The Tories

Year 1966 / Revival 1979

The Tories at Flughafen Tempelhof 1966

The Tories at Flughafen Tempelhof 1966 - Clipping: Berliner Morgenpost, 1966 

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1966 saw the climax of The Tories' musical career. After having test takes at the Lichterfelde Teldec-Studio, where The Tories recorded "My Generation" (The Who), "I've Got That Feeling" (The Kinks), "Still I'm Sad" (The Yardbirds) und "Go Away From My Window" (The Tories), they got a record deal.

In February 1966 the Tories flew to Hamburg to record the 45er single "Barbara Ann", a German variation of the Beach Boys' cover version at the Hamburg DECCA studios. The original version of "Barbara Ann" had been published much earlier in 1961 by The Regents and immediately had notched up to position 13 of the US charts, but was not well known in Germany - unlike the subsequent Beach Boy version [1965/1966].

Now that they were obliged to use German lyrics they would have prefered a German version of their demo song "Go Away From My Window" for a B-side, but Teldec insisted to have "Oho", a song, which musically spoken the Tories liked much more than the artificially falsetto of "Barbara Ann" (sung by Ede Winter). They were bound to sing that foolish text ("Oho, my baby is oho ... you get balla-balla...").

More highlights of that year have been a live gig at Club 18 of RIAS Radio, where the Tories were invited by John Hendrik to be part of the 10th Jubilee of the club. The failed gloriously in front of an ignorant and fanatic alike jazz audience.

On the sunny side were the performance at Neue Welt as support act of The Spencer Davis Group (featuring Steve Winwood and Pete York), where they received a warm welcome by more than 2500 people.

The group's coherence got more and more slack after each group members started to use his own car. Even worse, the bookings declined substantially as many music clubs turned into discos. In autum of 1966 the end of the Tories was reached - Hucky suggested the break-up and Kralle, Bokens and Ede had no other choice than to accept.

In 1979 The Tories tried a revival and met once a week for a beer, a chat and some music - they even had some performances on private events. In 1982 they irrevocably split up. Everone went their own way.

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