The Tories

60's Berlin Beatband

Reinhard's Tories-Album (1964-1966)

Reinhard's Tories Album (1964-1966)

previous page

THE TORIES - that was the name a Berlin Amateur Beat Band chose when they founded at the beginning of the German Beat Wave in 1963 - they played under this name between 1964 and 1966 in Berlin music cafés and youth clubs.

The band´s name reflects the anglomania of founder members Reinhard Bock and Michael Zeitner, but a more appropriate name would have been "The Whigs" or "The Democrats" as no one in the beat musicians' scene of those days really had any connection to the British conservatives, maybe much more to the liberals, the so called "Whigs". The flat German pronunciation of "whigs" - meaning "bullshit" - was not really a good choice for a newcomer band, whereas "The Tories" - dilated to "Tohries" - sounded very good.

The Berlin fans did not care for this "Tohries" thing and favoured more so the German pronunciation of "Torries" which then was to be found in some newspaper articles too. All in all the fans did not really care about meaning and pronunciation - as long as it was an English band name.

<< - Deutsche Version - >>


© Design & Texts 2020 by R. Bock
CSS Programming Lothar Wiesweg
English translation by Susan John