enormous size, they saw the funny side and they got drinks instead ..'

Kingsize Taylor was a loyal friend and formidable opponent. Lee Curtis remembers one incident with relish: "It could be rough in

Germany. A man might pull a gun on you. I've seen someone in a corner with a knife to his neck. We were having a drink and this character started annoying us. Teddy told him to behave himself but he persisted. Teddy went to talk to him, and his hand went into his pocket and we saw the top end of a gun. I'd have run, but not Teddy. With no messing whatsoever, he cuffed him good and proper , a wallop round the neck, a karate chop or something. It had the desired effect. We didn't see him anymore."

Sam Hardie: "We were playing in Berlin and Kingsize hadn't turned up. We launched into the show and he still hadn't arrived. Later on we learned that he'd been in a bar down the road and had had an argument with a barman, who had tried to fiddle him out of his change. He turned the whole length of the bar upside down, on his own, single-handed. The owner telephoned the police and he started knocking them all over the place. It took 12 policemen to get him under control. Nothing ever came of it. The German police were amazed that it . would 'take that many policemen to arrest one

man." '. Apart from those private 19505 rpr;ordings at Sam Hardie's house, I haven't mentioned any records by Kingsize Taylor & The Dom~ inoes in th is piece. It is a difficult subject, worthy of an article in itself and I doubt if anyone could locate a full collection now. Certainly not Kingsize himself- "I think I've only got about three of my records. We made over 90 tracks and I've only got a few of them. I don't mind, there's only one that I really liked and that was 'Stupidity'. It was one of the first records with a disco beat and it could be brought out again today by :.;;)meone else." Never mind, Kingsize, I'm sure you'll soon have that box-set.

Bobby Thomson explains what happened. "Kingsize would sign anything and I had terri- ble visions of getting sued. We were signed to Polydor, Fontana, Philips and Decca at the same time. We recorded under different names to cover up what we were doing. We aped Howie Casey's name and came up with Boot Lacey & The Toecaps. The Germans who rec- corded us didn't appreciate our sense of hum- our and they called us The Shakers. Kingsize would say, 'Right, we'l make an LP for 500 marks', and so the whole band would do an LP for £40.00. I don't know how many rec- ords we made, but it has to run into a couple of hundred individual tracks."

You'll see from those two statements that there are even opposing views as to how many tracks we are looking for. The Dominoes' first commercial recording was backing Aud- rey Arno on 'Bitte Bleib Doch Bei Mir' ('Please Stay With Me') I 'Umbo ltaliano' (Polydor NH 52~98), the credit being given to 'Aud- rey Arno dir Tony Taylor Band' (sic). The singer gives an emotional performance on the A-side, possibly because she had just learned of the death of her father -

In Germany the band recorded for Polydor as The Shakers wh ilst under contract to Phil- ips as Kings'ze Tayior & The Dominoes. The Philips recordings weren't issued in the UK but the German single, 'Never In A Hundred Years' (Philips 345 618 PF) shows Taylor's vocal range. Other tracks for Philips include 'Slow Down', 'Broken Arrow' (a Chuck Berry lyric to the tune of 'Old MacDonald') and 'Fortune Teller'.

A second single as The Shakers was 'Whole Lotta' Lovin"/ '1 Can Tell' on Polydor NH 52- E 272 in December 1963. They were taken from 1 a 16-track LP, which was released as 'Let's L Do The Madison, Twist, Locomotion, Slop, Hully Gully, Monkey With The Shakers' (Polydor 237-139) in December 1963, which was repackaged under the same number as 'Shakers' Twist Club With Kingsize Taylor & The Dominoes'. 'Dizzy Miss Lizzy' and '1 Can Tell' show Kingsize at his best, 'Ruby Ann' features John Frankland but is missing a guitar part, and 'Country Music' has a rare al vocal from Sam Hardie. 

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Another Polydor single from the album  was 'Hippy Hippy Shake' , 'Dr. Feelgood' on Polydor 66-991 in March 1964. This was released under the name of Kingsize Taylor &  The Dominoes, although the vocalist on 'Hippy, Hippy Shake' was Bobby Thomson. This shows you how confusing their releases were.  One reason why Kingsize is vague about his record releases is because they were made with little preparation. "70% of our records were I done in one take. We once walked straight , into a 4.30 in the morning session and came out at 8 with an LP in the can. That was The Shakers' album which got to No.1 in the German LP charts."

And there were live releases. The 'Teen beat' EPs, issued here by Decca, were recorded live at The star-Club by Ariola Eurodisc and leased to Decca for UK release. 'Teenbeat l' features The Rattles, and 'Teenbeat 3' ( The Bobby Patrick Big Six, who came from

Germany and Scotland respectively. 'Teenbeat 2' (Decca D FE 8569) was released in April 1964 and features Kingsize Taylor' & The Dominoes. There's a raving vocal on 'You I Can't Sit Down' and a storming 'All Around

The World' with a modest "Danke schoen"  at its conclusion. More recently, two albums, I 'Kingsize Taylor & The Dominoes, live In Star-Club, Hamburg, Volumes 1 & 2' have I been made available in Europe (Ariola 200 I 868-241 and 200 869-241 ). The band's wide I repertoire includes 'Down In The Valley', I 'She Said Yeah', 'lipstick, Powder And Paint', 'Sherry', 'slippin' n slidin", 'The Watusi' and, wait for it, 'The Skye Boat Song'. .

Kingsize's best-known Decca release is 'Stupidity"'Bad Boy' on Decca F 11874 in April I 1964. It was followed in July 1964 by 'some- . body's Always Trying' I 'Looking For My I Baby' (F 11935). On a later compilation, 'Mersey Sounds', a double-album which features non-Mersey groups like Brian Poole & I The Tremeloes, Kingsize does 'I'm Late (The Gong-Gong Song)' and 'I've Been Watchin You'. !

Kingsize Taylor & The Dominoes' best , record is their powerful version of a Solomon Burke  B-side, 'Stupidity '. Kingsize's vocal  yell at the start is one of the classic moments of Mersybeat and their version is far livelier I than the cover version by another liverpool 

band, The Undertakers. The band returned to England to promote the record in November 1963 with an appearance on 'Thank Your Lucky Stars' and a tour with Chuck Berry, Carl Perkins, The Animals and The Swinging Blue jeans, but 'Stupidity' was not a hit single.

'Stupidity' was to be their only chance at national stardom in the UK and they blew it. Maybe the song was wrong, maybe Kingsize didn't look right, maybe...well, it's easy to speculate. I feel that, from 1962 onwards, the band spent too much time in Germany and didn't concentrate on gaining a following here. The competition was so stiff that hit records were unlikely for bands which weren't seen. They could have tried for the British market, but would they have been happy? After all, the band had a German manager, Horst Fascher from The star-Club, and Kingsize had married a German girl, Gitta.

Still, Kingsize's exhortations to "...dance the Stupidity" took the record to No.1 on the German juke boxes. Kingsize Taylor: "We were stars in Germany and we went on before Chuck Berry and did really well. We had the No.1 in Germany with 'Stupidity' and we closed with it and it caused chaos. He refused to go on stage after that."

Sam Hardie: .'The Germans loved dance records and there were millions of dances for us to choose from. There was the Popeye, the Watusi and the Mashed Potato. We didn't know how to do the dances, they were just good numbers to us. The Twist caught on in Germany, and Lee Dorsey's 'Ya Ya' was No.1 for months and months. We were the first group to do Twist numbers because we heard the songs before they caught on. The original version of 'The Twist' was by Hank Ballard & The Midnighters who were an r&b group, but we thought of it as rock n roll."

.All the time though, the line-up was changing. Sam Hardie left to take Roy Young's place in The Star Combo- "I then joined a German group called Tramps- They used to put on light shows and we were very popular. There was an Irish drummer, three German lads and myself. We made a couple of records. 'Eene- Meene-Ming-Mang-Mo' was a record of the week on a German station. I also did a month with Tony Sheridan in Frankfurt for 500 marks a week, which is about £50.00 and was fantastic money for 1964. When I finished playing in 1966 and came home to England,1 was getting £13.00 a week working for the Post Office."

After a dispute over money, Kingsize Taylor split with The Dominoes and for a while he was backed by The Griff/Parry Five, which featured Brian Griffiths of The Big Three, Ron Parry and vocalist Steve Aldo.

The Dominoes split into two camps in July 1964 Gibson Kemp, Paddy Chambers and John Frankland in one camp, and Bobby Thomson, Howie Casey and saxophonist Dave Woods in the other, but they soon packed up. In particular, Bobby Thomson joined Cliff Bennett & The Rebel Rousers and then The Rockin' Berries. John Frankland now plays in Liverpool country bands and, in 1989, he and Brian Redman backed Tony Sheridan at a concert in Southport when his support band became a liability. Sam Hardie made his first public appearance in 15 years when he recently accompanied Sonny Curtis for a concert at BBC Radio Merseyside.

Kingsize Taylor returned to Merseyside in 1965 and effectively swapped beat for meat. He has a butcher's shop in Southport. Although the Merseycats charity has encouraged former musicians to reform their groups, King- size has never agreed, although The Dominoes would say yes. He says that the shop keeps him too busy but there must be more to it than that. Some speculate that he has lost his singing voice or his confidence, but I doubt it. I'm sure he could do it if he wanted to. Maybe it's better to keep the legend intact: