The band was formed by Simon Fitzgerald, (who became known as Slimy Toad, in about 1977). He played guitar and wrote everything, mostly original stuff apart from "Day of the eagle" which was by 'Robin Trower'. This song was included in their set list as Simon was a big Crystal Palace fan AND 'The Eagles' is what the team is called! Then came Phil Mitchell on bass, Glyn Evans on 2nd guitar and Chris Millar (who would later become Rat Scabies in 1976) on drums and finally myself on vocals.

All this was just pre punk although later Scabies (name came because he was always scratching, never fucking washed I don't think, but a lovely guy..... All were very talented musicians for the time!

The bands strange name "TOR", means the peak of Rock / Mountain..... so I was told by Simon, I never actually looked it up and  just took he's word for it.

We played quite a few gigs, all locally to Croydon, Caterham and old Coulsdon. In one such gig in Coulsdon we would play the local youth centre, I remember us filling that place to the brim, next stop would see us playing the local mental hospital as a warm up for our other gigs such as the church hall in south Croydon. This particularly gig got the band in trouble as we bought a barrel of beer to sell. The place was heaving to the brim, and we ended up getting banned from all church halls in the area for selling booze with out a licence, how Punk was that?

During the Christmas period of 1975, Simon played guitar for a pantomime company as did Chris, then shortly after that Chris met Ray Burns (aka Captain Sensible) and that was the end of TOR, experiments with drugs was not a good thing for us at that stage as we were all discovering LSD, after playing at Beulah Heights up near Crystal Palace one summer ('75 maybe) in the open air for a student union we topped the bill, and recruited a keyboard player, we were all so high on acid this guy had to tune our instruments at his audition, we never saw that guy again!!!

When the Punk thing hit, it took me longer to tune in to the punk thing than others but hey that's the way it was.

Simon joined 'Johnny Moped' and then formed 'Slime' & Chris would audition for London SS and ended up as 'The Damned's drummer.

 I've just started  playing again after all these years with a covers band, I guess something's are just to hard to put to bed.

Pete Starks

October 2010

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