In 1965/66 THE TORIES developed their own typical sound. In the beginning, to be successful with the German teenage fans, they had imitated sound and intonation of the British beat bands , but then destilled their own sound which jokingly was called "RUMBLE BEAT".
This so called rumble beat was created by Reinhard B's way of playing the rythm guitar where he only played the first three or four top strings while damping the strings almost totally and turning up his Vox AC30 as loud as technically and location related possible - this meant almost to the end of the scale! This play mode produced a hollow splashy sound which mingled perfectly with the heavy bass lines and bold drum beats (with a predominant use of Tom Toms) - what a clastic loud rythm sound!
Amazingly this sound sound was not easily recorded: On the tape and cassette recordings you had to take back the input so much not to get a scratchy distorted over steering record, the tape dynamics couldn't handle that noise level at all. Even with the studio takes, as to be heard on the B-side of DECCA single ("Oho"), this sound is almost unrecognizable as the sound engineer wanted to reproduce a "clear" beat sound.
When a Starlighters' poster announced "The Tories with Rumble Beat", Reinhard B's mother asked if there was a new member, a 5th man in the band, named Beat, a man she never had heard of before. No, no, they had no new member, but RUMBLE BEAT was now part of THE TORIES.