Germany, 1978, God knows how many degrees below zero. Rick Parfitt would be turning blue with cold if he wasn’t turning red with anger as we turn up to rescue him. “I am about to die of fucking exposure!” he fumes, having been standing for hours by a broken-down Range Rover in the dead of winter on a quiet back road.
The ungrateful bastard. Us heroes travelling in the other Range Rover used to transport the band – Francis Rossi, drummer (and driver) John Coghlan – and your intrepid reporter across the continent patiently explain to Rick that when we left him there in the freezing cold and went for help, we… er… misplaced his location and got lost ourselves. But hey, we’re here now. Rick (who doesn’t find it nearly as funny as we do, for some reason) jumps in the replacement hire car and we all take off. We eventually make the gig with just minutes to spare…
Amazingly, Status Quo rarely missed a gig in the 70s, despite being on what was effectively an endless tour, despite endless parties, hit album after hit album. But back in 1978 and throughout the 70s Status Quo were a mean, lean machine firing on all cylinders. Indestructible, really.
But before we get into that, let’s backtrack. Back in the 60s, The Status Quo (as they were then called) were a pop band. Their ’67 hit single Pictures Of Matchstick Men was psychedelic bubblegum; the following year’s Ice In The Sun sort of followed the formula. The Status Quo seemed destined to be one of the pack, set for theatre package tours until the interest ran out. There’s only so much of gaudy-coloured shirts with flowing sleeves a man can take. Then Quo sort of went quiet… Very quiet.
They were still going, of course, it’s just that they were playing in faraway British towns like Minehead and Skegness. When they made it back home to London, the band – Francis Rossi, Rick Parfitt, Alan Lancaster, John Coghlan and a keyboard player, Roy Lynes – were shocked to find that music had moved on a bit; a little bit of soul was what bands now needed for credibility. If not that, then a big bit of rock’n’roll was going to be the calling card of the 70s. Gigging with American singer pop Gene Pitney certainly wasn’t going to break the Quo. And when Pitney’s tour manager told them forty-five hundred times to shape up or ship out, it would be the ultimatum that would change their future. Whether they liked it or not, they had reached a crossroads.
Then in 1970 came two singles in less than a year: the rip-roaring Down The Dustpipe and the equally hard-edged In My Chair, both thundering along like a steam train at full throttle with the boiler popping rivets. Strangely, the group also looked different. As popsters, Quo’s Rossi and Parfitt were sweet-lookin’ boys. But now these guys looked like their hillbilly second cousins, twice removed: straggly hair, torn jeans; like the original Quo set in a parallel universe. As Parfitt would note later: “We just became the dirty, horrible, scruffy Status Quo that everybody knows and loves.”
Also in 1970 they came out with an album that looked cheap and nasty, too, with an old, fag-ashed dame on the cover. Ma Kelly’s Greasy Spoon was the final confirmation that Status Quo (without the ‘The’) had been reborn as a rockin’ boogie blues band; one track, Junior’s Wailin’, was the anthemic epitome of that rebirth. It was a patchy album, but most definitely a sure sign of what was to come from them. And there was a tribe of wannabe Quo fans from all over the British Isles waiting for it to arrive.
“It must have seemed like this sudden change – ‘Quo go heavy!’ – as if it was really planned. It wasn’t quite like that,” said Rossi in 1978. “We were a rock’n’roll band back in ’65 doing mainly covers – Rock Around The Clock , Everly Brothers, Gene Vincent, Johnny And The Hurricanes – and some of our own material. I mean, Pictures Of Matchstick Men was me trying to sound like Hendrix, but it didn’t quite work out.”
Quo certainly weren’t an overnight sensation. They had to earn their breaks – one of which was a gig at the Castle pub in Tooting supporting Mott The Hoople. “The owner put us on, and people were saying: ‘What are they doing here?’” Rossi remembers. “We really went down well, and we liked that challenge, but even the promoter wouldn’t take the risk to put us in his other clubs just yet.”
In time places like the Greyhound in Croydon and the Red Lion in Leytonstone followed, and the local gigs gradually developed into national gigs across the country. The Quo Army was on the move and in recruitment mode. And plenty were signing up.
In 1971 they released Dog Of Two Head. That’s when Status Quo shook off the 60s and embraced the new decade with a new, throttlehead music that would be commercial enough to appeal to anyone who liked their rock raw and the hooks sharp.
They also had the air of a proper band democracy. Even though guitarists Francis Rossi (as main vocalist) and Rick Parfitt would be the more prominent, image-wise, there was no mistaking the quarter share each played by Alan Lancaster, the hard-looking man with the hard-rocking bass, and John Coghlan, the wild man on the kit with a bass drum the size of Africa. (In this new rock world, naturally, they jettisoned the keyboard player.)
Quo were a gang. With them was a team that kept them on the road right throughout the decade, in spite of themselves. How many image-conscious chart groups would have had a roadie-cum-tour manager who also co-wrote the songs and played harmonica on stage, in the studio and on the telly? Enter stage left – as he did most nights – Mr Bob Young. The gang mentality extended to the management, especially when Colin Johnson, who’d honed his skills at the famed NEMS agency (founded by Beatles manager Brian Epstein), was brought in to help take the band to the next level. Alongside an intensely loyal road crew and seasoned PR Keith Altham, this was the squad that would see Status Quo ride roughshod over the 70s, flying in the face of any fancy fad they might encounter along the way.
Quo on Pye Records wasn’t quite working: an old-fashioned label with old-fashioned ideas. One of Johnson’s first deeds in the managerial chair was to secure a deal with the much-vaunted and credible Vertigo label, home to many high-brow rock acts – some of whom were visibly cringing at the thought of Status Quo and their common graces joining their exclusive club. Vertigo’s label manager, Brian Shepherd, didn’t bat an eyelid. “I began to realise that here was an act who’d made it one time around and now I was actually watching them doing it all over again,” he explained. “They were fighting to reprove themselves and they had a manager who’d put his bollocks on the line for them.”
Any decent Quo fan will tell you that Piledriver was the one. From its heads-down, tripartite guitar attack cover, this album delivered everything it said on the packet, from the title and the visuals. Don’t Waste My Time, Big Fat Mama, Paper Plane and a triumphant version of the Doors’ Roadhouse Blues were the pick of the bunch and would be part of the Quo fan’s staple diet for years to come.
Thirty-odd years later, Rick Parfitt still has fond memories of the band’s new birth. “There was no master plan,” he says. “We lived from day to day. Another song, another happy day. All the days were happy. We hadn’t got into any foreign substances. We were just loving it.
“All of a sudden this sound appeared and people started talking about ‘the Quo sound’, and we were saying: ‘What fucking Quo sound? We’ve only got two Telecasters’ – like we still have. Even now, if I play my Tele it just sounds like a Telecaster. If Francis plays his Tele it sounds like another Telecaster. But if you put the two of them together it sounds like Status Quo. We didn’t make it up, we didn’t look for it. It just appeared. And I think we’re very, very lucky. We cornered the market in these kind of rhythms.”
Much would be made from the start of the quirky banter between Rossi and Parfitt, the supposed couldn’t-give-a-damn attitude that couldn’t be further from the truth. As Rossi puts it: “People think we’re humorous and all that, but don’t for a second think that we don’t take what we do seriously. We have a sense of humour, but it doesn’t mean we go out there to be funny.”
It was around this time that this writer entered the orbit of Planet Quo, an Irish writer in the South London home of semi-detached suburban Mr Rossi. Quo had recently returned from an American tour, and that subject framed a lot of our conversation. Even then, the relative inability to break the States was becoming the pain-in-the-ass issue that would dog Quo for years to come. There was the rest of the world falling over backwards in embracing Quo’s no-nonsense boogie, but the good ol’ USA was taking a rain check.
Rossi, though, assured me that the band’s fortunes were on the upturn there. In fact, if they were to set aside five months to work solidly coast-to-coast in the US, the job would be done. But they weren’t prepared to spend that much time away from home at that stage when so much was happening. Actually, he added with some aplomb, they had just blown-out a further three-week stint simply because they didn’t feel like doing it.
“If we break the States, it’ll be when we’re ready,” Rossi tells me confidently. “But don’t worry, they’ll come along with time. The thing with us is that we’re not going to send home all this bullshit about how well we’re doing in the States just to get a few headlines. It’s ridiculous sending home news about headlining 3,000-seaters out there, because those gigs mean nothing. The news is in filling the 20,000 places, and we do that by playing support to bands like ZZ Top.
“But we don’t want to spend more than two months there at a time. We’re successful here and we don’t have to give anything away that’s dear to us. All the States is about at the moment is money, and we’re not too concerned about money. I mean, if it doesn’t happen there it won’t finish us. There are people around who would like to see it finish us but there is no way that it will.”
I was having the same sort of conversation a couple of years down the line (in March 1977) with Rick Parfitt. He was musing on his ambition to be the Number One band in the world, and there was only one thing stopping them from achieving that – you guessed it, breaking through in America. “I still think we’ll do it,” he announced, “but I don’t know how long it’s gonna take. We were paranoid about it at one stage – ‘We gotta break the States or it’s all over’. We’re not worried about it any more. If we do break it, great. If we don’t, that’s the way it is.
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