The Quo: still rockin’
For more than 50 years, British band Status Quo has been, ahem, Rockin’ All Over The World. Longserving guitarist Francis Rossi talks with Grant Smithies about cocaine, chord changes and cash ahead of the band’s Last Of The Electrics tour.
have answered the call.
‘‘This is going to be the last electric tour we do. In another couple of years, I’ll be 70, which seems ridiculous to me. We might do the occasional one-off show down the track, but this is us retiring from doing these massive electric tours.
‘‘Rock’n’roll requires a very physical commitment, just as you saw with Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis in the early days. But I’m 68, and if I play more than a couple of days on the trot, it really hurts. When I wake up in the morning after a good show, it’s all, like Ow! Hell! Ouch! You know…’’.
Status Quo was formed in 1962, with Rossi now the only original member. He wrote the band’s breakthrough single in 1968: the acid-addled psychedelic pop gem Pictures Of Matchstick Men.
‘‘I wrote that on the bog,’’ he told one interviewer. ‘‘I’d gone there, not for the usual reasons, but to get away from the wife and mother-in-law. I used to go into this narrow toilet and sit there for hours, until they finally went out. I got three quarters of the song finished in that khazi. The rest I finished in the lounge.’’
But trippy psych-pop was merely a stopover on the way to discovering the abiding Quo template. Soon afterwards, the band settled upon a sound based around grunty up-tempo blues shuffles and they’ve ploughed that furrow ever since.
Status Quo’s career enjoyed a second wind after the band was chosen to open the biggest live show in history, 1985’s gargantuan Live Aid in London’s Wembley Stadium, the roughshod pub anthem Rockin’ All Over The World beamed out to a global TV audience of 1.9 billion punters in 150 countries.
‘‘Yes, but amazingly, I’m not sick of any of our songs, even after all this time. When we play Rockin’ All Over The World or Whatever You Want or In The Army, it feels brand new again because you get such an amazing response from the crowd. As much as Rockin’ All Over The World gets on my tits, I’m grateful to that song for what it’s done for us, and once I start playing it, the adrenaline takes over.’’
Record sales have fallen sharply since Quo’s 70s and 80s heyday, but the band’s fan base remains substantial, especially in Holland, Scandinavia and working-class England.
It’s no coincidence that the producers of Coronation Street made one of that show’s greatest comic creations, beer-soaked former burglar Les Battersby, a massive Quo fan.
Rossi and Parfitt even did a cameo, playing live at Battersby’s wedding after he crashed into their tour van.
‘‘We did, yeah. Very good fun it was, too. We had a right laugh doing that show.’’
And he’s laughing, too, when I suggest that Status Quo has only one song, and it goes like this: chunka- chunka- chunka- chunk.
Actually, that’s unfair. They have at least two songs. There’s the chunka-chunk one, which makes up the vast majority of their set, and then there’s a slower one called In The Army Now, with wafty synthesisers and big 80s drums.
‘‘Yeah, well, we do a lot of three-chord blues shuffles, that’s true. But lots of music is just three chords, or four. Lots of my favourite Italian arias are just three chords. The key point in this capitalist world we live in is that our songs were successful. I don’t think anyone ever listened to them on the radio and thoughtS..., that’s great, but I really wish it had one more chord in it.’’
The point, he says, is that irrespective of lyrical or musical complexity, a song either hits you emotionally or it doesn’t. MARK HOLLOWAY
‘‘I sent the Pet Shop Boys a telegram once because I loved one of their singles. I didn’t want to like it; I just did. I usually have the radio on in the bathroom in the morning and something will come on and I think – Aaaaah, s...! Everything else just goes and you fall for the song. It might have terrible lyrics, you might hate the singer, it might have only a couple of simple chords, but it just gets you regardless.
‘‘People intellectualise music way too much. The same bunch of notes go into Beethoven’s Fifth or La Boheme as go into Shaddap You Face. People just arrange ’em in different ways. Look, I grew up on blues music, and once you’ve heard a blues song, you’ve heard ’em all. A lot of those phrases have been endlessly recycled, but each person brings their own fresh thing to it, you know?’’
The most difficult thing these days, reckons Rossi, is to get people to even give your records a listen. It’s as much about marketing as it is about the music.
‘‘Each time you do a project, you need some new angle. When we called that album In Search Of The Fourth Chord, we thought it might make people smile enough to give it a listen. Another time, we did a stripped-back acoustic album, and to add interest, me and Rick did the cover picture naked. Just us dickheads, nude.’’
Really? I’m grateful to have never seen that particular album cover. A sensitive soul like me would need post-traumatic stress counselling after clapping eyes on something like that.
‘Yes, we made denim waistcoats fashionable for a short while there, but then they became really unfashionable, didn’t they? People say we’re a band that’s never been cool, but we’ve never been considered uncool by our own fans.’