ANYTHING BUT STATUS QUO
Remembering Rick Parfitt
Rick Parfitt, who has died at the age of 68, was the singer and rhythm guitarist with Status Quo, the band that found a winning formula (the 12-bar boogie) in the 1970s and stuck to it for the rest of their career.
The denim-clad Parfitt’s shaggy blond mane and solid guitar playing were at the very heart of the look and sound of the Quo, who over the years attracted adulation and derision in equal measure.
Parfitt was never one to take himself too seriously. Defiantly unfashionable — both musically and sartorially — he nevertheless made the most of his rock-star status. At the height of his success, the inveterate “lad” owned 10 Porsches, had an expensive cocaine habit, was a raging alcoholic and betrayed wives (at least in the early days) with more groupies than he could remember.
But the self-styled Wild Man of Rock and Roll also wrote some of the band’s most memorable songs, including Whatever You Want, Living on an Island and Rain. And while the critics sneered, the Quo’s core members, Parfitt and Francis Rossi (the band’s lead guitarist with whom Parfitt described his relationship as “marriage without the sex”) continued touring and delighting their audiences with all the old favourites.
They were still gigging more than 40 years after the release of their first single, Pictures of Matchstick Men (1968). This was mostly for financial reasons (the drug years had taken their toll financially as well as physically), but their shows were always sold out.
As the band members got older, however, the offstage antics began to calm down — one journalist spotted Parfitt reading a book about arthritis on the tour bus — although rock ’n’ roll still had its dangers. In the late 1990s, Rossi pulled a leg muscle while executing a scissor jump and had to complete the Quo’s tour with the help of a walking stick. Then in 2001, in an irony not lost on music critics, who claimed that Parfitt could play only three chords, the band was forced to cancel three concerts after he was struck down by a suspected case of repetitive strain injury.
In 2005, Status Quo’s position as a British national treasure was confirmed when they were listed by Guinness World Records as having had more British hit singles than any other band. Moreover, Parfitt, despite a string of health problems, including a quadruple heart bypass in 1997, a cancer scare in 2005 and a heart attack in 2011, continued to exude a puppyish enthusiasm for his craft, and his fans.
“The Quo fans are fantastic,” he said. “They used to be blokes in their 20s but now Quo fans are aged eight to 80.”
Rick Parfitt was born Richard Harrison on Oct. 12, 1948, first met Francis Rossi at a Butlin’s holiday camp in 1965 while playing in a band called the Highlights. Rossi was playing with the south London-based band the Spectres (a forerunner of Status Quo) and they discussed working together, although Parfitt didn’t join the band until 1967.
Pictures of Matchstick Men, its first hit, was a psychedelic number and not representative of their later canon. But their first album, Ma Kelly’s Greasy Spoon, hinted at the “boogie woogie” style that was to dominate their songs.
By the mid-1970s the band had abandoned frilly shirts for denim and white trainers; and so began a look and a sound that endured through every musical fashion.
The 1970s were glorious years for Status Quo; they sold millions of albums and had endless hits with singles such as Paper Plane, Caroline, Down Down and their inexplicably popular cover of John Fogerty’s Rockin All Over the World. The rest of the lineup changed, but Parfitt and Rossi continued to dominate the Quo.
In 1985, the band opened the Live Aid concert, but the partying had been taking its toll.
During a performance of Marguerita Time on Top of the Pops in 1983, Parfitt was so drunk that he fell off the stage.
At the Brit Awards one year they were too busy taking cocaine in the backstage lavatories to collect their award. At one stage, Parfitt was using 15 grams of cocaine a week.
“I started about midday with whisky and wine chasers,” he recalled. “I liked to get fairly drunk before I began on the drugs. There were a lot of hangers-on and I was under the mistaken impression that they were my friends. The 1980s were a complete nightmare.”
He sank further into drug and alcohol addiction after his twoyear-old daughter from his first marriage drowned in the family swimming pool.
Parfitt was thrice married. His third wife, Lyndsay Whitburn, survives him with their twin son and daughter and a son from each of his other marriages.
I started about midday with whisky and wine chasers. I liked to get fairly drunk before I began on the drugs.