Shockin’ all over the world!
The groupies who made a mockery of his marriage. The drugs that destroyed his body. The riches that made him an ‘insufferable twit’... In his brutally honest new memoir, Status Quo’s Francis Rossi looks back in wonder – and horror – on his life of rock’n’roll excess
The helicopter took off straight from the backstage area of Milton Keynes Bowl and within seconds the 60,000-strong crowd below looked like ants. Actually, they had looked like ants to me even when I was on stage. By the time we did the encores I was so high on cocaine I could barely see the guitar in my hands. At the end, I had to be carried off stage over a roadie’s shoulder. All I knew for sure was that I’d never again have to stand up on stage with Status Quo and pretend to be enjoying myself.
Our 1984 farewell tour had been our biggest ever, with huge shows across Europe, including 42 in Britain alone. But I was out of my mind on drugs and alcohol, and I was sick of the band – the fame, the money, the expectations, the critics who said we were just headsdown, three-chord rockers. Breaking up the group I had spent over 20 years building into one of the biggest in the world – why not?
Until Bob Geldof phoned up one day not long after and asked me and my fellow frontman Rick Parfitt to sing on his Band Aid record. Sorry Bob, no chance. Status Quo is finished.
‘I don’t give a f*** about that,’ yelled Bob. ‘Just get back together for the day.’ All right then, Bob, we said. But only for one day... It didn’t quite work out that way, of course. Status Quo are still here, 35 years on from our ‘split’, 51 years since our first hit. The big difference now is that Rick is gone, having died in December 2016 after a life of rock’n’roll living and years of poor health.
BUTLIN’S HERE WE COME!
I wouldn’t say I was a natural rock star. I was an anxious, brooding kid from Forest Hill, south London, born to a large Italian family who ran ice-cream vans.
From the earliest days of the band, Rick Parfitt was everything I wasn’t and used to wish I could be: flash, good-looking, talented, the glamorous blond. A real rock star, in the truest sense. Someone who lived for today and to hell with tomorrow, love ’em and leave ’em, no encores. I was the opposite: the darkhaired balding one, an insecure show-off, always worrying about what was around the corner. Talented? Perhaps. Lucky? Definitely.
Rick and I met at Butlin’s in Minehead in 1965, when my band The Spectres were playing a summer season booking. Back then, Butlin’s was like Britain’s answer to Las Vegas. As the camp entertainment, we got all our meals provided and chased as many pretty girls as we could find. For a 16-year-old just out of school, it was like I’d died and gone to heaven – at least until the reality of two lengthy performances a day turned us first into zombies, then into hardened pros.
Rick was in a cabaret trio with two twin girls. We thought he was their brother, though it turned out that was just part of the act. In fact he had managed to have affairs with them both at different times. This sort of reckless behaviour was, we were soon to discover, very much the way things would carry on with Rick for the rest of his life.
Back in London, with Rick on board alongside my south London schoolmate Alan Lancaster on bass, drummer John Coghlan and keyboard player Roy Lynes, the band took shape and we threw ourselves into the swinging life of the aspiring Sixties pop star.
We toured with the Small Faces, who smoked joints like they were cigarettes, took speed every day and got us into bad habits. Steve Marriott, their brilliant singer and guitarist, introduced Rick and me to the idea of sharing a bottle of brandy before we went on stage. Until then we were still drinking Tizer. We would often bump into Stevie or Rod Stewart in some boutique on Carnaby Street and it would be a competition to see who could get their hands on the best clothes first.
’ER INDOORS... AND OUR FIRST HIT
But before anything resembling success could strike, the ultimate bombshell hit: my girlfriend Jean was pregnant and, still only 18, we had no choice but to get married. Jean kept me from meeting her mum before we were married. Now I found out why. It was as though she had leapt straight out of a Les Dawson joke about mothers-in-law. She would sit slumped in the armchair, chain-smoking, with her old-fashioned dress pulled up so you could see her big old-lady knickers.
With a mother-in-law and a baby in the house, and a wife who would have preferred me to quit the group and do something that brought a bit of money in, I took to locking myself in the tiny, freezing toilet with my guitar. That was where I eventually came up with Pictures Of Matchstick Men. I wrote most of it on the loo, then came out when the coast was clear and fin-
TWO LENGTHY PERFORMANCES A DAY TURNED US INTO ZOMBIES, THEN INTO PROS