I had so much cash I didn’t know what to do with it
MORE FUN THAN THE GROUPIES WERE THE SILLY PRANKS OF ROAD LIFE
long list of very attractive blonde girls. Rick believed a rock star should look and behave like a rock star.
By then we were all getting more than our fair share of groupies. But more fun, in practice, were the silly pranks of road life. One night in Munich, the promoter gave us an 8mm blue movie and we aimed the projector out the window onto the side of the building opposite our hotel. Suddenly, unassuming Germans in the street were treated to 20ft-high images of people having sex. We had gorgeous groupies in our room who were offering it on a plate, and we were only interested in falling about laughing.
In America, life on the road could be especially druggy and strange. I’ll never forget the extraordinarily beautiful woman in San Francisco who came into our dressing room and walked straight up to Rick, pointing at him, with a long finger, purring: ‘You! You..!’ I’m sure we were all wishing it could be us, until he returned the next morning, freaked out and hinting at a strange and disturbing night he refused to talk about. I don’t know if she had laced his drink with LSD, but there was certainly something witchy about her. She truly shook him up. We toured in America, but though we went down well, it was to no avail. The problem, it seemed, was with the bigwigs who ran the label. Our manager asked one of the executives over there why none of our records ever got on the radio, and he was given a proposal: ‘You pay off my mortgage and I’ll get your record in the charts.’ When we heard that, we were so outraged that we told them where to shove it, and we didn’t go back until 1997.
LIVING ON A COCAINE ISLAND
Meanwhile, in the three years we spent trying to break America, from 1974 to 1976, we had three No.1 albums in Britain and another six top ten singles, including our first No.1 with Down Down. Our fees for shows doubled, then tripled, then went up again. I bought an 11-bedroom house in Purley on its own private estate, where I would sit and enjoy the comforting sound of the envelopes carrying big fat royalty cheques dropping onto the doormat. Gone were the days when a cheque for £1,000 looked a lot – I was now getting big six-figure payments every six months.
But I had so much money I didn’t know what to do with it, and I became insufferable for a few years – aggressive and over the top, mouthing off in posh restaurants, terrorising the waiters. I was a little twit. It still makes me cringe when I recall how many really nice people have come up to me over the years and told me how obnoxious I was to them back then. The joke was that if it did end in a fight, I nearly always came off worst.
Rick, meanwhile, was out every night, hanging out with other infamous party guys of the era like George Best and Alex ‘Hurricane’ Higgins. He’d snort cocaine and drink champagne in London clubs with pretty girls sitting on his lap, then drive home at dawn in his Porsche or Rolls-Royce at 100mph.
Our commercial peak was probably 1977, when it wasn’t unusual for us to play six big shows in a row, have a day off, then play another five. We were hoovering up mountains of cocaine, then drinking huge amounts to help us sleep. At one point, Rick told me, he was drinking a bottle of whiskey every day, along with a couple of bottles of wine and at least three grams of coke. My own intake wasn’t much more moderate.
The upshot of this was decidedly ugly, and the first thing to suffer was the music. In a fit of cocaine paranoia, I fell out with our road manager and songwriter partner Bob Young, with whom I had written many of our hits.
Then Jean left me, along with our three children. She knew about the drugs and the groupies, and she had grown exhausted by the fact that I was never home. Having to stand there and watch her put the children and their suitcases in the car, then drive off without me, was like being knifed in the heart.
I had been persuaded to become a tax exile, so I headed to Ireland, booking some rooms at Dromoland Castle, a beautiful 16th-century hotel in Co. Clare, and coped with it simply by doing more coke. Even as our Whatever You Want album went rocketing up the charts in 1979, the band was nosediving in the opposite direction
DEEPER AND DOWN
But all of our selfish and overindulgent shenanigans were thrown into the starkest possible perspective by a family loss so tragic I don’t think Rick ever got over it. I was in my studio at home one Sunday in August 1980 when he called. ‘Heidi’s dead,’ he said. ‘Don’t be daft, she can’t be.’ ‘No,’ he said. ‘We found her in the swimming pool.’
Rick was always phoning to let you know about his latest scrape – cars crashed, flights missed, endless woman trouble. But Heidi was Rick’s two-year-old daughter, and I didn’t want to believe what I was hearing.
He had been sitting with his sixyear-old son Richard watching TV while his wife Marietta cooked Sunday lunch. It was a nice day and they had taken the cover off the pool, and the next thing, Heidi had gone missing. They searched the house and found the poor little mite in the water. Rick did his best to resuscitate her but it was too late.
‘F ****** hell, Ricky,’ I remember saying. ‘Now what have we done?’
Rick was all about enjoying life. If you needed cheering up, he was your man. He could be a handful. He’d be out drinking with a group of people until four in the morning, then drive all the way back to his house in the country, pick up a few of his gold records, drive back to whatever after-hours private club they were in and hand them out like party favours.
When Heidi died, a big part of Rick died with her. Sunny Rick was gone, to be replaced by Dark Rick. I don’t think I saw him smile again,
except for the cameras, for at least a couple of years. I don’t think I saw him really laugh again for a lot longer than that.
It was the beginning of a bleak time in our lives, although my decision to split the band for a solo career in 1984 didn’t last long, thanks to Mr Geldof.
DAY WE ROCKED THE WORLD
I have to confess that Rick and I were nervous turning up at the studio on the day of the Band Aid recording. We knew Phil Collins and Sting, and we had met Geldof once, but we didn’t know what to expect from young guns like Simon Le Bon, Boy George, Bono and George Michael.
We needn’t have worried – everyone was as nice as pie. And I hadn’t expected how much many of us had in common when it came to cocaine. Soon our corner of the studio became the go-to hangout for quite a few others.
We opened the Live Aid show the following year too, playing Rockin’ All Over The World to just over 70,000 in Wembley Stadium and millions on TV. What memories! Or rather: what memories? The whole thing went by in a flash. I was straight when we went on, but I was in a terrible state for the rest of the day.
When the finale came, I was sat with David Bowie and Bruce Springsteen’s guitarist Steve Van Zandt, and the backstage lights went out just as we were scrambling to get on stage, so we were laughing hysterically.
I was surprised to see Rick on stage again at the end. After our performance he had taken the heli- copter straight back to his local in Battersea, the returning hero. Then he helicoptered back again for the big singalong. There he was, right up at the front next to Bowie, having the time of his life. I was stood at the back, feeling uncomfortable. But we had fed the world. And somehow revived the name of Status Quo in the process.
MY NOSE DOWN THE DUSTPIPE
Our problems weren’t over, though. We suffered through a messy split with Alan Lancaster, our punchy founding bassist.
And after years of coke addiction, my septum fell out of my nose in the shower, like a little bloody chunk of chopped liver landing at my feet. I called my manager and he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. ‘We better get you to the doctor,’ he said. ‘Have you still got them?’ ‘Got what?’ ‘The bits of your nose that fell out.’ ‘Yeah. Why?’ ‘In case the doctor can sew them back in or something.’
That’s when I knew my life had reached a level of farce bordering on tragedy.
As the Eighties ended, I cleaned up and brought myself back from the brink with a new marriage – to Eileen – that lasts until this day (see panel), and a family that extends to eight children.
Rick, however, carried on living at full throttle. He was 48 when he had his first heart attack and quadruple bypass. When they discharged him after 11 days and told him he needed to rest for a few weeks, he took that to mean lie around smoking 60 cigarettes a day, drinking red wine and snorting coke. ‘After being in hospital for so long, I thought I owed myself a couple of big nights,’ he told me with a straight face.
He kept returning to the band after two more heart attacks and a lung cancer scare, before finally retiring in 2016 after another cardiac arrest in Turkey. It was a few months later, on Christmas Eve, that we heard he had died from sepsis at a hospital near his home in Spain.
If anything, Rick’s passing has made me hungrier than ever to carry on. I didn’t cry when he died – something that was made a big deal of in the press. It doesn’t mean I didn’t care. It’s me being me. I get up and go about my day as always. I’m not going to walk around wailing and moaning, tears running down my face. That’s all showbiz b ******* .
I don’t want to dwell on some of the negative things Rick’s family had to say about me after his death. They were grieving for their father or husband – or ex-husband. They didn’t know him like I did. They weren’t there whenever I would cover for him in the studio, or on the bus at night when he got angry or started crying.
And they weren’t there when the two of us were spending the best times of our lives together, from sharing a musty bed at Butlin’s to the impossible highs of playing to millions of people, selling millions of records – and writing songs that are now beloved as some of the finest rock anthems ever.
I DON’T THINK I SAW RICK SMILE AGAIN – EXCEPT FOR THE CAMERAS
© Francis Rossi, 2019 ‘I Talk Too Much: My Autobiography’ is published by Constable on March 14, priced €23.