DRUMMER IS QUO-ING OUT WITH A BANG

THE original drummer with rock legends Status Quo is hanging up his sticks.

John Coghlan will be bringing the curtain down on a 60-year career with a farewell tour that includes a couple of West Midlands dates.

His band, John Coghlan’s Quo, will play The Robin 2, Bilston, on February 20, and the STMS Festival, Tanworth-inArden, Solihull, on August 7.

John joined The Scorpions (later The Spectres, Traffic Jam and finally Status Quo) in 1962.

“I was in the Air Cadets at the time and in a band doing Shadows covers. Then one day Francis [Rossi] and Alan [Lancaster] heard us playing and asked me if I would be willing to join their band. We got together in Alan’s house and that was that.

“A few years later, we passed an audition to do a summer season at Butlins in Minehead. It was all very ‘Hi De Hi’ then, but we met Rick [Parfitt], who was in the more ‘upper class’ ballroom playing guitar and singing with two twin sisters called The Highlighters. And the rest, as they say, is history.”

Status Quo had a massive hit with their third single, Pictures Of Matchstick Men, in 1968, but then a change of image and musical direction saw the band become the denim-clad, 12-bar boogie merchants that we all know and love.

In 1982, as the band started recording their 1+9+8+2 album, John quit.

“It had been building up for a while. There was a lot of drugs about. Now, I like a beer, but I didn’t do drugs. Plus, we were either recording or touring. We just weren’t getting any rest.”

After Quo, John formed his own band, Diesel, then later John Coughlan’s Quo, with a set-list comprised almost entirely of Quo songs.

Then in 2013 and 2014, Quo’s classic line-up – John, Rossi, Parfitt and Lancaster (who had left the band in 1985) – got back together for some ‘Frantic Four’ reunion shows.

“It was good fun,” John says. “Just like the old days.’’

Parfitt died in 2016 and Lancaster in 2021.

As for the future, John won’t be idle. “I’m hoping to play with a jazz band local to me and I might put an acoustic blues band together,” he says..