SEX DRINK DRUGS...
...whatever you want — as long as it’s not a day off
AUTOBIOGRAPHY I TALK TOO MUCH by Francis Rossi (Constable £20, 320pp)
The extraordinary thing about the survivors of the great Sixties and Seventies rock boom is, simply, that so many of them have survived. Keith Richards will obviously outlive us all, but Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, Joni Mitchell and Paul Simon are still around, as indeed are all four of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.
And given how many drugs he has taken over the years, and how little of his nose he still has in full working order, Status Quo’s Francis Rossi looks in remarkably good health these days. It’s only their fans, like me, who crumble prematurely into dust.
Rossi has a good story to tell. From their earliest days in the mid-Sixties as The Spectres, through a stop-start pop career in the late Sixties, the glory denim days of the Seventies, massive wealth and ludicrous expenditure in the eighties, and easy middle- aged contentment thereafter, Status Quo have just kept going.
Rossi is the only original member left. John Coghlan, the drummer with the moustache and the ridiculously long hair, stomped off in a rage in 1980.
Alan Lancaster, the diminutive hardman bassist, went after Live Aid in 1985. And Rick Parfitt, Rossi’s partner in rhythm for nearly half a century, died of a heart attack in 2016, having long since used up his nine lives in a high-octane life of showbiz excess. he lived as though there was no tomorrow, and eventually he was proved right.
So rather a lot has happened, and Rossi is happy to talk about all of it. This is rarer than you would think in a rock memoir, but Status Quo’s USP, at least in their early days, was always their absolute authenticity.
No one would grow their hair or wear those double denims or play that relentless chug- chug rock ’n’ roll of theirs if they didn’t want to. In the end, of course, it all turned them into raving lunatics, as we find out.
Rossi was brought up in a large Italian family in South London, and was imbued from birth with a strong work ethic. ‘Working evenings and weekends was just normal to me. I think this must have affected my attitude later when I became involved in trying to make it in a band. Strange hours, working on those days and nights when so-called normal people were relaxing, never worrying about things like holidays, putting every spare penny back into the business … none of this was a sacrifice to me.’
Rock musicians tend to bang on about their need for artistic expression and creative freedom. Rossi, by contrast, always recognised the constant need for another hit single.
As highly strung as the strings on his guitar, he’s nowhere near as outgoing and confident as you might think. ‘I’m actually always in fear of things becoming out of control. I’m in fear of people.
It’s hidden away in some of my bestknown lyrics and it’s probably one of the reasons why I got lost in drugs for so many years.’
But look at it another way, and you could say that it was rossi’s drive and nervous energy that fuelled the band’s rise in the early seventies, just as much as his songs did. The rest of the band were of a different stripe. Alan Lancaster had been a friend of rossi’s at school. he was the tough little kid the more nervous rossi had hidden behind, and he never really changed at all. Lancaster did write and sing several songs over the years but, against all the evidence, he always saw himself as the leader of the band, and wouldn’t compromise over anything.
rossi’s portrait of him is hil-arious: a permanently enraged toerag, constantly ready to argue about anything.
rick Parfitt was, unlike rossi, rock star incarnate. he was constantly buying flash cars, having brief and tempestuous affairs with blondes and, perhaps inevitably, running out of money. And if the girls weren’t blonde to start off with, they soon were.
once on a bus, the band were reminiscing about their schooldays. rossi said he’d love to go back in time and learn more, because he missed so much of it, having been ill as a child.
rick said: ‘f*** all that. I know all I need to know.’ rossi was dumbfounded. how could anyone say anything so arrogant? ‘But rick was like that. full steam ahead, no looking back.’
The Eighties make for a pretty grim read. The drugs overpower the band, and the records get worse and worse. But rossi doesn’t judge his past self too harshly, which is itself refreshing. ‘Did it go to our heads?’ he asks at one point. ‘of course it did. It is meant to, isn’t it?’ happily, rossi has been drinkand drug-free since 1989, and has therefore had a long time to contemplate the wreck he made of his life in the middle years. he’s a strange old fish: at times modest and self- deprecating, often very funny about his misadventures, but occasionally you see a glint of pure ego. That’s a rock star for you. All those limousines eventually seep into the blood.
In the main, though, this is a surprisingly amiable memoir from a man who sees no need to lie or obfuscate. he even tells the truth about his hair transplant. As you might imagine, it really hurt. so did a lot else, it seems, in an unusual and highly readable book.