I Talk Too Much

by Francis Rossi

  In the case of ‘Down Down’, we didn’t need to make a demo. It was all there on the cassette recording we made in LA. I had this fantastic idea for an extended intro that just keeps building until the song takes off like a rocket. I just didn’t have any words for it. Even Bob couldn’t think of anything and he was supposed to be the poet. We just had this one line over the chorus – dah-dah-de-dah – which we kept repeating over and over. The only word we could come up with to stick in there instead of dah-dah-de-dah was ‘down’ – as in ‘down, down, deeper and down’. Then repeat. I said to Bob, ‘There’s no way we can keep it like that. It doesn’t mean anything.’ But the fact is it sounded great. So we kept it. And guess what, it’s still one of the most popular records we ever made.

  The fact is people bring their own interpretations to song lyrics. Bob Dylan, arguably the greatest lyricist of the twentieth century, would never think to include lyric sheets with his albums, and some of his songs would have twelve or fifteen different verses. It was impossible to hear everything he sang correctly. Even when you could hear them they were so full of symbolism you couldn’t possibly know what he was really on about. But it didn’t matter. People brought their own meaning to those words.

  It’s the same with seemingly simple lyrics. T. Rex had a number 1 with ‘Metal Guru’ when we were having our first hits and nobody to this day knows what that song was supposed to be about. I thought he was singing ‘medal gnu’ when it first came out. It didn’t stop me loving the record. It sounded so cool and sexy it didn’t matter what it was ‘about’.

  It was the same with ‘Down Down’. Although I must add that even there I did manage to inject a bit of autobiographical detail in the line, ‘I want all the world to see/ To see you’re laughing, and you’re laughing at me’. That was me thinking about all the haters that put Quo down, but at the same time also thinking about my wife Jean and the times when she would laugh at me, accuse me of dreaming, back before the band finally made it.

  The real point is that like U2, the Stones, Bruce Springsteen, Sting and the Police … the moment you hear any of their records, you know exactly who it is. That to me is an achievement few artists in the rock sphere have accomplished. Knock us all you like, but as soon as a Quo record comes on you know it couldn’t be anyone else but us. Anyway, sod the critics. There are so many records, books, TV programmes, films, ideas that the so-called important critics and I disagree about it, I take everything they say with a pinch of salt, plus or minus. The only critics that really count are the people listening to your music. One small example: for all the micky-taking records like ‘Down Down’ attracted from the music press, it still remained one of John Peel’s all-time favourite tracks. Apparently he used to always close his live DJ sets by playing it. I had to laugh, too, when some years later I was told that Jo Callis, the former guitarist in the Rezillos who later joined the Human League, loved ‘Down Down’ so much he – ahem – repurposed the riff for the Human League’s biggest hit, ‘Don’t You Want Me Baby’. That speaks to me far more than some hastily written bit of stone-throwing from some know-all with a typewriter. Cheers, Jo!

  I see this as different, by the way, to the sampling that would become such a feature of the hip-hop takeover of the pop world in recent times. Sampling a riff or melody from a well-known chart hit takes skill. The German techno group Scooter did an incredible job in 2008 when they took ‘Whatever You Want’ and built it into their own giant hit, ‘Jump the Rock’. That was huge fun. But it’s not quite the same as becoming an inspiration to other songwriters to build on something you did first – and make it into something ‘original’. Younger musicians are always using older music to reinvent and be creative with. That’s the great thing about music – it doesn’t have to obey the rules. So when people ask, is it better now or then? I say it is both better and worse. Depending on how old you are. It’s like asking who your favourite James Bond is. Depends on how old you are. For some it’s still Roger Moore. For me it will always be Sean Connery. (Although Daniel Craig is the exception, as he’s going to be best ever, you wait and see.)

  But while we were busy congratulating ourselves on how well we had done by the end of 1978, the cracks were appearing, not just within the band, but in our personal lives. I don’t want to speak for Alan and John here, as they are still around to tell their own stories. But Rick, who isn’t, was definitely burning the candle at both ends. We both were.

  Rick had recently had his second child, a beautiful baby girl named Heidi. We were on tour again in Germany when Marietta phoned him to let him know she had gone into labour. Rick was in the shower in his hotel room when Marietta rang – and one of Rick’s German groupies answered the phone to her. You can imagine how that went down. Because of the tour, it was another month before Rick was able to get home to see his daughter for the first time. Even then he couldn’t stay long as we were tax exiles by then. I’m pretty sure Marietta knew what Rick was like. Not just with other women, but in his whole rock-star lifestyle. Where I would burrow myself away when we were not working, Rick would be out every night, hanging out with other infamous party guys of the era like George Best and Alex ‘Hurricane’ Higgins. He’d be out night after night, doing coke, drinking champagne, having pretty girls sitting on his lap. Then climb into his latest Porsche or Roller and drive home at dawn at a hundred miles per hour. He had his own big house by then, set in nine acres of rolling fields and woodland in Hambledon, Surrey. Big swimming pool. God knows how many cars. Then there were the various boats he owned along the way. He even had a fire engine at one point. Don’t ask me why. Rick just was that wild and crazy guy.

  I was the same – but different. Rick, Alan and I were all doing a lot of coke by then. Not John. He was not into it at all. He was still into his beer. Boy, was he into his beer! The first time I’d ever done cocaine was with Rick at this posh party somewhere on tour in Canada in 1975. It was just like you would imagine that sort of party would have been like in the mid-seventies. Coke was king, ultra cool. Offering your guests coke was no different to serving them good champagne. There was actually a big glass bowl on the table in the middle of the room where you would just help yourself, as though you were helping yourself to a punch bowl.

  There was a guy there we knew who worked for Manfred Mann’s Earth Band and he was the one with all the coke. Rick and I dived in, curious as much as anything to find out what this wonderful substance we’d read about was actually like. The Manfred Mann guy helped fill our nostrils, using a little silver coke spoon, and Rick and I wandered outside and waited to see what happened. The answer, rather disappointingly, was that not much appeared to happen at all. I was standing by the swimming pool with Rick and saying to him, ‘Is it me or is this stuff not very good?’ Rick was like, ‘It’s not half as good as speed, is it?’ I agreed.

  We were both doing a fair bit of speed at that point – white amphetamine sulphate powder that looked much like coke and which you could also snort lines of. Speed, though, had a much more pronounced effect. At its best it definitely aided creativity. When we were making the Blue for You album in 1976, Rick Alan and I were all speeding out of our nuts night and day. One night, I left Rick in the studio working on a tune he and Bob had written together called ‘Mystery Song’. When I came back the next day there he was still working on the song. I thought, blimey, he’s keen. I said, ‘What time did you get in this morning?’ He just looked at me with these big dilated eyes, sweat running down his face, and said: ‘What do you mean? I haven’t gone home yet.’ Crazy, yes, but the song itself was fantastic and became another hit single for us that year, with Rick singing it. Unlike coke, speed really lasted you.

  You always knew when you were speeding. You could be up for days and days on it. But then the comedown would be hideous. Depression, paranoia, insomnia … Cocaine was supposed to do all the things speed did for you – keep you going all night, give you extra fizz and energy – but without the terrible comedowns.

  That’
s what we’d been told anyway. But this stuff didn’t seem to do anything. We thought, perhaps we need to do a bit more to get us going …

  By 1978, the speed was only there occasionally. The rest of the time we – that is, Rick, Alan and I again, never John – were doing coke. Rick used to call it ‘laughing at spoons’ because by then we all had our own silver coke spoons. Coke was such a cool thing in the late seventies you would get ads in Rolling Stone selling the paraphernalia. Most sought-after would be this little brown medicine bottle in which you could put several grams of coke. The little silver spoon would be built into the bottle cap. So you could just whip this thing out on a plane or the tour bus or just sitting in a restaurant – not that we were doing much eating any more – and help yourself to a couple of scoops of coke, discreet, like. Classy. Oh yeah.

  Like speed, and before that dope, we used coke to ‘help’ us with our songwriting. Unlike speed, coke was expensive and because the effect was more subtle, you ended up snorting far more of it per day (and night) than you ever would speed. Consequently, while it definitely had an impact on our live performances, which became more and more high-energy, and became our go-to drug in the studio, it was beginning to have all sorts of unexpected, though in retrospect inevitable, effects on every other aspect of our lives, too. Jean said this was when a big change in my personality came about. I’m sure she was right. We weren’t able to figure any of this out at the time, though. ‘Rehab’ was not a word anyone used in those days. Having more than a few weeks between recording and touring was also unheard of. If you felt bad – physically ill, mentally charred – the cure was to do more coke. There was even this private doctor in Harley Street who would give bands these special ‘B12’ injections in the arse. I’ve never had a B12 like it. The trick was he would spike these injections with pure pharmaceutical coke. All the big bands knew of him and all of us would go.

  One unfortunate side effect of doing mountains of coke every day, for me personally, was that for the first time in my life I became a heavy drinker. I had never been a drinker, beyond sharing a half-bottle of brandy with Rick before we went onstage in the early days. But that was only for a short period. I didn’t like the taste. I was always much happier drinking lemonade and smoking dope. As I got older and more successful and found myself in different social situations, I might have some wine. But alcohol was never my thing. Now, suddenly, I began to make up for lost time.

  It started as a couple of shots of tequila at the end of the night to help me smooth out the edges of the coke and help me get some sleep for a few hours. Then quickly escalated from there. Rick was the same. At one point, he told me, he was downing a bottle of whisky a day, a couple of bottles of wine and at least three grams of coke. Every day. I don’t know how much Alan might have been drinking but he was as knee-deep in ‘snow’, as we used to call it, as Rick and I were, I’m sure. At least while he was with the band.

  The upshot of all this was decidedly ugly. For a band that was used to being accused of sticking to a formula, suddenly it was like all the pieces of the jigsaw got thrown up in the air at once. Where they landed none of us had any say over. At least that’s how it felt at the time, though looking back it’s pretty easy to see what was happening to us. It wasn’t just the cocaine. The success, the break-up of personal relationships, the pressure of always being on the road or in the studio trying to come up with another successful record, all of that would have been enough to finish off most groups eventually. Having three of the four members stoned out of their minds on coke and booze, though, definitely made everything ten times harder than it was already.

  The first thing to suffer was the music. Bob Young and I had grown apart – ‘grown apart’ being a euphemism for starting to hate each other. It all went back to 1976, the year that Colin Johnson and his business partner David Oddie split from Gaff Management and went off to form their own new management operation, which they called Quarry Productions. Their major clients were Quo and Rory Gallagher. I had no problem with it at the time. We were riding the crest of a wave with the Blue for You album, which was another number 1, and Rory Gallagher was a wonderful musician and an absolutely lovely bloke.

  However, there was also someone new now advising us that became very destructive indeed. I’m not going to name him, just refer to him as Be-Bop. He was supposed to be a financial whiz who was going to make us all more money. Sounds good, right?

  Wrong. The only person Be-Bop was interested in making more money for was himself. Unfortunately none of us could see it at the time. Seeing what a bunch of cossetted coke hounds we were becoming, Be-Bop took full advantage. At one point, he suggested giving us chequebooks full of blank cheques. So that we could sign all the pages saving us the ‘trouble’ of having to sign the cheques every time Be-Bop needed to pay for something on our behalf. We were all so out of it we thought this was a great idea: don’t bother me with paperwork, mate, can’t you see I’m busy writing songs (read: snorting coke). The only fly in the ointment for Be-Bop was Bob Young, who could see something wasn’t right. The fact that Bob had a close personal relationship with me also counted against him, asking awkward questions about this new feller and what he was doing with our money. Bob could tell you down to the last penny where our money was being spent on tour. It’s my feeling now that Be-Bop decided he would have to get Bob out of the picture.

  That’s when the whispering started. In my ear telling me horrible things Bob had said about me. In Bob’s ear telling him terrible things I’d said about him. I should have sat down and spoken to Bob about it. Instead, I went straight off the deep end. I’ve always been that way, whether it was drugs or music or, these days, manically exercising every day. Do I have an addictive personality? That’s a definite yes. I see it more as an obsessive-compulsive thing. I like to chop my days up into manageable lines. Coke just really fitted in with that kind of mania. It was also a hell of a lot of fun!

  It wasn’t much help, though, when it came to dealing with situations like the perilous one we now found ourselves in. At the same time, things between Jean and me were at an all-time low. Marrying so young, and becoming parents so young, would have been enough to put a strain on any relationship. But as I approached my thirtieth birthday, with my coke habit becoming more out of control and my relationship with Bob now up in smoke, and of course hardly ever being home, Jean and I began rowing so much I felt like I had nowhere I could run to for some peace.

  When the option to become a tax exile came up, I jumped at it, partly because I did not like the idea that 83 per cent of the band’s earnings (down from 90 per cent, gee, thanks, Mr Chancellor) now went to the taxman, but also because I saw it as a chance to escape my worries at home with Jean.

  We all chose different options. Alan, whose marriage had broken up, had remarried a beautiful Australian woman named Dayle. They had already decided they wanted to live together in Australia before the tax exile thing became an issue. Alan, I think, also saw it as an opportunity to get himself out of the whole drug thing. It was impossible to escape when the band was working but the rest of the time he was always eager to get back to Sydney and be with Dayle, who he soon started a family with when she had the first of their two sons. John’s marriage was also heading for divorce eventually. Meanwhile, he set up home on the Isle of Man, where he would continue to live, off and on, for a quite a few years. Rick took Marietta and the kids and rented a nice big place in Jersey. He was bored out of his mind within the first five minutes. He was always getting one of his pals to get the ferry over to see him, not forgetting to bring a nice big bag of coke with them.

  I ended up living in Ireland. No big surprise there given my family connection on my mother’s side – and the fact that Ireland also offered tax exemption for artists living there. I also liked the people, who were so open and friendly compared to what I had become used to. I didn’t miss not being around the others, not even Rick. Once the novelty of our coke-brothers days were behind us and we were both jus
t full-on self-absorbed coke addicts, I don’t think either of us really spared much thought for the other, except when it came time to work.

  Jean had given birth to our third son, Kieran, in January 1979. It should have been a joyous occasion, a reaffirmation of our love together as a family. But 1979 was also the year Jean decided she’d had enough and walked out, taking the children with her. I can’t say I was deeply shocked when she told me of her plans. It wasn’t the first time Jean had left me. In the past, though, she had always come home again eventually. I knew this time was different when she told me she had bought a house for her and the children to live in. Having to stand there and watch her put the children and their suitcases into the car, then drive off without me, was like being knifed in the heart. I had never known such pain. Pain and guilt and regret. I blamed myself, as all good Catholic schoolboys would. Jean knew about the drugs. Knew about the groupies. Had grown exhausted by the fact I was never home, no matter how much money we had to spend.

  But it was more than that. She had simply grown tired of being with me, having to put herself second all the time while I was out there living out my dreams and fantasies. I never allowed Jean the space to fulfil her dreams too. I should have realised but I just wasn’t thinking straight. I was still young and inexperienced enough to feel somehow that if my dreams were coming true then that meant Jean’s were too. That isn’t how it works, though. I see that now. Deeper even than that was the fact that we had both known it was over long before. We just hadn’t had the courage to end it. It tore me apart having to see the children leave like that. But the brutal truth was I was quite relieved the marriage was over. That we could finally be honest about it.