I Talk Too Much

by Francis Rossi

  A few days later I was back in Ireland. I’d booked some rooms at Dromoland Castle, this incredibly beautiful sixteenth-century hotel in County Clare. It was out of season so it felt like I had the place to myself. I didn’t but you could lose yourself in those 1,200 acres for days at a time and feel like you were exploring a whole new world. I was close enough to London that my children could come over for visits. I was still able to enter the UK for up to sixty days a year so that also made the transition easier to manage. I mean, I really rationalised the whole thing, laid it all out in my mind as a marvellous step to take. I thought by being in Ireland I was escaping the worst of my problems. In fact, they had only just begun.

  I coped with it by doing some more coke. In truth, I don’t have many strong memories of that time at all. I know I was in a state, and that it was mostly my fault. That’s one of the reasons Jean left me. I wasn’t taking care of her and the kids other than by bringing money in. I was never there and when I was I wasn’t really because I’d be locked away smoking dope and doing coke and hiding from the world.

  Then Rick got ill. It all went back to one typically crazy-Rick night when we were in Holland recording the Whatever You Want album, and he took a boat out on this big lake one evening. It was a lovely warm evening so he’d gone out in just a shirt and jeans. But then something happened and the boat broke down and he was out on the water all night, shivering in this thin shirt in the freezing cold. In truth, I don’t know for sure what caused him to become so ill soon afterwards but that was always my theory anyway. The upshot though was that, despite numerous tests in the hospital, nobody could tell him exactly what the problem was. They just whacked him with cortisone injections, gave him a ton of heavy-duty sleeping pills and told him to get some rest. So he went home and went straight to bed – for three months. This was to be the start of what became Rick’s lifelong reliance on sleeping tablets. The fact is he was in a bad way – his whole body was racked with pain and he was so weak he could hardly stand – but no one could tell him why. He ended up in Germany with Marietta’s family, having all sorts done to him in a German hospital. Draining fluid from his knees. Covering his body in these different poultices. Sticking yet more needles in him. He eventually got back on his feet but it took a long time. Meanwhile, we had to cancel a European tour and put the rest of our touring plans on hold while we waited for Rick to fully recover.

  I don’t know how I felt about this. Annoyed probably. Inconvenienced. Worried about Rick? Not overly. Rick was always getting into scrapes. Rick was always in some kind of trouble. I would sit there chopping out another gram of coke, listening to whatever the latest was with Rick and just get on with my day – which was rapidly spiralling into a kind of permanent midnight. I was beginning to worry about myself more than Rick. That’s when I allowed myself to think too deeply about things at all.

  Fortunately, we already had a new album in the can, the aforementioned Whatever You Want, and, of course, it featured one of our all-time best-known – and most successful – hits with the title track. Rick had written the song ‘Whatever You Want’ with our keyboard player Andy Bown. Andy had been in the Herd with Peter Frampton, so we knew each other. He’d also been a much-sought-after session player and solo artist in the seventies. He played as a session musician on the Rockin’ All Over the World album and would officially become a full-time member of the band in 1982. Andy is a great player who deserves more credit for his massive contributions to Status Quo.

  What Rick and Andy achieved with ‘Whatever You Want’ was so good I admit I was a tad jealous. I hadn’t come up with anything as good as that as a single since ‘Down Down’ five years before. Rick sings it brilliantly too. Fair play, it’s simply one of those songs that completely defines and reaffirms the Quo musical identity. It’s also got that great quality all the best songs have of having universal appeal. It’s suggested there in the title, of course – whatever you want, here it is, you can have it. But it’s in the glorious rhythm and riff too. Your body starts reacting to it before your brain even knows what’s going on. Your feet tap. Your head nods. Your shoulders start to twitch. As a result, it was a major hit in every country it was released in (though not America, where I don’t think it was even released) and remains one of the big highlights of any Quo show to this day.

  In fact, Rick was absolutely hitting it out of the park in his role as a co-songwriter on that album. With Bob, he also co-wrote the album’s other big hit, ‘Living on an Island’. If ‘Whatever You Want’ was archetypal Quo taken to the nth degree, ‘Living on an Island’ was the exact opposite. Our first proper ballad since ‘Are You Growing Tired of My Love’ died a death over ten years before, ‘Living on an Island’ was a soft-as-a-feather, country-tinged ballad that Rick sang like an angel. He co-wrote that one with Bob, and if you listen to the lyrics it spells out exactly what life was like for him at that time living as a tax exile on Jersey: ‘Living on an island/Looking at another line/Waiting for my friend to come/And we’ll get high …’

  The painful part was that just as the Whatever You Want album went rocketing up the charts towards the end of 1979, the band was nose-diving in the opposite direction. Jean had already left me. Rick was ill. Alan was in Australia. And John was pretty sick of all of us by that point, by all accounts. Then, early in 1980, with our touring commitments on hold while Rick got better, Bob announced he was leaving. He’d had enough of the behind-the-scenes ructions. If I’m being honest, my attitude at the time was very much of the ‘good riddance to bad rubbish’ variety. I believed he had betrayed me by slagging me off behind my back. Bob believed the same about me. We had both been played for fools.

  I don’t know if the rest of the band blamed me for Bob leaving, but they were all upset when told Bob was out of the picture. We had all come to rely on him for so long it was hard to imagine touring again without him.

  In terms of Bob’s input as a songwriter, that was easier to accommodate as by then we were all working with different people, both in and outside the group. It had started with the Rockin’ All Over the World album, where Alan brought in a song he’d co-written with Mick Green, who had been the guitarist in Johnny Kidd & the Pirates, and Rick came in with one he’d written with Jackie Lynton, who’d been one of that generation of British rockers that came up with Billy Fury and Screaming Lord Sutch. Even Pip Williams wrote one of the tracks. In the couple of albums we’d done since then it had become a free-for-all. ‘Again and Again’, another hit for us, had been written by Rick, Jackie and Andy Bown and, although it became a successful single, always seemed like a piss-take to me; Alan had another with Mick Green; Pip had another. And I had come in with three new songs that I’d co-written with the guy who was to become my main co-writer for the next few years, a lovely chap named Bernie Frost.

  By the time we came to Just Supposin’, our first album after Bob had gone, in 1980, I was mainly writing with Bernie, Rick was mainly writing with Andy, Alan had teamed up with an Australian singer he’d gotten to know called Keith Lamb, and there was even one song co-written by me, Alan and Andy. I think that was two songs in one, actually; the first time the three of us would be co-credited with a song – and the last. We had also managed to lose Pip as our producer somewhere along the way – as I recall, Alan suggested it would be cheaper for us not to have a producer – and were back to producing ourselves. If that all sounds messy, believe me it was. Very.

  All of these typically selfish and over-indulgent band shenanigans were put into perspective, however, by an event so tragic I don’t think Rick ever got over it. His two-year-old daughter, Heidi, drowned in the family swimming pool at home one Sunday in August 1980. I was in my studio at home in London recording the guitar solo to a future Quo single called ‘Rock ’n’ Roll’ and the tape stopped suddenly just as I was in the middle of it. At that precise moment the phone rang and it was Rick. He said, ‘Heidi’s dead.’ I said, ‘Don’t be daft, she can’t be.’ He said, ‘No. We found her in the swimming
pool.’

  I still couldn’t believe it. Rick was always phoning to let you know about his latest scrape – cars crashed, flights missed, mystery illnesses, endless woman trouble – I had become somewhat inured to it all. I said, ‘Are you sure, Rick? It can’t be. You’ve got it fucking wrong!’

  But he hadn’t, poor bastard. He’d been sitting with his six-year-old son Richard in the lounge watching TV while Marietta had been cooking Sunday lunch. They had taken the cover off the pool because it was a nice day and they were all going to hang out by the pool later. Next thing, Heidi has gone missing. They searched the house and found the poor little mite in the swimming pool. Rick did his best to resuscitate her but it was too late. He was telling me this on the phone and I couldn’t believe my ears.

  ‘Fucking hell, Ricky,’ I remember saying. ‘Now what have we done?’

  Chapter Seven

  Runny Nosin’

  The Rick Parfitt I first knew as a sunny, blond-haired teenager hadn’t changed much in the intervening years between meeting him at Butlin’s in the mid-sixties and the death of his daughter Heidi in 1980. Now suddenly everything changed.

  Rick had always been the starriest member of Status Quo, the most showbiz. Someone who could snap into character when the moment demanded it, no matter what might be going on elsewhere in his life. He lit up every room he walked into. Had friends – and girlfriends – everywhere we went. Was never at a loss with what to do that night, whatever night and whatever place he found himself in. Rick was all about enjoying life. In that respect, he was born to be a seventies rock star. That is, the guy with the gorgeous blonde wife, gorgeous blonde girlfriends on the side, big flash expensive cars, big flash expensive house, big flash expensive tastes. If you needed cheering up, Rick was your man.

  But who was there to cheer Rick up when he was down? I don’t know if he really had anyone. It certainly wasn’t me. Rick and I had been very close in the early years of the band. But as the fame and money and success overtook us, we had grown apart. We were still close. We never lost that tight bond between us, even during those times when we were pissed off with each other, which only made it even more frustrating. We always had that thing that we would never be able to share with anyone else – the mutual experience of becoming famous together, and the struggles, frustrations and many victories that entailed. But we were no longer in each other’s lives as much. How could we be? We were both now over thirty, both married (just about, in my case) with kids, and spending most of our time together working with the band. Any time off we ever got, we couldn’t wait to get away from each other. That’s the same with every band that’s been together longer than five minutes.

  Rick could also be a handful in other ways. We were like mirror opposites in many ways. A great partnership in the band but very different away from it; it seemed like the more of a recluse I became, the more outgoing and sociable Rick became. The more uncomfortable I became hanging out with other so-called celebrities, the more famous friends Rick collected. He might be hanging out with John Deacon from Queen one night, then out on the razz with Rod Stewart and George Best at Tramp. And, of course, he was a friend to all the models and party girls you find at clubs like that.

  He would tell me about the night he was drinking with a group of people until four in the morning, then insisted on driving all the way back to his house in the country, picking up a few of his gold records and driving back to whatever afterhours private club they were in and start handing them out like party favours. No wonder he had so many friends. It would all come crashing down eventually, of course, when Quo’s career took a dive in the mid-eighties, but while it lasted Rick was determined to live that life to the hilt.

  When Heidi died, though, a big part of Rick died with her. That’s how it seemed to me. Sunny Rick was gone. To be replaced by Dark Rick. I don’t think I saw Rick 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. Now when he walked in the room he did so like a ghost. No energy at all. No spark. No nothing. He was just … gone.

  How Marietta coped with it, I will never know. Rick obviously had some time away from the band but it was only a few weeks. I was told later that he spent hardly any of that time at home. And that when he was at home he was in such a state he was no good to anyone. That he would go out into the garden at night and shout for God to come down and take him. Scream at God for being such an evil bastard. I can’t say I blamed him. They say there’s a reason for everything. But that’s not true. The hardest part of having to live through the accidental death of a child must be feeling that they died for absolutely no reason.

  We cancelled the tour we had planned for that autumn but of course the record company went ahead and released the album anyway. Just Supposin’ was another big hit for us. The single released ahead of the album, ‘What You’re Proposing’, was a song I had written with Bernie Frost and it became our biggest hit single since ‘Down Down’. It was very nearly our second ever number 1 single, kept from the top spot for three weeks running by ‘Woman in Love’ by Barbra Streisand, which was a Bee Gees song and went to number 1 in about ten different countries, so fair enough. I suppose.

  Definitely cause for celebration, though, except for one thing. It meant we were obliged to promote the single with TV appearances in Britain and Europe. Rick could have easily – and understandably – said he couldn’t do it. But he stepped up, bless his heart. I’ll never forget him doing his best to be his usual outgoing self when we filmed our Top of the Pops appearance. Look at the clip now and you’d never know anything was wrong with him. But as soon as the filming was over and we went back to the dressing room, he was filled with despair again.

  To fill the gap we went back into the studio and made another album. We had a fair amount of material already recorded and left over from the Just Supposin’ sessions. We added a few numbers to that and put it out as Never Too Late. It was not the best Quo album ever made but we didn’t know what else to do with Rick out of the picture. The songs we had cobbled together weren’t strong enough to include a single so we recorded a cover of ‘Something ’Bout You Baby I Like’. I remember it was the first time we had experimented with a drum machine. It had been a minor hit for Tom Jones a few years before. The version that inspired our go at it, though, was a fantastic duet Glen Campbell and Rita Coolidge had released a couple of years before ours. It wasn’t a big hit either but it had that wonderful honkytonk feel that suited Quo down to the ground. That said, the fact it went top 10 for us says more about how popular we were at that point than how good our version was. The same goes for the album, which hit number 2.

  By now Rick was virtually begging for us to go back on the road. Home life was in pieces. Not helped, he was the first to later acknowledge, by the fact he was now very much the worse for wear on coke and booze and anything else he could get his hands on. Marietta ended up putting their son in a nearby boarding school while she tried to build a life for herself again after the death of her daughter. But Rick would be off on another three-day bender or be out on the road with us. It was too much and eventually Marietta told Rick she wanted a divorce. That meant all three frontline members of Quo were now divorced or getting divorced from their wives. Not long after that, John split with his first wife Carol and they were also later divorced. It became one of those strange landmark eras where we all kind of grew into our older selves. A bit like when we came back from Butlin’s all those years before. Only now the boys that had grown into men were the men that were easing into a somewhat pained middle age.

  After Rick came back we did a big three-month tour: sixty-seven dates between March and June 1981, in twelve different countries. Big runs of shows in Germany, Italy, France, one-offs in Switzerland, Norway, Portugal, Belgium, Sweden … you name it, we played it. Somehow in the middle of this we also did two mammoth UK tours that included four nights at the Hammersmith Odeon in London and three nights at Wemb
ley Arena – in London. We could have done a whole tour of London we were in such demand. Were we happy, though, any of us?

  No we bloody well weren’t. Any of us. Ever.

  For me this signalled the start of a bleak period in my life. Just as Quo was at its commercial height, I was sinking fast. While I was tax exiled in Ireland my coke habit had grown out of all proportion. I was now convinced that without it I wouldn’t be able to keep writing hit songs. I thought I was proved right when ‘What You’re Proposing’ became such a huge hit. The irony was that the song was almost entirely about doing cocaine. Well, that and getting divorced from Jean – and the general unhappiness now surrounding the band. All that stuff about ‘Not disclosing how we’re really, really feeling …’ And that bit about ‘If I’m composing, but then I might be runny nosing …’

  How we were really, really feeling was shit. And part of the reason for that, at least for me and Rick, was that we were constantly ‘runny nosing’ – snorting coke. For Rick, it was a form of both escape from his feelings of complete devastation following the accidental death of Heidi, and a weird kind of consolation. Like drinking to forget. Only he was snorting and drinking deliberately to try and destroy any feelings he had left.

  I would like to have helped him but I didn’t know how. No one knew how. I was so deep into my coke addiction I would snort it even when I knew I couldn’t get any higher, just to experience it trickling down my throat, the bitter taste as I rubbed it around my gums. The feeling of it as it rushed up my nose. On those exceedingly rare occasions where I had run out of coke, I would find something else to snort – speed maybe. Even snuff, anything just so that I could shove something up my nose.