I Talk Too Much

by Francis Rossi

  I was doing so much ‘runny nosing’ that I started carrying around bundles of handkerchiefs, which I would leave behind, soiled, everywhere I went. When I wasn’t snorting coke I was smoking it. I don’t mean crack – the synthesised version of coke that addicts smoke out of homemade pipes. I mean I would roll myself a big fat joint and frost it with layers of cocaine. I also took to lacing my tequila with pinches of coke. Big clouds of it, dissolving in the liquid, that I gulped down like a dying man given water. When I woke in the morning I couldn’t get out of bed until I’d had a snort of a couple of lines of it. That would enable me to run to the toilet. Then stagger back and have a couple more big fat white lines. Then have a shower, aiming the nozzle up my nose in an effort to clear away the debris in my powder-encrusted nostrils.

  This was when my tequila habit became really serious. By the time we came to make our next album, which for tax reasons we decided to record at Mountain Studios in Switzerland, situated halfway up a mountain in Montreux, I was in full swing. We didn’t realise until we got there but Queen owned the studios and it so happened that they were all in the country at that moment, too – and almost certainly for the same tax-saving reasons. Rick and John Deacon were already close and I knew Brian May and Roger Taylor. Freddie Mercury was there too but I don’t know if anyone ever really ‘knew’ Freddie, certainly not by that point, when he was at his absolutely most flamboyant peak. So we all went out for a big blowout meal at this Mexican restaurant.

  It was an incredibly expensive place, as most good restaurants are in Montreux. I think the bill that night came to a few grand. Queen ordered these pitchers of tequila margarita, which I’d never had before. The waiters would literally stand behind you and the moment you took a sip from your glass they would automatically fill your glass again. I didn’t need to be asked twice either. I absolutely loved these pitchers of margaritas. The taste of sweet alcohol always went down well with me, I discovered. God knows how many I personally downed that night but after that it was my favourite drink – and my new favourite pastime. After coke, that is, obviously.

  Back in Ireland, getting the landlord of the pub to make you up a pitcher of tequila margarita was not always an option (read: never) so I would get them to mix me a tequila and orange – a tequila sunrise. But they always tasted a bit weak to me. So I would get the landlord to make them doubles. Then trebles. Then quadruples. Soon I told them to forget the orange and just give me straight tequila. I would order a quadruple tequila in a tall glass. Down it. Then ask for another quadruple tequila in a tall glass. Down it. Then ask for another quadruple tequila in a tall glass. Down it. Then ask for another quadruple tequila in a tall glass – with a splash of orange. That would be the glass I would then carry back to the table where everybody else was sitting. I would sometimes ask for the splash of orange just so I would appear ‘normal’ to whoever I was drinking with. But, of course, there was nothing normal about me any more, and everyone could see it. When I wasn’t sitting there with my fourth glass of quadruple tequila, I would be in the gents, runny nosing. All the while thinking I had everyone fooled. I will sometimes meet someone from those days now and they will tell me stories of being in the gents toilets somewhere when I was carried in by two roadies, my head hung over the toilet bowl by my hair, as I threw up everywhere. Then lifted up while one of the roadies wiped my face clean. They tell me these stories and I try and feel suitably chastened but the truth is I can’t even remember them. They might as well be talking about someone else.

  With Rick now deep into his own bottle-of-whisky-a-day routine, and God knows how many grams of coke, the two-month tour we did of Britain and Ireland in 1982 was just a blur. We did a week of sold-out shows at the Hammersmith Odeon on that tour – seven shows in a row at one of the most prestigious venues in London – and I can’t remember a thing about it. And if Rick was still alive today, I bet he couldn’t either. I’d be out of my brain before we even got onstage. I’d have one of the roadies ready with a few lines already chopped out on a mirror by the side of the stage so I could jog over after a few numbers and top myself up. And a quick glug of tequila. Rick was the same, except for him it was whisky.

  By then we had already discovered the joys of Mandrax. In the late sixties and early seventies you could get Mandrax – ‘mandies’, we called them – prescribed for you from a private doctor, in our case a certain Dr Feelgood in Harley Street. They were super-strength tranquillisers that were meant to help you sleep, or give you what they called ‘deep relaxation’. No prizes for guessing what we used them for. Clue: it wasn’t for sleeping. They also had a hypnotic effect, which basically meant that you were off your trolley for hours. In America they were known as Quaaludes, or ‘ludes’. They were much more prevalent over there and it became a thing that audiences at rock shows would take them along with a couple of bottles of red wine. Mandrax was less well known in the UK, except to famous rock musicians, who ate them like chocolates. We had used them to have a bit of fun when we’d first found out about them in the early seventies, then stopped when we got bored. Now with our coke habits raging out of control, the mandies came in useful again, to help bring you down. When we couldn’t get our hands on any mandies we would neck down some reds: Seconal, a powerful barbiturate that would have a very similar effect to Mandrax, only you would hardly remember a thing the next day.

  Writing this stuff down here now all these years later I realise how appalling all this behaviour sounds. But in order to fully understand what we were doing you have to recognise what a different world it was back then. All sorts of showbiz types – actors, artists, TV people, musicians, but also their agents, managers, record company people, roadies, you name it – viewed these drugs as either purely recreational or as a useful tool to add to our creativity. Or whatever else they managed to convince themselves they were taking them for. Indeed, some of the greatest music made in the latter half of the twentieth century was made when the musicians involved were out of their brains on one form of drug or another or, indeed, several at once. Including the Beatles, Miles Davis, Bob Dylan, Elvis Presley, David Bowie and anyone else you care to name as the greatest in your opinion.

  It has to be said that a great many of the worst records in the world were also made by musicians under the influence of various illicit substances. And again, I include Quo in that list too. So I am aware how all this looks now but the fact is it happened and, along with all the alcohol, that’s just where we were in the late seventies and early eighties. Do I regret it? It’s a bit fucking late for that now, isn’t it? It would be different if I had never learned anything from all this. But hopefully I learned a lot.

  We were so far gone on all this stuff I’m not sure we even noticed when John left the band.

  Ah, yes, that. It had happened while we were recording at Mountain. The story goes – and it has always been told the same way because neither Rick nor I could really remember exactly what happened, we were so out of it – that John simply sat down at his kit one day as we were getting ready to tape a track, fiddled around with his drums for a bit, decided fuck that, he’d had enough, then kicked them over, then stormed out vowing never to come back.

  Well. John had always had a dark and moody side. We knew that. Always had the capability of throwing a wobbly. We had grown used to it. But this was clearly of a different order. Talking to John years later, I’m not sure even he knew for sure what the real underlying reasons for his freak-out was. But I daresay it’s no coincidence that it happened at that moment when Rick and I were simply no longer in any state to reassure anybody that we had the slightest idea what we were doing. I’m not saying it was our fault. I’m saying it can’t have been easy for John, who never liked drugs to start with, having to put up with a couple of alcoholic drug fiends.

  Reading interviews with John later, he talked about being sick of all the tantrums that were thrown. It’s true, give three over-indulged musos a sack of cocaine and there will definitely be some ‘tantrums’. Th
ese could also sometimes turn into fights. Usually, though, just a lot of shouting and finger pointing and door slamming and, well, you get the picture.

  Worst of all, when John left, is that none of us tried to stop him. I used to joke that the reason John left was because his pet hates were gigging, rehearsing and recording. Which was not fair. John was a great drummer and long-time fans now understandably regard that line-up of Quo as the classic one. The truth is the whole shebang was out of control at the time John packed it in. We all threw huge wobblers at different times. But nobody ever came over and put their arm around your shoulder. They just left you to it. I was probably the worst for that. I didn’t want to know anything about anybody else’s problems. I had too many of my own. We all did. Something that was borne out by the fact we all baled out not long after. But I’ll come to that.

  We replaced John Coghlan with indecent haste, as the saying goes, with Pete Kircher, who was a lovely bloke who’d been in countless bands previously. The song Pete played on that everyone in Britain over the age of fifty will know is ‘I Can’t Let Maggie Go’, which he made while he was in a group called Honeybus. It was in the UK top 10 at the same time we were in 1968 with ‘Matchstick Men’. Honeybus were the more famous though because ‘Maggie’ also became the theme tune for the Nimble bread TV ad at the time. We had first met when he was in a band called Shanghai that once supported us on tour. Since then he’d been in a new wave band called Original Mirrors, even though he was already in his mid-thirties. I’d gotten to know Pete better when he played on an album I produced for former Atomic Rooster singer-guitarist John Du Cann, which Andy Bown had also played on. So Pete fitted right in, no problem at all.

  At the time I phoned Pete, he was working as a session drummer for the Nolan Sisters. He said he was ready for something a bit more challenging. But he had no idea what he was walking into. Like John, Pete would become the only nondrug-taking member of the band. Unlike John, he didn’t even drink either.

  Which is just as well as my memory of the album we made, the dreadfully titled 1+9+8+2, is foggy, to say the least. To this day, I scratch my head and wonder how that got to number 1. But it did. In fact it became the last Quo album to do so. Let’s just say we have made better albums. A lot of much better albums. Even the hit single we had from it, a cover of a Johnny Gustafson song called ‘Dear John’, was decidedly average by our standards. I still cringe when I think back to those days. Like the album, the tour was a huge hit, culminating in us headlining the 1982 Castle Donington Monsters of Rock festival. (Now rebranded for the twenty-first century as the Download Festival.)

  The real highlight of our tour that year was when we headlined the first-ever fund-raising concert for the Prince’s Trust, at the NEC in Birmingham, in May 1982. It doesn’t matter whether you see yourself as a staunch supporter of the royal family, or you think they should all be sacked, the fact is the Prince’s Trust is a great thing. A charity founded in 1976, it’s all about helping underprivileged young people between the ages of eleven and thirty. The toughest cases involve kids in care. Homeless young people; kids with drug problems or other problems that have brought them into trouble with the law. It’s not some wishy-washy thing but a really solid organisation that actively helps these people on a practical level, offering support in all sorts of amazing ways. Thousands of kids benefit every year and they have a hugely impressive success rate, with around three in four moving on to employment, education, volunteering or training.

  What a bunch of reprobates like us were doing being there I can’t tell you, or hope to justify. Only that we sold the place out and gave all the money to the Trust. We also helped bring a lot of publicity to the charity. So what if we were snorting coke off the toilet seats backstage, as far as we were concerned that was our business. Raising money for charity doesn’t mean you have to act like you’re some angel. So if and when I do ever get to stand before St Peter at the Pearly Gates I hope he will remember that. I certainly will and so will the thousands of people the Prince’s Trust has continued to offer their incredible help and support to over the years since. We also got to meet Prince Charles and I can tell you now, he is a lovely, genuine man.

  But these were no longer great days for either Status Quo or me.

  The next year was like my own personal Lost Weekend. I’d simply had enough. I couldn’t take it any more: any of it. Not the band; not my personal life; nothing. All I cared about was getting as much coke as I could in me, along with a couple of bottles of tequila, a few downers, plenty of hash, with the phone left permanently off the hook. I ‘celebrated’ my thirty-fourth birthday in May 1983. I have no recollection of how I passed that day, nor do I have any particular recollection of how I passed that year. As a band we had simply stopped. I look back now and I realise that thirty-four is a ridiculously, arrogantly, utterly stupidly young age to be speaking of retirement. In my defence, I will point out that by then I had lived the lives of two thirty-four-year-olds. But then I wasn’t really retiring so much as committing a form of suicide, I now realise. I’m not sure there is a right or wrong age for that.

  In 1980, Vertigo had released a compilation Quo album called 12 Gold Bars. It contained twelve tracks, all of them hits of ours from the seventies. It became our biggest-selling album to date, going platinum in the UK for over 300,000 sales. Then, in November 1982, the label released a follow-up compilation, this time called From the Makers of … This was a double-album package with twenty of our hits and various other tracks. This didn’t go platinum but it did reach number 4 and go gold. No reason for us to hurry to make another new album then. Or go back on the road or do anything really except get even more stoned.

  I hate to keep on about it. But that’s really all that happened during this year or so when the band stopped working. Well, that and the fact that I began another serious relationship. This time with a wonderful Irish woman named Elizabeth Gurnon.

  Liz was a streetwise, raven-haired Irish beauty who didn’t take shit from anyone, least of all me. She had worked in the music business in public relations and in promotions. When I’d first known her she was working with her brother-in-law, Pat Egan, who was the wonderful fella who promoted all the Quo shows in Ireland. The first time I’d seen Liz in action was kicking the arses of some big hairy louts that had caused some problem for us at one of the shows. The way she dealt with these guys was amazing. I’ve seen various tough-guy promoters and backstage fixers unload at troublemakers at a gig. But Liz was different class. She virtually had them crying. Liz was beautiful – but she was also hard as nails. When I offered her the job working full-time with Quo she’d originally said no. It was only later, after I’d moved to Ireland to become a tax exile, that I got to know her properly – and fell in love with her.

  Liz knew the kind of life I was leading. That is, she had been around enough successful musicians to understand the life I had been living, constantly touring and recording, constantly having my back slapped by yes-men and my dick squeezed by groupies. Nevertheless, she seemed to like me. And I liked her too. So much so it turned into love. It was certainly a romantic relationship, in that we spent a lot of time together. This was a new thing for me. My years with Jean had been mostly spent away from her. What time we did have together was always taken up with kids, home building and making promises I couldn’t always keep. Then feeling rotten about it. Being with Liz felt more open and honest. At least, it did while it lasted and things were going well.

  I even managed to persuade Liz to come and work for Quo. The rest of the band had no problem with that. Not that anyone mentioned to me anyway, though looking back now I do wonder. They couldn’t argue with the fact that Liz was brilliant at her job, though. Liz was no pushover. She knew her job and she knew everyone else’s job, too. She made sure the train ran on time, so to speak. It was knowing Liz would be there that helped bring me back into the fold, in terms of getting the Quo show back on the road.

  But there was more trouble to come. Alan and
I hadn’t been getting on for a very long time. You could say the problems between us went all the way back to when we were still at school. But what we experienced now went way beyond that. I’m not saying Alan hated me at this point. I’m not saying I hated Alan at this point. But if you’d just walked into the studio and seen us going at it to each other in 1983 you’d have been hard-pressed to think any different. That was the year we made Back to Back. Though we didn’t know it yet, it was going to be our last album with Alan in the band.

  After nearly a year off the road, we reconvened to make a new record at Air Studios in Montserrat. This was the former Beatles producer George Martin’s luxury new state-of-the-art residential studio in the West Indies. Sun, sea, sand and Status Quo: what could possibly go wrong? The answer: just about everything.

  While we had been off the road we had all had a chance to get our bearings in terms of where the music business was these days. It felt like the last time any of us had looked up from our guitars, in that respect, it had been 1971 and we were making Dog of Two Head. There had been some slight adjustments to our sound after Pip Williams came in – a lighter touch. But this was no longer the long-haired seventies. This was 1983 and the biggest names in the charts were acts like Culture Club, Eurythmics and Duran Duran. These were groups that focused as much on presentation as music. They certainly had the songs but they also had a very manicured image. Long hair and denim were no longer part of the scene. More to the point, those bands all shared a very contemporary sound that was built more on synthesisers and up-to-the-minute studio technology than anything to do with loud guitars and four-to-the-floor drums.

  I knew it was pointless trying to reinvent the wheel with Status Quo. Changes to music come every decade. We were what we were and had been extremely successful at being that way for over a decade. Nevertheless, I definitely felt the need to keep abreast of change, musically at least. The main difference being the sound of the drums. The Back to Back album would be the first where we abandoned the live drum sound John Coghlan had perfected and went for a more enhanced, studio-enriched sound. The sort of eighties drum sound that now makes you pull a face because it sounds so dated and, well, eighties. We also brought the keyboards more to the fore, not just tinkling the ivories but getting Andy Bown to introduce more of a synthesised ‘bed’. In terms of image, if you look at clips from that time you’ll see I still have long hair and that I’m still inordinately fond of denim and waistcoats. But Rick and Alan have cut their hair. It’s hardly the full Simon Le Bon, but it is shorter than before.