I Talk Too Much

by Francis Rossi

  Musically, these were cosmetic changes. But I had to fight for them every step of the way with Alan. Rightly or wrongly, Alan had a very fixed idea of how he believed Status Quo should sound: hard, rhythmic, guitar-led, more manly and macho. While my feeling was that we already had that market cornered but if we were to survive in the future we needed to expand our musical horizons a bit. I love rock music but it is far from being the only kind of music I’m in love with. Someone once said to me: ‘There are only two kinds of music: good and bad.’ I go along with that, in terms of there being whatever music you like, personally, and whatever you don’t like, personally. So if I hear a seductive pop song I can swoon over I have no hang-ups about that whatsoever. I also love country music, as became more obvious as my career progressed. My eldest son Simon has grown up to be an opera singer and I now love that, too, particularly because of the Italian connection. Mainly, I just love music.

  Alan wasn’t having it. Especially after he moved to Australia, where he’d met and married his second wife, Dayle. He seemed to become even more entrenched in his views on how we should sound. Quo made Quo music and that was that, in his opinion. We’d been arguing about it for a long time, for years, but things really came to a head on Back to Back when Bernie Frost and I came up with a country-flavoured song called ‘Marguerita Time’. Well, you can tell from the title where I got my lyrical inspiration, seeing as it was named after the second most important thing in the world to me right then (after cocaine). Musically, though, in some ways it was like a throwback to our late-sixties period: pure pop but with a twinkle in the eye. A real mums and dads tune, if you like – one for the milkman to whistle on his rounds. It was jolly and catchy and sweet and Alan hated it. Refused even to help us record it at first. And then did so only grudgingly because, I presume, he thought it would never make it onto the album. Rick was caught between the two worlds. Like Alan, his self-image was tied up in being a rock star. He was a born rock and roller. On the other hand, this is the guy who was wearing a lamé suit and singing ‘Baby Face’ on the ukulele when we first met him. Rick was all for rocking out. But Rick was even more for having a hit. It was doubly tricky for him, too, because he had always tried to maintain a decent relationship with Alan. In the end, Rick did what he always did and left it for me to make the decision.

  When we played the tracks we had recorded in Montserrat for Vertigo’s label chief, Brian Sheppard, however, he went nuts for ‘Marguerita Time’. Zeroed in on it immediately and said it was a sure-fire hit and that we should release it as a Christmas single that year. Alan did not take this news well. At one point he actually said: ‘We can’t release this as a single. How will I ever face my family again?’ I couldn’t believe my ears. What on earth was he talking about? Our last couple of singles hadn’t made the top 10. Why would we turn down the chance of breaking that run with a song our own record company virtually guaranteed us they could make into a giant hit? For me, we were back to the old adage again: art for art’s sake, hit singles for fuck’s sake.

  There was an argument. That turned into a fight, then a slagging match. Followed by Alan swearing he would under no circumstances play the song live onstage or even mime to it on TV. Fair enough, we would see about that.

  What really twisted the knife for Alan was the fact that one of his songs called ‘Ol’ Rag Blues’ had been green-lighted by Brian as the first, lead-off single from the album – but only if I sang the lead vocal. Alan had already decided that he should be the one who sang the lead as he had written the song with Keith Lamb, his mate from the Australian band Hush. Oh dear. Here we go again.

  Alan’s logic was easy to follow: both Rick and I had sung lead on various Quo singles, usually the songs that either one of us had been the main writer on. Surely it was only fair now for Alan to have a go – after all, he had written ‘Ol’Rag Blues’. The problem was that having personally twisted Brian Sheppard’s arm into making it the first single, I couldn’t now hamper the label’s chances of making it a sizable hit by agreeing not to sing on it and front the song. After all, that was my job. Alan was absolutely insistent though. It was his song. He should sing it. Accusing me of wanting to hog the spotlight. Even though I was the band’s frontman and it was expected of me.

  In the end, just to keep the peace, we ended up recording two versions of the song: one with Alan singing lead, one with me singing lead. Then told Brian Sheppard to choose which one worked best as a single. Well, you don’t need me to tell you how that went. Three weeks later we were miming to it on Top of the Pops – with me singing lead and Alan singing backup into his own mic. We had got to the stage where we even argued about things like who had a mic on telly. Usually Rick had been the one to take the second mic. He was the blond good-looking one who genuinely sang most of the harmonies with me. But Alan was on the warpath and there was no stopping him.

  The daft thing is it went top 10. In those days that meant it probably sold around 250,000 copies. So Alan got to make some serious money. But that didn’t seem to change things between us. It felt to me like he had been building up this grudge against me for so many years it all just came pouring out like lava from an erupting volcano. He was so pissed off he flew home to Australia. His wife Dayle was pregnant at the time and he said he needed to be with her. Fair enough. But my personal feeling was that there was more to it than that. We had all had kids while the band was working. It was a shame because the Back To Back album and the singles we released from it were really good: ‘A Mess of Blues’, a cover of a great old honkytonk Elvis song, suggested by Bernie Frost, which, ironically, sounded much more the way Alan thought Quo should, and got to number 15; and then, just in time for Christmas, the dreaded ‘Marguerita Time’, which got to number 3 and became one of our biggest hits ever.

  It was farcical. With Alan back home in Australia, we just went ahead and did things like Top Of The Pops and Cannon and Ball without him. We didn’t bother hanging a life-size puppet of him onstage this time, we just moved Andy and his keyboards into the spot stage left where Alan would normally stand, and did the shows like that. The hardcore Quo fans noticed and wondered what was going on. But the mainstream audiences of millions that saw us on TV, none of them blinked an eye. They just saw me and Rick and a band playing next to us and assumed it was business as usual. By then both Rick and I were increasingly aware that this was the state of affairs for the vast majority of the public. It was the start of Rick and me being seen as a double act, by the public and the music business both. Neither of us minded that at all. And as long as it worked and brought the band more success the others were happy with it too. Or should have been. Being musicians, they always railed against it to a degree. But you couldn’t argue with the success.

  Alan did make one appearance on Top Of The Pops. The only other exception to doing ‘Marguerita Time’ on our own was when we did it on the Christmas Top of the Pops and Jim Lea from Slade, who were also on the show that week, stood in for Alan, pretending to twang away on the bass. It was all good fun. People loved seeing Jim on telly with us. It was Christmas. Why not? Besides, the only thing people ever really remember about that show now was how Rick fell over into Pete Kircher’s drum kit at the end of the song – while the track kept playing. Rick always swore it was a deliberately silly move. The fact that he and I had both drunk the backstage bar dry that day before taping our performance had nothing to do with it, obviously.

  In fairness to Alan, it has to be said that there was a fair proportion of old-school Quo fans that pointedly did not like ‘Marguerita Time’ either. I still get older fans trying to take me to task for it all these years later, as though I had broken a solemn oath. But for me it’s still one of my all-time favourite Quo records. I don’t love tequila any more but I will always love ‘Marguerita Time’. To me it’s a cracking little tune and I’m proud of it. And I’m sure Alan’s ill feeling towards it would have softened somewhat too when he received his share of the royalties from it.

  The up
shot of all this was that I spent Christmas 1983 seriously wondering if I really wanted to continue in Status Quo. Rick was back in wonderland with his new girlfriend, Debbie Ash – a sexy dancer with Hot Gossip, The Kenny Everett Video Show regulars that Mrs Whitehouse got into a strop about, and whose sister was the actress Leslie Ash – and God knows how many new cars to either crash or get done for speeding in. He was banned from driving at one point. But drove anyway. That was Rick, a rock and roller no matter what. There was also another beautiful blonde named Debbie Ashby, who was a Page 3 model in the Sun who came into his life around this period. It was hard even for Rick to keep up.

  Meanwhile, Alan now disliked me more than ever. Andy and Pete were just holding on for dear life. They had both received their first full credits on a Quo album a couple of years before. The last thing they wanted now was to see the whole thing go kaput.

  But I was in such a state I was now beyond caring. The way I saw it – as I snorted another gram of coke and downed another dozen tequilas – was that I had given my all for the band for over twenty years, onstage and off. If that was no longer good enough, then fuck them. I was off.

  Rick and I had been talking to each other about a life after Quo for a while now. At one point, we reckoned that if we could come away from the group with our mortgages paid off and fifty grand in the bank each we would be set for life. That had been in the early seventies. Now, here in the mid-eighties, it was a different story. Rick had lost his house in the divorce settlement with Marietta. I still had my house but I was rarely there, and my wife and children had long since moved out.

  Yes, I now had Liz to consider. But I was now residing so far up my own arse I was about to blow that situation too in a big way. To say I wasn’t thinking clearly would be an understatement on a par with saying I liked the occasional small sherry.

  To make matters worse, it was now that I realised for the first time that it wasn’t just Alan that had felt edged out of the spotlight. It was Rick too. It came out as a casual remark. We’d been talking about what we might do if we split the band. I said I’d probably go solo. Rick looked at me and said something about it being all right for me as I’d always been number one, while he’d always just been number two, and that he was sick of being number two. I thought, what the hell? Did he really just say that? Well, yes, he did. In fact, this would become a recurring theme of our working relationship as the years passed. It used to irk me because Rick was such a star in his own right. The blokes loved him. The girls fancied him. He was great at what he did in the band. I didn’t get what his problem was.

  Actually, by this point, I didn’t care what his problem was. I had too many things to deal with in my personal life. My mother had separated from my father sometime earlier, and so I had moved her into The Glade. At first I thought it would help having Nonna around to look after the kids. But now Jean was gone and my mother was still there. I thought this was fine as I could use the company in that big old house. Only now she had turned into a religious freak. It was her sister in America who did it to her. She went to visit her as a relatively normal middle-aged mad Catholic woman and came home a swiveleyed religious loon. I was talking to my dad about it one day in the kitchen and he said, ‘Me and your mother had a marvellous sex life. Until that cow of a sister spoiled it.’

  She didn’t even want to be called ‘Mum’ any more. You had to call her ‘Annie’. Even my kids did, all because of religion. When she became hyper religious she’d be lying on the floor convinced she could see something no one else could. She’d be talking about how the Lord was here. I’d be thinking: what is she on about now? She was already convinced that I was an immaculate conception. This was when I was about twenty-one or twenty-two. But I was working away a lot with the band so I didn’t get the brunt of it. Dominic, my brother, did. He’d sit with her and they’d read the Bible every night. He was only doing his best to placate her, to stop her from crying. But I was disgusted. What are you doing, brother? What would you fall for that for? But he still can’t get over it now, poor sod. As usual, I was far more pragmatic. I loved my mum, but not so much after she more or less vanished before our eyes and insisted I now call her Annie. And definitely not so much when she kept on about me being part of an immaculate conception. I was already in run-for-it mode with the band. This just became one more reason why I was in such a hurry to do so.

  I spent a miserable Christmas chewing this stuff over in my mind. Then on New Year’s Day came to my decision. I was off. For good. No coming back. Ever.

  Of course, being a sly two-faced Gemini, I hedged my bets. I didn’t just announce I was leaving the band. I said I wanted to come off the road. Stop touring and just concentrate on making music in the studio.

  The rest of the band didn’t like the idea. But then the rest of the band – meaning Alan and Rick – had no say in the matter. Our management and record company weren’t exactly thrilled either. But I managed to shut them all up by agreeing to do one last massive farewell tour. By massive, I mean highly lucrative. By highly lucrative, I mean spending money as fast as we could make it. Then having to keep going to make some more.

  I may have decided I was leaving Status Quo but that didn’t mean Status Quo had any intention of leaving me alone. Not just yet anyway.

  Chapter Eight

  Twelve O’clock in London

  Demand for tickets to our farewell, the End of the Road tour, was incredible. That said, a combination of comparatively soft sales of Back to Back in Europe and virtually none in Australia, plus the fact that I wanted to get the thing over and done with as soon as possible, meant that our ‘final’ tour only lasted about three months.

  We did five big shows in Ireland. Eight big shows in West Germany. Two in Switzerland, France and Sweden and one in Holland, followed by the forty-two shows in Britain. All finishing with the grand finale in front of 60,000 fans at the National Bowl, Milton Keynes.

  I sat down and looked at the tour itinerary and was happy with it. No one else was happy with it. The record company made it very clear to us that they saw the whole thing as a disaster for our career. They were quite blunt in their summation, which they put simply like this: the day Quo stopped touring was the day Quo stopped selling records. The day Quo stopped selling records was the day Quo no longer had a record deal. The day Quo no longer had a record deal was the day Quo was finished.

  So what? I was sick and tired of the band.

  A fourth single was released from Back to Back in the middle of the tour, a version of a song called ‘Going Downtown Tonight’ by a new guy I’d discovered named Guy Johnson. On reflection it was a piss-poor record, with chirpy keyboards and synths replacing the guitars, and with that heavily processed drum sound that was suddenly popular in the eighties. It wasn’t much of a hit, barely getting into the top 20. Alan was clearly disgusted by the whole thing and having to deal with his reaction was just another reminder of why it was the right time to end it all.

  Pete Kircher and Andy Bown were going to be OK once the end came. They would no doubt get work with other bands. But poor Ricky was absolutely beside himself. He stood to make a lot of money from the End of the Road tour. We all did. But he was still spending it like there was no tomorrow. I was hardly a role model, in that regard, having split from my wife and kids and taken to shovelling most of my own money up my nose. But Rick took being a spendthrift to new dimensions. He was still always buying cars, Mercedes, Porsches, a Corvette Stingray. Always crashing them then buying new ones. Always throwing parties, always high on life and everything it had to offer him as a rock star. He was also, as usual, embedded in some incredibly tangled relationships with various glamorous women. He had moved in with Debbie Ash for a while, becoming a surrogate dad for her daughter Candie, whose dad was the stunt rider Eddie Kidd. Then that ended and he hooked up again with his former girlfriend, Patty, who he’d known since he was at school but had lately gotten together with after she returned from living for a while in Australia. Then he w
as seeing Marietta again on the quiet … He would tell me this stuff but I had long since stopped trying to keep up. I became like his Father Confessor. I would listen to his complicated love life, tell him not to worry, just to settle down with whichever girl he was most fond of at the time, and he would agree. Then go off with someone else again.

  Now for the first time he was forced to think seriously about the future. The trouble was that, like me, Rick was doing most of this thinking with his face hovering over a mirror crowded with big dusty white lines. Ideal it was not.

  Then a couple of months before the farewell tour was due to begin in April 1984, I got some unexpected news of my own. Liz was pregnant. Oh wow! Oh God! Oh joy! Oh no! Oh yes! I didn’t know how to react. I’ve always loved having kids. Even when I was at my wildest, in terms of drugs and drink, I always saw myself as a loving, caring father. This, though, was something I had not planned on becoming with Liz, much as I adored her. I had just enough sense left in my head to know that this was probably not going to pan out the way either of us would have liked it to. I still couldn’t wait to become a dad again, though. It seemed Rick wasn’t the only one whose life had become almost unbearably complicated.