I Talk Too Much

by Francis Rossi

  Nothing had quite prepared us, though, for the four-shows-in-one-day malarkey on 21 September. The whole thing had begun the day before at Newbury Racecourse, where Nordoff Robbins staged a special Music Therapy charity race day. David organised for Quo to be the official sponsors of the two o’clock race, called, oh yes, the ‘Rock ’til You Drop’ Stakes. The BBC showed the race live with us seen handing over the Rock ’til You Drop trophy to the owner of the winning horse. Then at midday the following day Rick and I were guests on the Saturday morning kids’ TV show, Going Live!, bigging the whole thing up, before flying off to Glasgow.

  Onstage at Wembley Arena that night we were joined by Norris McWhirter, the co-founder of The Guinness Book of Records, who presented us with certificates for performing the largest number of British arena shows in under twelve hours. Towards the end, I actually did think I was going to drop. Tired doesn’t even begin to describe it. All this without any chemical assistance to pick me up: I really must be a new man now, I thought to myself. When I was then told we had managed to raise over £250,000 for the charities we had nominated, I got a lump in my throat.

  There was still one last twist to come, though, which David had arranged without our knowledge: Michael Aspel was going to be strolling onstage, followed by the TV cameras, to surprise Rick and me for a joint This Is Your Life show. No way, Aspel! That really was the last thing I fancied doing at that precise moment. Or ever! What, have your past rolled out before you and the watching millions? Fortunately, David tipped us off at the last minute – at which point we told him in no uncertain terms what Aspel could do with his big red book. If the show had been about Quo, we’d have probably done it but David warned us the programme makers just wanted to get up close and personal about our private lives. Sod that! Our lives were complicated enough as it is, let alone talking about them in public. (That said, Rick of course did do a similar show some years later called Stars & Their Lives, with Carol Vorderman. He was brilliant on it, too. Obviously.)

  It was all to the good, though. Rock ’til You Drop went straight into the top 10 and a week after that Quo was back on the road, starting out on what would be one of our longest tours ever. Twelve solid months, playing all over Britain, Ireland and Europe.

  Before we said goodbye to each other though, Eileen and I made time to finally get married. It was just a few days after we’d done Wembley Stadium with Rod Stewart. As an odd coincidence, the date of the wedding, Wednesday 19 June, 1991, was almost exactly the same date I’d married Jean nearly twenty-five years before. How the world had changed for me since then. My three boys with Jean – Simon, Nicholas and Kieran – were all now young men. And the wedding ceremony, such as it was, hardly carried the same meaning it did first time around, when I was still a God-fearing Catholic boy still dreaming of making it big one day as a pop star. I was now in my early forties and I’d been to the top and right back to the bottom, and was now on my way up again, thanks to David – but mostly thanks to Eileen. Without her, I’d never have had the energy or motivation to keep going. Eileen allowed me the freedom to follow my obsession. We didn’t need some bit of paper to tell us that, though. I just did it to provide her with all the legal rights of being my wife.

  We kept it all very low key. We set off from home that morning for Croydon Register Office and were back home in time for lunch. The driver I’d hired for the day and our lovely housecleaning lady were our only witnesses. I didn’t even have a best man. I did remember to kiss the bride though! No honeymoon afterwards, either. As far as Eileen and I are concerned, every day we spend together at home is a holiday. I can see a lot of you grimacing at that but it’s true. We did try going on holiday now and again, somewhere hot by the beach. Then came home again a few days later because we were bored.

  Quo’s career established a pattern throughout the nineties, under the tutelage of David Walker. It was still about the music, but in a very heightened sense. Everything was geared up to turn whatever we did into a major event. We would headline the End of Race show at the TT races on the Isle of Man. Or we would be on TV messing around with some comedian. We were always playing lots of big events, like the twenty-fifth anniversary party for Radio 1, in front of 125,000 people at the Party in the Park, in Birmingham. Hale and Pace did take-offs of us on their TV shows. Alias Smith & Jones did take-offs of us on their show. Bobby Davro did impersonations of us on his TV show. When Rick and I turned on the Blackpool Illuminations, in September 1993, more than 25,000 people turned up to see us, the biggest crowd for over thirty years. That same morning we had done a live Radio 1 Roadshow set, followed later the same day by a Daily Star Roadshow. We were no longer just rock ’n’ roll musicians, we were showbiz entertainers. Rick was living his dream. I wasn’t complaining either. Well, not as much as I let on in the press. The fact is, we were earning more money than ever, and becoming more well known than ever. You can’t deny that David was doing his job. It used to be that when I walked down the street I might get recognised by some hairy rockers or obvious music fans. Now I was treated like a mainstream entertainer, him off the telly. Rick would lap it up and get put out if it didn’t happen. I would tie my hair back, and try and not be noticed. At the same time, of course, I still craved the recognition. I still needed that affirmation. In my job, the day people stop noticing you is the day your career is over.

  There were now Royal Doulton mugs of me and Rick, which were sold in limited editions of 2,500 at the Royal Doulton Fair, and are dreadful. Then in 1994 we went to make a record with Manchester United, who were about to win the first Premiership and FA Cup double. We recorded a proper-bloke football terrace version of ‘Burning Bridges’, retitled ‘Come On You Reds’. Brian McClair, one of their main players, had seen us at Old Trafford on the tour with Rod, and he suggested adapting ‘Burning Bridges’. Being Scottish and partial to a good bagpipey knees-up, he thought it would be brilliant. The public agreed and sent the single to number 1 – our first number 1 single since ‘Down Down’ nearly twenty years before. I don’t care how cheesy everyone who isn’t a Man United fan thought them, I still love the way we adapted the lyrics: ‘Busby Babes they always made me cry/Thinkin’ ’bout the teams of years gone by/Charlton, Edwards, Law and Georgie Best/We’re United, you can keep the rest …’ That said, as I don’t really know much about football, it was Rhino who came up with the lyrics and Andy Bown who worked out how to make them fit.

  Around the same time we did another Prince’s Trust show, this time billed as ‘The Appointment’. We did the show at the Albert Hall and Prince Charles was there. We raised over £70,000 for the Trust and afterwards Rick and I presented Charles with miniature versions of our trademark white and green Fender Telecaster guitars for his boys, William and Harry, who were eleven and nine, respectively, at the time. Oh, the joy of show business! I don’t know if they ever got to play them together, or which one of them was me and which one Rick, but we also brought another Telecaster, which the whole band signed and put up for auction in aid of Capital Radio’s ‘Help a London Child’.

  Even on those increasingly rare occasions when we did just put a new record out because we just wanted to put a new record out, David was always able to find a way to turn it into something just a little bit special – or hammy, depending on how you looked at it. When, two months after ‘Come On You Reds’ went to number 1, we released a new single, ‘I Didn’t Mean It’, and were booked back to appear again on Top of the Pops, David somehow figured out that it would be our hundredth appearance on the iconic show. Not only that but it meant we had now been on the show more times than any other act in the show’s long history – a record we still hold to this day. Naturally, David turned this into another publicity blitz, along with the other fact he had unearthed that ‘I Didn’t Mean It’ was the forty-sixth Quo single to make the UK top 30.

  Any hopes I had, however, that Thirsty Work, the album that followed on the heels of the single, would also prove to be a success were quickly dashed. It was our fir
st all-new album since Perfect Remedy had fallen at the first hurdle five years before, and went top 20, but only as high as number 13, which made it our second, worst-selling album since Dog of Two Head nearly twenty-five years before. When the other two singles lifted from the album – a nice enough song by Andy and Rhino called ‘Sherri, Don’t Fail Me Now!’ and a cover of a truly beautiful Jennifer Warnes love song called ‘Restless’, which I now confess we completely murdered – barely scraped into the top 40, any hope I had of convincing David Walker that he was wrong to push us in the direction of novelty hits and compilation albums had vanished.

  By now the music world had moved on without us. In 1994 Oasis and Blur were the two biggest British acts in the world. Britpop was the newest of the new waves. It seemed the only way old-fart seventies stars like Quo could get back into the charts was by releasing what were essentially novelty records. Elton John was the best at this: he had big hits in the nineties by doing singles with George Michael (Elton’s old hit ‘Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me’), Kiki Dee (‘True Love’), even Ru Paul (a version of the original Elton–Kiki hit, ‘Don’t Go Breaking My Heart’). Rod Stewart was the same, having joint hits with Tina Turner, Sting and Bryan Adams. He even tried covering hits by Oasis and Primal Scream. (It didn’t work. Sorry, Rod.) Some of the older acts had the ‘integrity’ not to be tempted down those paths – and most of them subsequently spent the nineties languishing in oblivion. We survived.

  Sure enough, the following year found us making the Don’t Stop thirtieth anniversary album. David really went to town this time, with a truly ‘high concept’: a fifteen-track CD, all cover versions of songs that had really influenced us over the past thirty years. That was the party line anyway. Well, we bent those rules a bit, as you do, but it ended up a real cross section, from out-and-out rock, like ‘Proud Mary’ by Creedence Clearwater Revival and ‘Get Out of Denver’ by Bob Seger and his Silver Bullet Band, to old sixties-style pop, like ‘I Can Hear the Grass Grow’ by the Move, ‘Fun, Fun, Fun’ by the Beach Boys, and ‘Get Back’ by the Beatles. There was a range of stuff from the fifties – Chuck Berry’s ‘You Never Can Tell’; Buddy Holly’s ‘Raining in My Heart’ – to the seventies – ‘Don’t Stop’ by Fleetwood Mac; ‘All Around My Hat’ by Steeleye Span – to the eighties – ‘Johnny and Mary’ by Robert Palmer; ‘The Future’s So Bright (I Gotta Wear Shades)’ by Timbuk3.

  On paper, looking at it now, it sounds like a right shambles. But here’s the thing. We really enjoyed making that album. It was probably the most fun record we ever made in many ways. Every track killer: absolutely no filler. My personal favourite remains our version of ‘When You Walk In The Room’, which was written by Jackie DeShannon and had originally been a big hit in the UK for The Searchers. I still think that’s one of the best tracks we ever did. Pip Williams really excelled with his production. Then there was David’s touch of genius by bringing in the Beach Boys to duet with us on ‘Fun, Fun, Fun’. I had wanted us to do ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’, which I always loved. But it just didn’t sound right. ‘Fun, Fun, Fun’ just worked from the off. Then we had Brian May from Queen to add his unique sparkle on guitar to ‘Raining In My Heart’, and Steeleye Span’s great Maddy Prior, who I love, duetting with me on ‘All Around My Hat’.

  Released with the heavy-duty promotional fun of the fair under a highly lucrative new deal David had cleverly put together with Polygram TV, the album came out early in 1996 accompanied by a massive TV ad campaign and me and Rick appearing on every TV and radio show that David could ‘persuade’ into having us. A lot of these decisions were also chewed over with Simon Porter, the brilliant PR man who was becoming more and more influential. I always liked Simon. He had all the right instincts but was also someone I knew I could trust. The result was our biggest-selling album since Rocking All Over the Years – our early ‘anniversary’ album five years before. None of the singles we released from it reached the top 20 but the album went straight in at number 2, selling nearly half a million copies in the first six weeks. I’m not saying David said I told you so. I’m saying he bloody well yelled it in our faces. Deservedly so. He had been proved right again. Who were we to complain about silly things like ‘credibility’ and ‘critical acclaim’? Sod all that.

  When we released ‘Fun, Fun, Fun’ as a single, David had the Beach Boys fly into London and take off with us on a big promotional tour of Britain. The Beach Boys were legends, of course, but they hadn’t had a hit in Britain for years and the interest in the joint record was huge. We ended up performing together on dozens of TV shows and radio shows. Everything from Top of the Pops and GMTV to The Des O’Connor Show and Cilla Black’s Surprise Surprise. The whole thing was surreal. I’d been a Beach Boys fan since I was a teenager. We first met them a couple of years before when we both appeared at ‘The Last Tattoo’ concert in Berlin, to mark the withdrawal of the last of the British and American troops from the city. We all went out afterwards and had a good time, swearing allegiance as you do on those very late nights and early mornings. But when David suggested getting them in for a track on the Don’t Stop album, we told him he was off his head. But he did it. Don’t ask me how. I still have no idea. But that was David – very persuasive.

  Meeting Brian Wilson was a little bit different, though, as you might expect. In the mid-nineties he was only just emerging still from decades of being a drug-damaged recluse. He became a lot better as the next few years went by and began doing his own solo tours. But at the time it was very sad. I would be having a little chat, getting on with him well, then suddenly he would just switch off, not know you were there, go wandering off somewhere in that genius mind of his. The first time we met I said: ‘Hello, mate. How are you?’ Brian just looked at me and said, ‘Who are you?’ He had no clue. And why should he? Our career path had been steered by David into so many new directions by then, I wasn’t sure I knew who I was either. The mid-nineties had seen a massive resurgence in guitar-oriented rock, from Nirvana and grunge to the whole Britpop phenomenon, with Oasis and Blur leading the charge.

  I’m not foolish enough to suggest that Status Quo might have found a new connection to those bands, but it did make me wonder if we were even still thought of as a guitar-oriented band, in the same way we had made our name as back in the seventies. Of course, I was just a couple of years short of my fiftieth birthday. Things had changed whether I liked it or not. I should just be thankful Quo hadn’t gotten completely lost in the shuffle. We had certainly come close before David Walker came along and set us on a whole new and more successful path.

  But still … we were no longer just about the music and I began to clash more and more with David over this. In his usual too-shrewd way he tried to keep me happy by arranging things like a separate solo deal. The result was King of the Doghouse, an album comprising some songs of mine that I’d done with Bernie and a batch of new tunes written for me by Tony McAnaney, a talented musician who’d written with me and Bernie on a track on Thirsty Work, but was best known for writing the Jimmy Nail hit ‘Crocodile Shoes’. Tony was great. He’d been introduced to me by Iain Jones but David Walker was less keen on the idea of Tony and me working together. I liked the album – at least, while I was making it. It had a lot more of the folky, country, melodic stuff that I’d never had the chance to explore very much with Quo. I still think the title track, which I love, would have made a great Quo track. Who knows, I might have to revisit that idea one day. But the album died a commercial death when it was released in 1996. All it did, in fact, rather than ‘keep me happy’, was make David Walker seem even more correct in his summation that Quo’s days as original music makers were over and now it was all about – dreaded phrase – ‘extending the brand’. The trouble was we still had one foot in the old music business model of only gauging success by sales of albums and singles. Whether they were actually any good or not – that is, albums that would stand the test of time the way all the original Quo albums have – didn’t matter. Thankfully, the pen
dulum has swung again in more recent times. Now, because nobody sells albums any more, it’s all about how good they are, musically: it’s not about first-week sales or any of that. It’s about having them out there ready to be discovered at any time.

  What none of us knew was that all the major rock bands of the seventies and eighties were about to follow us down that road, with the advent of what is now recognised as the classic rock market. Within a few years all the rules would be rewritten as bands reformed, sometimes as original line-ups, but most often with a couple of original members and some other well-known names grafted on. Queen and Paul Rodgers or Adam Lambert immediately spring to mind. Or gigantic American rock bands like Foreigner and Journey. Or Black Sabbath – both with and without Ozzy Osbourne. Or Deep Purple – both with and without Ritchie Blackmore. Look at the Rolling Stones and Guns N’ Roses – only three original members left in each band but no one cares as long as the singer and guitarist are there.

  The music world hadn’t gotten to that stage yet, though, and with Quo I found myself caught between totally getting what David was doing for us, and pining for a time when it was just down to how good were the riffs the boys and I could come up with. Except we weren’t boys any more, we were middle-aged men, with all the attendant issues that brings too. In my case, that was putting on weight – without the drugs to comfort-consume, I had become very partial to really good food. Having Eileen as my wife also helped with this, as she was one of the best cooks I had ever known. I would deal with this in time by developing a daily fitness regime, which I would become even more addicted to than I had been to coke all those years.

  I was also going bald, or thinning on top, to put it more kindly. I decided I also had the answer to this with the arrival of the new ‘hair technology’ of the time. In my case that involved getting a hair transplant at a fancy (read: very expensive) hair clinic in London. Losing your hair has always been a nagging problem for us aging rockers. Years ago, you had to do what Elton and so many other singers did like Frank Sinatra, and simply get a wig. In more recent times it has become more acceptable to simply shave the whole thing off, like Michael Stipe from REM did when his garden stopped growing.