I Talk Too Much

by Francis Rossi

  Neither of those things ever appealed to me. Instead, I opted for the hair replacement route – plug-ins. Again, this is something Elton also tried but not terribly successfully. There have been many other cases of famous rock stars getting a little ‘work’ done on their hair, some well known and some not so well known – I’m thinking here of Chris Martin from Coldplay and Bono from U2, and let’s say ‘rumours of’ Mick Jagger and Roger Daltrey also having a ‘rug rethink’, as the author Martin Amis once so eloquently put it.

  In my case, I decided honesty was the best policy and invited the cameras in to see what I was having done. Sure enough, the next day’s newspapers were full of the top of my head having clumps of hair stitched into place. None of this bothered me in the slightest. It would have bothered me more to pretend I’d never had it done and lie about it in interviews. The only thing that hurt was the procedure itself. It bloody hurt a lot! Still, it did improve the thickness of my hair. If not the colour, which I have allowed to grow ever greyer as the years have rolled by.

  Rick had none of these problems. Rick’s health issues were far less cosmetic and much more serious. The way he had always lived his life, I knew it was surely only a matter of time before he crashed. But even I was shocked when it happened as quickly as it did. Rick was forty-eight when he had his first heart attack. I nearly keeled over myself when David phoned me with the news. Officially, we tried to play the whole thing down. Some story went out that Rick had been having chest pains so checked himself in for an appointment with his doctor, who advised him he needed an urgent heart op.

  The truth is, Rick had nearly died before he even got to the doctor. He told me that he just got up one morning (or probably one afternoon, knowing what a night owl Rick was) and was on his way to make a cup of tea when he felt like he’d been hit by a thunderbolt that left him gasping in pain on the floor. When he finally recovered enough to drag himself to the phone he didn’t call for an ambulance like anyone sensible would, but dialled his private doctor – who told him he was busy and to come in and see him tomorrow. In the meantime, he told Rick to take a couple of aspirin and go back to bed. So that’s what Rick did. That might sound odd, unless you knew Rick. He had this habit of having what he called his ‘second kip.’ He would get up in the morning, make himself a cup of tea, then go back to bed for his ‘second kip’.

  In fact, Rick said, he felt so much better the next day he nearly cancelled the appointment. But somehow he had just enough sense to see the doctor – who took one look, told him he had almost certainly had a heart attack, and promptly sent him to Wellington Hospital in St John’s Wood, where they took him in and prepped him for an immediate quadruple heart bypass. They told him that if they didn’t operate immediately, he would be dead within twenty-four hours.

  He used the phone in his private room to call his mum. Followed by David Walker, whose next call was to me. He told me what had happened and that Rick might not survive the op. Bloody hell, Ricky! I thought. What have you done this time?

  Fortunately, Rick pulled through. Of course, David made sure he made the news and Rick’s room started filling up with cards and flowers from Quo fans all over the world. He also had a string of visitors. I went and had my picture taken with him grinning from his bed. All for tomorrow’s newspapers thank you, David. There was a bit of a kerfuffle, I found out later, when both of Rick’s wives turned up to see him. Marietta, who Rick had been seeing again for a couple of years on and off, and Patty, his second wife, who he had divorced the previous year but who he was also seeing again. Apparently they had to sneak one out while the other one was waiting to come in. Very Rick, that scenario, I thought.

  The other thing that was very Rick was his response to all the medical advice he was now given, in terms of recovery but also in terms of avoiding having another heart attack. When one consultant told him that a glass or two of good red wine might be beneficial – something to do with the tannins in red wine – Rick took that to mean he could have one or two bottles of good red wine a night. When they told him he would need to rest for a few weeks, he took that to mean a roadie would have to carry him home to his couch, where he could lie around smoking sixty cigarettes a day, drinking red wine and snorting coke. He told me all this with a straight face, by the way. When he saw how I looked at him, he tried to turn it into a joke but I knew he was telling the truth. ‘The thing is, Frame,’ he told me, ‘after being in hospital for so long I thought I owed myself a couple of big nights.’ In fact, he’d only been in there for eleven days before checking himself out.

  The truth is, Rick was very ill for a long while afterwards. Although he made his comeback onstage with us just three months later, for a while I did wonder if he would ever be fit enough to work again. Then his first show back, at Norwich City football ground, he was jumping around like a spring chicken. Like nothing had happened. The place was packed with about 25,000 fans and there were ‘Welcome Back Rick!’ banners everywhere. One read: ‘Rick Parfitt’s got more bypasses than Norwich!’ Rick was so chuffed, just revelling in the attention. Afterwards, he tried to explain it to me as what he called ‘a midlife refit’. Like a car, he saw it as having ‘worn out the valves in the old engine, so I’ve had some new ones put in’. He also told me he felt so good that he expected to live to be a hundred. That any ‘repairs’ he needed he would get fitted along the way.

  And in fairness, that’s pretty much what he did for the rest of his life. I may not have agreed with his analogy. Whether he liked it or not, Rick wasn’t a car. I knew he was kidding himself. I couldn’t fault his work ethic, though. Which was just as well as the next eighteen months saw us touring constantly. In 1998 alone we played to more than two million people around the world. David Walker’s never-ending campaign to turn Status Quo into part of the family furniture was still paying big dividends. When we released the Under the Influence album in 1999, David organised a ten-date tour of British pubs, giving a right old knees-up to a couple of hundred people a night. This time the shtick was that the ten pubs had all been nominated in a competition held in the Sun, under the banner headline, ‘Get Quo to Play in Your Boozer’, which they announced had attracted over 10,000 entries. David did a similar pub-tour promotion for us in Holland and Germany.

  The thing is, none of this actually translated into record sales, with Under the Influence selling less overall even than Perfect Remedy. It was also galling on a personal level, as the title Under the Influence had absolutely nothing to do with alcohol or pubs. It was just something David the marketing whiz had glommed onto as a way to publicise the record. Simon Porter really fought David on this one; he could see it was a bad idea. I remember Neil Warnock, our brilliant booking agent, also warned me it was a bad idea. Neil was someone who had been around as long as us, starting out at NEMS before forming his own companies, most notably The Agency, in the early eighties, which is when we started working with him. These days Neil is the head of UTA (United Talent Agency), one of the biggest talent agents in the world, with over a hundred agents working for him. Neil knows his stuff. So when he took me to one side and had a serious word with me about David’s latest brainwave, I had to take it seriously. David was unstoppable though. I got it that in the absence of major radio play, which we had stopped getting in the late nineties, David saw the tabloids and the mainstream TV entertainment shows as the only media left where we could get word out about our latest records. But the pub promotion left me feeling very disenchanted. Not least as I now hated going into pubs and hated drinking. The song ‘Under the Influence’ had been inspired by a recurring dream I was having about an old girlfriend – and two of her best friends – while the melody actually came from something I wrote on the piano when I was thirteen. But when I told David this, tried to explain that the song meant something different but real, he just pulled a face and said, ‘I can’t build a marketing campaign about that!’

  Most of all I was starting to hate all the fakery involved. Showbiz and promotion I am fine
with, it has always been part of the music business game. But it felt to me like Quo had now gone way beyond that. You need to find the right balance. Without it we were becoming a laughing stock even to some of our longstanding fans. Even, if I’m honest, to me. Something had to change, but what? And how?

  David, meanwhile, was full steam ahead. And bless his heart for it. One thing about David: he was absolutely unstoppable. And the truth is some of what he came up with was brilliant still. Our 2000 Australian tour was launched with a trip on the Australian version of the Orient Express, the Great South Pacific Express. It was like the Butlin’s trip only bigger. Much bigger. An amazing, historic vintage steam train that carried over 250 fans and media to one of Australia’s grandest old railway stations, Grandchester, located deep in the outback. When they got there we were waiting to play a free show on a flatbed railway carriage. It was pretty incredible, if unbelievably hot.

  Then there was the flip-side, like the time just a few months later when we became ‘the first outsiders ever to enter a Big Brother house’ when we played a gig for the housemates in the Norwegian version of the show. God, did it smell in there! I mean whoop-de-doo, do you know what I mean?

  But then there were also glorious events like making our first appearance on the Night of the Proms tour. Full classical orchestra and choir, featuring classical and jazz musicians and rock artists, including Simple Minds, Meat Loaf, UB40 … We did two months of shows in Belgium, Holland and Germany and it became the most enjoyable experience I’d had as a performer for many years. It was also the easiest. We only had to do four songs a night and we were sequestered in luxury private accommodation throughout as the shows all took place in one grand venue per country. I took to bicycling to and from the show every day. That and the unique experience of hearing ‘Rockin’ All Over the World’ and ‘Caroline’ being thumped out by a full orchestra and choir made this a truly memorable time for the band.

  The stretching of the Status Quo ‘brand’, to use one of his favourite words, continued apace throughout the last couple of years we worked with David. For all the good things he did, there were now other things that were truly getting me down. David had tried to turn not being played on Radio 1 any more into a publicity opportunity by having us sue the BBC. Simon Porter was going, ‘No! It’s suicide!’ We all knew it was a huge mistake but David went ahead with it. I read my quote – written for me – in the official press release and felt like an old granddad spoiling the kids’ party: ‘“Someone seems not to like us at Radio 1,” said Francis Rossi. “But the staff are not paid to be taste-makers. They should play the current Top 40, which is their remit.”’ I was made to feel like an even bigger fool when the whole thing backfired so spectacularly the judge ruled against us, which ended up costing the band upwards of £500,000. Note: costing the band not the manager half a million quid!

  Meanwhile, we were all over the telly in other ways. Argos had been using ‘Whatever You Want’ in their official ads for years. ‘Down Down’ now became the theme to a Kwik-Fit ad, while ‘Whatever You Want’ also started being used by everybody from Hoseasons Holidays to the theme tune to a Saturday night TV show called, wait for it, Whatever You Want. We got paid very handsomely for these things and we were very happy about that. But how it left me feeling inside was wretched.

  Everything reached a head – or rather a new all-time low, at least for me – with David’s plans for our next album, which he had already come up with the title for: Famous in the Last Century. He had the whole thing figured out. Released early in 2000, it would comprise twenty of our favourite songs – again – from the twentieth century. Yes, it was the Don’t Stop album over all again, with the spirit of ‘The Anniversary Waltz’ thrown in. I hated it before he had even finished selling us on the idea. I hated the album even more when we’d finished making it. Not because it wasn’t good. The songs were ace, the band was great; it was just the whole concept that broke my heart. People used to chide us in the seventies for always releasing the same record, but back then we had originality and imagination on our side. This, though, wasn’t even our own material. It wasn’t even our own idea. And in the end it wasn’t even a hit. Both singles from it flopped and the album popped into the charts at number 19 for a week in April 2000 then popped out again.

  We were all having that sinking feeling, more or less. Jeff Rich quit the band the month the album was released, right at the start of what was to be another gruelling eighteen-month world tour. Jeff’s replacement was Matt Letley, a great drummer with a lot of experience playing with a varied bunch of people like A-ha, Bob Geldof, Vanessa Mae, Hank Marvin and Kim Wilde. Matt was a very technical drummer and could play anything and play it really well. He was also a very quiet, calming influence in the dressing room. Something I was grateful for as we ploughed on gamely through the Famous in the Last Century tour. The irony was that, without the drugs to hold me down, I was feeling fitter and more ready to work than for years. But I was bone tired of David’s methods of keeping us ‘relevant’.

  By the end of it I was seriously having thoughts about jacking it in. Well, not seriously. I had tried that once before and look where it had got me. But I was thinking about an escape route. Rick came to me in his familiar fearful way and told me that David had said to him at the end of the tour: ‘You realise that you two have probably only got a couple of years left and then it’s all over.’

  You couldn’t say something like that to Rick without completely freaking him out. He still remembered with a shudder the aftermath of our first break-up, back in 1984. He came to me in a complete panic over what David had said. I was disgusted and angry. How dare he say that, and not even to me but to Rick, who he knew couldn’t handle that kind of thing?

  Years later, thinking about it, analysing late into the night yet again, I realised that David was probably thinking of himself more than us. He was a very wealthy man, not far off his sixtieth birthday, and as someone who was always thinking two steps ahead, he was probably already planning for his retirement. And under those circumstances he simply couldn’t see how we would ever be able to carry on without him. In reality, he didn’t want the band to carry on without him, such was his ego.

  In the end, the whole thing became academic. David Walker suffered a heart attack while attending his son Charlie’s eighteenth birthday with the family at home, in Gerrards Cross. He was taken to hospital but died in the early hours of the morning on 30 August 2001. The following Wednesday we were all there for his funeral at Chilterns Crematorium in Buckinghamshire. He was only fifty-seven and had only recently come out of a drug rehab. He was looking in the best health I’d seen him in years. He’d been in rehab before but it had never taken. This time it really seemed like it had. He came out very anti-drink and drugs. He wasn’t the kind of guy who liked to exercise, though, and he was still smoking God knows how many cigarettes a day. Still, fifty-seven is no age to go. I was deep in shock for a long time afterwards.

  Deep in shock – and suddenly free.

  Chapter Twelve

  The Double Act

  When Simon Porter took over as manager from David Walker, the plan was very simple as far as I was concerned. I was going to reach my fifty-ninth birthday in 2008. That would be the perfect time to retire, I told Simon. I’m not sure he believed me. I’m not sure I really believed me. But that seemed a sensible sort of deadline to set, to see if we could keep the band going at the level we’d become used to. In the end, I didn’t retire at fifty-nine. By the time we got there, Simon had already proved himself several times over and the band was in the best shape it had been in for decades.

  In the beginning, though, I asked Simon to basically do two things for us: allow us to start making the kind of records we could be proud of again; and keep whatever good things David had brought to the band during his time with us, while ditching the bad. That is, have our cake and eat it. Why not? After all, we had earned it surely, after everything we had been through all these years together?
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  Fortunately, Simon has been exactly the right man to deliver exactly that. Having worked as Quo’s publicist throughout the David Walker years, Simon knew all the tricks in terms of promotion. It may have been David that dreamed up all those gimmicks for Quo, but it was Simon who had been the man on the ground organising them. On the other hand, Simon had also had a long career working with credible bands like Motörhead, Uriah Heep and the Damned, to name just a few. Simon knew exactly what I was talking about and, good as his word, that’s exactly what he has done for us ever since.

  A good example was the first album we did with Simon managing, Heavy Traffic, in 2002. For me, this was the best, most authentic-sounding Status Quo collection since the heyday of albums like On the Level and Blue for You. We sounded like a real band again, guitars upfront in the mix, all but one of the tracks a band original, including half a dozen brand new songs written by me and Bob Young. And what an unexpected joy that was. Bob had simply shown up at one of our shows a couple of years before and suddenly it was like we’d never been apart. We were finally able to sit down together and talk through all the bullshit that had ruined our friendship back in the bad old days. We were older and had a much greater sense of perspective – one of the few benefits getting on a bit actually has. That was the most important thing. The fact that we were able to pick up our songwriting partnership again just like that was an added bonus.

  I was now writing with everyone in the band again, in fact: Andy, Rhino, just not Rick. But then Rick only came up with one song on the album, something he had done with Rhino, called ‘Creepin’ Up on You’ – which, ironically, was one of the most Quo-like tracks on the whole album, like something from the Dog of Two Head era. Brilliant.