I Talk Too Much

by Francis Rossi

  Pat, bless him, did everything he could to keep the show on the road. As Traffic Jam we got more gigs and even landed a spot on Radio 1’s Saturday Club, a popular Saturday morning show hosted by Brian Matthew. We also picked up some paying gigs providing support for some American acts, most notably P. J. Proby, who was more famous by then for splitting the crotch of his trousers onstage than he was for his hits. We also worked with a female vocal group called the Dixie Cups, who’d had hits like ‘Chapel of Love’ and ‘Iko Iko’. They were great girls. What I remember most of that job though was getting to know their guitarist, this very cool black guy who was the first person to really make me aware of what a big role marijuana and amphetamines played in so many musicians’ lives.

  Up till then we had steered well clear of anything like that. We knew about ‘uppers’, as they were called. And we’d heard about ‘dope smokers’. But like most teenagers in the mid-sixties that was the sum total of our knowledge, other than drugs were ‘bad’ and might make you think you could walk off the top of a building. It would be another couple of years before we really got stuck in. Touring with the Small Faces was the turning point for all that. They smoked joints as often as they smoked cigarettes, took speed every day, and were heavy into psychedelics, although the whole LSD thing was something I never personally enjoyed and steered well clear of. Instead, Stevie Marriott, the brilliant singer and guitarist of the Small Faces, became the guy who got Rick and me into sharing a half-bottle of brandy before we went onstage each night, and a joint afterwards. Until then John Coghlan was the only one who ever had a few beers. The rest of us were still drinking Tizer.

  I really enjoyed touring with those guys. Stevie and the boys and I shared a lot of the same tastes in clothes. Because of the image of Quo that would emerge in the seventies of the double-denim and long hair, people don’t realise what a clotheshorse I’ve always been. Back in the sixties when we were making our first records, I was mad about clothes. The right shoes, the right shirts and jackets. You would be in some boutique in Carnaby Street and you would bump into Rod Stewart or Stevie Marriott and it would be a competition to see who could get their hands on the best clobber first. To this day, I always like to dress smartly, even if I’m only at home relaxing. I’m not a gym-pants and trainers guy at all. I like proper shirts with the top button done up and I like my shoes to be polished. I don’t really like slovenliness in other people either. Call me superficial if you like but I am a great believer in ‘clothes maketh the man’.

  The other big change in my life in 1967 came when I married my Butlin’s sweetheart Jean Smith. She was now a mod, too, and I’d been obsessed with the girl from the moment I met her but it had been an on-off kind of thing between us and I look back now and see how that also added to the allure. When you can’t have the thing you think you want most in the world, it drives you to want it even more, especially when it involves matters of the heart.

  To begin with, Jean had scarpered after the time we got caught in bed together and my landlady threw me out. While I was roughing it on the beach with Rick, Jean had quit her job and run off with a pal to find another job at some other seaside holiday camp. When I found out I was devastated. No mobile phones in those days, no way of instantly staying in touch, so I didn’t hear another word from her for three weeks. I just assumed she’d run off and left me. Then suddenly she was back. I was overjoyed, thinking my worries were over. Instead it was just the start of Jean running off and leaving me whenever things got rough, then coming back and me being pathetically grateful. Teenage love. Thank God I never have to go through that again.

  Then the ultimate bombshell: Jean was pregnant with our baby. I was just seventeen when she found out. That would be big news today. Back in 1967 that was the clincher. There was absolutely no question of not having the baby. Abortion wasn’t even legal in Britain at the time. Then, as a Catholic, that was never going to be an option anyway. Plus, and this was the real reason, I was madly in love with her. That left just one option: getting married. Which is what we did in June 1967 – the so-called summer of love. Because Jean was seven months pregnant at the time, a proper Catholic wedding was not allowed so we simply had one of those I-do-you-do quickie jobs at the local register office.

  The only other people there were my mum and dad, Jean’s mum and her sister. My mum wasn’t going to come at all. She was so aghast at us not being able to get married in a Catholic church she wanted nothing to do with it. Then she acquiesced on the day. I had turned eighteen just a couple of weeks before and did my best to treat the whole affair as a sort of very with-it, Swinging London type deal. No suit. Instead I wore my Carnaby Street stage clothes, which at the time meant a yellow-and-green striped blazer, pink shirt and white trousers. Jean, whose tummy was huge, wore a flowery pale green smock. She looked amazing, actually.

  There was no honeymoon. I don’t think it even crossed our minds. It was all about making sure the baby wasn’t born out of wedlock. The day after the wedding we moved into the spare room at Jean’s mother’s house in Dulwich. Her husband had died a few years before so she had plenty of room. Two months later our son, Simon, was born. Married couples having kids at such a young age was much more common then. In my case, it was no big deal as I’d always had a big extended family around me and all the kids were brought up equally among the various relatives. Nevertheless, it was never going to be easy under the circumstances – teenage parents trying to bring up a baby while one of them was working away a lot – but the whole set-up conspired against us making a proper go of it. Jean’s mother wasn’t much help. Jean had always kept me from meeting her mum before we were married. Now I found out why. The woman could be very difficult. It was as though she had leapt straight from the pages of a Les Dawson joke about mothers-in-law. She would sit slumped in the armchair, chain-smoking, with her old-fashioned dress pulled up around her hips so that you could see her big old-lady knickers and she would do the most evil-smelling farts. Much to her poor daughter’s annoyance and embarrassment.

  She also didn’t really understand or care about whatever it was I thought I was doing poncing around in a pop group instead of getting a proper job. My own family probably felt much the same but didn’t show it so much. The way they looked at it, I suppose, was that if and when the music thing didn’t work out for me, I had a job waiting for me on the ice-cream vans. All Jean’s mum knew, though, was that I wasn’t around much at night and that I was around too much during the day. She was in Jean’s ear about it too. And so it started. ‘We’ve got a baby now. It’s time you stopped messing around wasting your time in the group and settled down and started bringing in money for the family.’ It got to the point where Jean gave me an ultimatum: ‘It’s either me or the group!’ Again, it’s one of those things that happen to almost all aspiring young musicians at some point. So much so it becomes another rite of passage where you have to choose which road you’re on. In my case, I simply said: ‘You knew about the group before we got married, you knew that’s the way it was. If you want to change your mind now then fine, but I’m sticking to what I said I was gonna do.’

  She accused me of being cold, unfeeling, uncaring. But I had been crazy about this girl. I loved my son. And I knew that if something good didn’t happen for the group soon I probably would have to get that ‘proper job’ after all. Apart from the grief about giving up the group, I loved being married and being a young father. I took the whole business of having children extremely seriously. But even this became something Jean and I couldn’t see eye-to-eye on. I believed in being strict, in having rules, boundaries, teaching your children right from wrong. Jean was more sixties about the whole thing. She used to tell people: ‘My children will be able to do anything they want.’ I would say, ‘No, they bloody won’t!’ and another argument would kick off.

  In the end, I took to locking myself in the toilet. It was the only place in the house where I could guarantee myself five minutes’ peace. It was pretty horrible, this freezi
ng toilet with a cold, hard wooden seat. It was more like a cupboard than a room. But I began spending longer and longer in there. I even started bringing my guitar in there with me. It was so small I had to hold the guitar up vertically. But I’d be in there for hours, my feet up against the wall, toying with the guitar and singing to myself.

  At the urging of John Schroeder I had begun writing my own songs. We were all having a go. The fact that the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and the Who and the Kinks all wrote their own material meant we had to try and emulate those feats if we wanted to be seen in the same bracket. Otherwise you did what groups like The Hollies and Manfred Mann did and went around to all the music publishers in Denmark Street. My first attempt became our one and only single as Traffic Jam. It was called ‘Almost But Not Quite There’, and as a song that described it perfectly. For some reason I can no longer remember the song is credited to Pat Barlow and me. The lyrics were definitely mine though and concern the age-old problem of leaving your sexual partner ‘almost but not quite there’. Clever, I thought at the time. Until the BBC decided the words were ‘too suggestive’ and promptly banned the record.

  Having just gotten married I did start to think that maybe Jean and her mother were right and I should think seriously about trying my hand at something else. I’d spoken to my dad about working for him on one of the ice-cream vans. Word had got back to us that the people at the record company were also having serious doubts too. The only one who wanted to give it one more go was John Schroeder. This probably had more to do with John thinking about his own reputation in the business than any greater concern with our career – he had enjoyed a lot of success, and he didn’t want to have to chalk us up as a failure.

  It was decided we would go into the studio with John one final time and see what could be done. It was make or break time. We were all painfully aware of that, none more so than me as I’d taken it upon myself to be the one to try and come up with a song that had real hit potential. I was desperate not to be forced into quitting the group and – dreaded phrase – settling down. Which is how I found myself with my guitar locked in the toilet at home again one day. Until then I’d deliberately been trying to ape the sounds of other groups in the charts, picking up little phrases here and there, imitating choruses.

  Now I fell back on something much more fundamental to my musical upbringing. For some reason, I had ‘Poppa Piccolino’ in my head, the song I used to love as a kid. In particular that jolly little melody that pulls at your sleeve. I started messing around with it on the guitar, slowing it down and making it more sort of freaky 1967 style. I also had the Jimi Hendrix version of ‘Hey Joe’ in my head. I loved his version and in particular that ultra-groovy gunslinger guitar. So I started messing around with that too. Next thing, more out of idle curiosity than serious intent, I kind of put the two together – the itchy intro to ‘Poppa Piccolino’ and the lazy guitar strut of ‘Hey Joe’ – and I had this whole new thing that actually sounded really good.

  By now, Jean and her mother had gone out with the baby so I let myself out of the toilet and set myself up again on the couch. I started improvising these sort of spacey lyrics – until I had a title and a song called ‘Pictures of Matchstick Men’. People always assume because of the title that I took inspiration from the famous L. S. Lowry pictures of the industrial north. In fact, that had nothing to do with it. Really it was me just trying to imagine what it was like to take LSD.

  I sat there on the couch playing the new song over and over. One minute I thought it was the best thing I’d done. The next I thought it was a bit of a joke, just a novelty song I’d patched together. I couldn’t get it out of my head though. Then I played it to the group and they all liked it too. The real test though came when we went into the studio to make what we knew might be our last record with John Schroeder. John listened, liked it well enough, and said it would make a good B-side for the next single. He meant it as a compliment but I was knocked back. The song John had planned for us to record as the A-side was this really rather mediocre song called ‘Gentleman Jim’s Sidewalk Café’. It was exactly the kind of cod sixties crap that we’d already failed with.

  Once we’d recorded both tracks, though, John’s innate talent for spotting a hit came through and he suggested flipping the tracks, so that ‘Pictures of Matchstick Men’ was now the A-side. The only change to the track he suggested was to the vocal. I had originally sung it falsetto. John said to try it in my natural singing voice, which I did and – bang! – suddenly we had something. We all knew it the minute we sat back to listen to the finished track. Then John added some final touches to make it really stand out on the little two-inch speakers of a transistor radio – the way most people listened to music back then on the radio: that lovely wah-wah guitar that shimmers between the verses and that phasing audio effect that the Small Faces had used on their ‘Itchycoo Park’ single, which was in the charts at the time.

  We recorded the track in October 1967 and it was scheduled for release the first week of January 1968. Before that we had another small detail to attend to: yet another change of name. The palaver at the BBC over the ‘Almost But Not Quite There’ single had left a stink over the name Traffic Jam. Plus, Steve Winwood’s Traffic had already enjoyed no fewer than three massive hit singles since then. Pat got his thinking cap on again and came up with what he thought would be a great new name for us – the Crow Bars. We were in the middle of rehearsing in his basement when he came down the stairs and suggested that one. We sent him straight back up the stairs again with a boot up his arse.

  The next one he came up with was even worse: The Muhammad Alis. Pat thought this was particularly good as we could then use the slogan: ‘They’re the Greatest!’ As a group, we did consider this one, which just shows you how desperate we were to keep the group going. Fortunately for us, Pat couldn’t get the necessary legal permission to use Ali’s name so we were back to square one.

  Pat’s next idea, though, was a good one. We’d told him we needed something that sounded really up-to-date, like Pink Floyd or Amen Corner. Pat excelled himself this time and came up with Quo Vadis, which was the name on the label inside his shoes. We agreed it definitely had a certain ring to it. The shoe thing was a bit off-putting though. Then someone – almost certainly Pat – suggested ‘The Status Quo’ and we knew straight away that that was the one. It was one of those phrases that was just around at the time – young people were always talking about challenging the status quo. It was 1967, the Beatles had changed the world from black and white to colour with the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album. Young men were burning their draft-cards in Central Park, New York. In Britain we now had Radio 1, the International Times and Mick Jagger being sent to prison for dope. Pat pointed out that people would be mentioning the band without even realising it. Heavy, man! I wasn’t so sure about that. All I knew is that I really liked the name – the Status Quo. Like the Rolling Stones, the Pink Floyd and the Small Faces.

  Then ‘Pictures of Matchstick Men’ came out in the New Year – and nothing happened. That was it for me. I had passed my driving test in December 1967, then spoken to my dad again about driving one of his vans. He had actually ordered a new ice-cream van, which I was at home waiting to take possession of when the phone rang and it was Pat. He said, ‘The bloody single has only gone in the top 30!’

  You what? You what? You fucking what? It was what they call a slow-burner. Radio Caroline had played the record a couple of times, so then some London stations picked up on it. Then Radio 1 got hold of it and spun it a couple of times. The next thing we’re in the top 30 and it’s on the radio all the time. The following week it had gone up to number 11 and the week after number 7. And then we were invited onto Top of the Pops! Look, Mum, we’re on the telly!

  Even people old enough to remember what a weekly institution Top of the Pops was for most of its forty-year existence probably need reminding what a huge deal it was to be on there back in 1968. With only two national T
V stations in the UK at the time (yes, there was BBC2, but you needed a special aerial to receive it so only a small percentage of people had it), to be invited on to perform your latest single on Top of the Pops was to guarantee you a massive-selling hit. So it proved with ‘Pictures of Matchstick Men’. Although it only got to number 7 in the British charts, it went gold for us, for sales over one million. It also went on to become probably our biggest hit single around the rest of the world, reaching the top 10 in dozens of different countries. It also became our only big hit in America, where it reached number 12. It became such a big hit for us that we didn’t realise how successful it was until years later. No social media or internet to keep a check on things like that back then; you relied solely on what the record companies told you and they weren’t in a hurry to tell you much in case you started asking tricky questions like, ‘Where are all my royalties then?’ Particularly the ones in America.

  We were so skint at the time we did Top of the Pops that we were on tour working as the backing group for the beautiful black American singer Madeline Bell, who would become really famous a couple of years later in the group Blue Mink. She had her first solo album out, Bell’s a Poppin’, and she was a great singer and an amazing performer. We would end the show each night doing a duet together on ‘It Takes Two’, which had been a hit a couple of years before for Marvin Gaye and Kim Weston. It was the last number of the night and at the end we would kiss. Just on the lips. The first time we did it spontaneously and we started doing it every night. Then one night in Manchester, some arsehole in the audience yelled: ‘Fuckin’ hell, lads! Didja see that? Fuckin’ nigger kissed him!’

  It was a horrible, excruciating moment and I felt so ashamed – for being white, for being male, for coming from the same country as whoever this wanker was. Madeline, who’d been putting up with crap like that her whole life, just shrugged it off. But it was a real lesson to me. I’d put up with racist slurs when I was a kid but I’d assumed I’d left all that behind me. Wrong again. In fact, you only had to pick up on TV shows like Till Death Us Do Part, and the ravings about ‘sambos’ and ‘coons’ of the hugely popular Alf Garnett, to gauge how far behind the times we still were in Britain. It was satire but the vast majority of people didn’t get that. They just loved Alf for being ‘outspoken’. We lived in a world where we still talked of ‘coloured people’ and gollywogs.