At first, Bob and I were like, ‘But Colin, that’s not fair! We wrote that song!’ But we soon saw he was right. The choice came down to either finding a way to placate Alan and the others, or bowing down to the demands and starting to use more of their material. I didn’t care who wrote what, but I did care whether we had another hit. So we went for the four-way credit on ‘Roll Over Lay Down’, and it worked, especially when a live version of the song was later released and became one of our biggest hits. It’s still one of my favourites to play. It sounds like the theme tune to a Clint Eastwood movie, as some baddie rides his horse into town looking for trouble.
The real monster on the album was the final track though, ‘Forty Five Hundred Times’, which Rick and I came up with together. It is now regularly voted one of our best songs ever by diehard Quo fans. Rick came up with the gently noodling intro after he’d had a few drinks one night, and it was incredibly melodic and almost plaintive. We were sitting in the studio, in a circle, just improvising over the top. Then Rick just started riffing and the song took on a whole new aspect, becoming more epic as we ploughed on. The finished track was almost ten minutes long. When we played it live it could go for twice that length if we were really going for it. It became sort of like our ‘Stairway to Heaven’, at least to the Quo fans. The absolute highlight of every show, the pinnacle of total Quo-osity, if you like. We would end it – the three of us in a line – Rick, me and Alan – all heads down banging away on our guitars, hair dangling, the crowd going crazy. It was almost like a spiritual communion between me, Rick, the band and the fans.
What still baffles me is exactly when we recorded all the tracks. All I remember about 1973 is being on tour all over the world. We even did the Reading Festival again, this time as special guests for Rod and the Faces on the Saturday night. It felt big time. It was big time. When did we stop long enough to record some songs? No idea. That and the making of Piledriver always overlap in my mind. That said, a lot of things are now a blur from those days. But then a lot of things were rather a large blur even at the time they were happening.
Like Piledriver, we plumped for a one-word title for the album. In this case, a simple Hello! – another title Colin Johnson came up with, but with an exclamation mark this time. Even the cover had echoes of Piledriver, all four of us this time lined up. Not banging our heads but standing with arms aloft, pictured in triumphant silhouette. Quo’s None More Black cover, as it became known after Spinal Tap came out.
Then we crossed our fingers and let Vertigo do the rest. Sure enough, and to huge relief and no little pride all round, ‘Caroline’ was released in August and went straight into the charts, getting as high as number 5 – the highest any of our singles had gone at that point. Top of the Pops here we come – again. In fact, we were starting to feel like veterans of the show. Kenny Everett was the presenter the first week we did ‘Caroline’. He was the coolest daytime DJ on Radio 1 at the time. So cool he’d been sacked at least once for some perceived outrage. He’d only just gotten his job back when he did Top of the Pops with us. About a week later he left Radio 1 again to become one of the inaugural DJs at the newly launched Capital Radio. We were beginning to feel bulletproof. John Peel loved us. Kenny Everett approved and played our records too.
Then something happened that we had never really dreamed possible before – Hello! came out and four weeks later it went to number 1, knocking the new Slade album, Sladest, off the top spot. I sat there with a copy of Music Week, the big weekly industry magazine at the time, which had all the charts in it, just staring at the albums chart page. The same week Hello! went to number 1, the latest albums from the Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Genesis, Lou Reed and the Carpenters were all below us in the top 10. Then there were the real heavy-hitters like Perry Como (number 3) and Max Bygraves (number 10). It didn’t matter who they were, we were higher than them. I’m not the kind of bloke to tempt fate by gloating but I don’t think that copy of Music Week left my hands that entire week. To say we were happy doesn’t describe how we felt at all. We were doing a show in Helsinki when we got the phone call. It was that time of the year when Finland has twenty-four-hour sunshine and I don’t think any of us went to bed for a week.
By the time we were finishing the year with some more British concerts, Hello! was already the biggest-selling album we’d ever had. It also gave us our first gold record for over 100,000 sales in the UK. It was our biggest around the rest of the world too. It just seemed to take off everywhere. Everywhere, that is, except America. Which in those days, like now, was still seen as the Holy Grail for British rock bands. The perception was you hadn’t really made it big until you’d made it big there.
We weren’t worried though. We had our own cunning plan to make it big in America. Well, not that cunning actually. We just decided to tour our arses off there as much as we could over the next year and see what happened. The same as every other hopeful British band had done since the Beatles. In the case of bands like Black Sabbath and Deep Purple, and solo acts like Elton John and David Bowie, this strategy had paid off in spades. Unlike those guys though we didn’t have any hit records in the States to open the doors for us. Instead we quickly fell into the same commercial chasm as bands like Slade, Cockney Rebel and T. Rex: artists that were huge in Britain but couldn’t get arrested in America.
It certainly wasn’t for the lack of trying on our part. Between 1974 and 1976 we did five long tours of the United States, either opening for big acts like Sabbath, ZZ Top and Lynyrd Skynyrd or headlining our own club and ballroom shows. We went down really well with the American crowds too. Our brand of high-octane boogie rock was always well received. There were many nights when local promoters or radio people would tell us we were the best band they had seen come through town since the Stones or whoever. Big record sales were always just around the corner, we were told.
The crux of the matter, though, had nothing to do with how ordinary people felt about the band. It was all down to the bigwigs that ran the label in America. Not the men at the very top like Jerry Moss, who co-owned the label with Herb Alpert, but the guys that ran the A & R and promotions departments. Their jobs were to prioritise the various records they had coming out on the label. So, for example, Rick Wakeman’s 1974 solo album, Journey to the Centre of the Earth, was given a huge push at the personal behest of Jerry Moss, and as a result it went to number 3 in the US that year. Now, I’m not picking on Rick, who as well as being one of the finest musicians this country has ever produced is also a lovely man. He deserved every minute of his success. And, yes, it’s also true that because he had been a member of Yes, who were huge in America, he was already well known over there. But, without meaning to labour the point … Journey to the Centre of the Earth was a mainly instrumental progressive rock album with just two tracks on it – side one and side two. Hit singles it did not have. Yet A & M was able to make it one of the biggest American hits of the year. Our question was: if they can do that for Rick and his symphony, why can’t they even get us in the top 100 with ‘Caroline’ or any of our other singles like ‘Break the Rules’, which became our next big hit in Britain, or ‘Down Down’, which was the hit after that and the biggest-selling single of our career everywhere else in the world?
Even after we switched labels in America to Capitol, which was the US wing of EMI, we didn’t fare much better. Again, we were going down a storm with American audiences, yet you could never hear any of our records on the radio. The key as to why almost certainly lay in a conversation I was told Colin our manager had with one of the main men at an American company around this time. Pushing to know why no one seemed able to get any of our songs on the radio over there, he was presented with the following proposal: ‘You pay off my mortgage and I’ll get your record on the charts.’
We were so outraged when we were told this we asked Colin to tell them where to stick it. Sure enough, apart from some of the new ‘progressive’ FM stations that operated independently in the States at that tim
e, where some longhair might decide to play the whole side of an album if the fancy took them or they’d smoked enough dope, Status Quo remained resolutely off the American radio airwaves.
Finally, after yet another twenty-four-date American tour, in April 1976, we said fuck that and never went back. Not for another twenty years anyway. We were finally persuaded to return to America in 1997, when we did precisely two shows: one at the House of Blues in LA and one at the Irving Plaza in New York. They both went very well but that was that and we didn’t go again until 2003 when, off the back of some shows in Brazil and Mexico, we crossed the border and did half a dozen House of Blues-style shows across both coasts.
Our decision to forget about America wasn’t entirely based on a fit of pique. From our point of view we had tried our best for three years – all to no avail. Meanwhile, these long tours were costing us a fortune. We always returned from America in debt. Meanwhile, our records in the mid-seventies were now selling millions all over the rest of the world. During the same period when we were flogging our guts out playing everywhere and anywhere they would have us in America, we were now doing major headline tours all over Europe, Japan, Australia and, of course, Britain, where we were now one of the biggest bands in the country. In the three years we spent trying to break America, we had another three number 1 albums in Britain, and another six top 10 hit singles, including our first number 1 with ‘Down Down’. We had also seen what happened to Slade, whose singles were going straight into the charts at number 1 in Britain when they decided to spend the next two years concentrating on America – at the same time exactly as us, as it happened. But instead of throwing in the towel like we did, they doubled down and moved over there in 1975. But even that didn’t work and by the time they came home again their career had stalled. We took that as a salutary lesson in how not to do things. At least, not while things were going so well for us everywhere else in the world.
Over the years there have been times, I confess, when I do wonder what might have been if we’d played the game with the powers that be in America, if we’d paid that guy’s mortgage off, bought all the ounces of coke the radio people constantly demanded, and we’d been able to get a hit song on the radio. But then I think, what else would it have given us? More fame? I’ve been famous enough now for nearly all of my adult life, long enough not to need any more of that. In fact, I quite like the anonymity when I go to America these days with my wife Eileen to visit her family, or to see members of my own family that live out there. It’s nice not to have to keep noticing people giving you funny looks when you walk into a shop or restaurant. The only big change had we made it in America would have been money. And again, it’s not as if I’ve been exactly poor. Being big in America might have added an extra zero to my personal wealth, but as one of our old accountants used to say, ‘You can only wear one pair of shoes at a time.’
There was also, if I’m honest, the comfort-zone factor. By the mid-seventies everywhere we went we were now travelling first class. Not just on planes and in hotel suites but in our personal lives too. Next thing, we’d be roughing it again in America. Playing small venues, being treated like beggars. We hadn’t worked so hard back home to go through all that again.
When Hello! went to number 1 in 1973, our earnings for headlining a concert hall in Britain went up astronomically. By the time we got to Blue for You, in 1976, we’d had another three chart-topping albums, a top 10 best-of compilation, six major hit singles, and we had just recorded a two-night stint at Glasgow Apollo that would comprise our first live album, simply called Live!, which would get to number 3.
During that time our fees for one of our shows had doubled then tripled, then gone up again. It was the same all over the world (except America). We were now touring major venues for weeks and months at a time in West Germany, where the venues were all arena-sized, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and every country we could name in Europe and a few we had never heard of. We weren’t just selling tickets at these shows, we were selling massive amounts of merchandise every night (T-shirts, tour programmes, denim patches with our name on them, posters, jackets, you name it). At some shows, particularly in Japan, we were making as much, sometimes more, money from selling official Quo merchandise than we did selling tickets. All of which we shared equally as a band.
Then came the royalties from all the songs. Since the day I had received my cheque for £1,200 for writing ‘Pictures of Matchstick Men’, I had always been aware of what felt to me like an undercurrent of jealousy in the band about how much money I was making from being the guy who wrote the hits. Now Bob came under scrutiny too, as he was the guy I’d co-written the later hits with. We had tried evening things out by giving four-way credits not just on ‘Roll Over Lay Down’, but also ‘Break the Rules’, in 1974. Bob had also started writing with Rick, coming up with great hits like ‘Mystery Song’, in 1976, which Rick sang. Then there was ‘Rain’, another all-time Quo classic, which Bob and Rick came up with and Rick again sang lead vocal on. In fact, the next two hit singles we had after that were covers – ‘Wild Side of Life’, an old Hank Thompson hit, and ‘Rockin’ All Over the World’, written by John Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival.
None of which made Alan feel any better about things as he’d had very little to do with those records, other than playing bass, of course. We would use one of Alan’s songs on a B-side, as we did for ‘Caroline’ when his song called ‘Joanne’ was on the flip-side – and you earned the same amount for writing the song on the B-side of a single as you did writing the A-side. He still wasn’t happy. He had it firmly in his mind that Status Quo was his group, he was the leader, not me and certainly not Rick, and he should get more acknowledgement of that fact – and more money. It was during this period that we all began to drift apart slightly as a group. We weren’t at the stage where we would all have separate dressing rooms, though that would come later. But we certainly weren’t sharing hotel rooms any more, let alone beds. And when we weren’t touring, which wasn’t often, we hardly socialised at all.
Meanwhile, I was now starting to enjoy the rewards of our success. At the start of 1975, just as ‘Down Down’ went to number 1, I bought a big new house in Purley. Still keeping with my south London roots but a million miles from the sort of places I grew up in as a child. This place had eleven bedrooms and an outdoor swimming pool. It also sat in the middle of these beautiful spacious gardens. I didn’t know it yet but I was about to discover a love of gardening – or, at least, designing and planning a garden, then paying an actual gardener to put it together. I also discovered I could be a bit of a property wheeler-dealer too on the side. The asking price for the property was £80,000. But, because I was away touring so much and didn’t have time to sit around worrying about whether the sale went through, one of our managers played hardball, stringing things out until eventually the price was negotiated down to £50,000. It was still a lot of money in 1975 (approximately £400,000 today, though the equivalent of a few million in terms of what a place like that would cost now) but for what I was getting it was an absolute snip. The main reason I was able to pull this off was because my offer was in straight cash. No banks or mortgages or middle managers involved, just a suitcase full of readies.
It really was a beautiful old house situated on its own private estate. It even had a name: The Glade. Very posh, my son. Boy done good, etc. I loved that house so much I lived there for the next thirty years. Not that I was ever there much to enjoy it when we first moved in. But on those few days off we would get, I would take the phone off the hook and just sit there like a king in my gorgeous huge gardens, or have a dip in my lovely heated swimming pool. No mortgage, no bank loans, a nice new BMW in the drive. It could comfortably get up to 130 mph – I know because I pushed it that far to see what it could do, and then spent the next three weeks telling everyone I met about it. I’d just be enjoying the comforting sound of the envelopes carrying big fat royalty cheques dropping onto the doormat. Gone were the days
when a cheque for a thousand pounds looked like a lot. I was now getting cheques every six months, big six-figure payments.
I say this here not to show off but to demonstrate how far I had come as a young man living his dream. But I had so much money I didn’t know what to do with it. So I didn’t do much, not once I had the big house, big car and big career to work on. My children were still little, just at school. Jean now had money too, and was used to not having me around and built a life for herself around that. There were expense accounts here and there at various expensive West End stores – this was long before Amazon and online shopping, thank God – and she had her own car, her own friends and this huge house to run as she saw fit. I was all right with all of this as long as I could pull up the drawbridge and sit and smoke dope in peace and quiet. How Alan and John spent their money and lived their lives was up to them. I didn’t really know and I didn’t really care. I already spent more time with them than I did Jean or the kids.
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