Rick was enjoying a similar spell in a beautiful place he had bought for himself and his wife Marietta and their kids, a beautiful blond boy and a girl. His didn’t come with a pool, so he had one built. And rather than enjoy one luxury car Rick, of course, had to have several, from Porsches to a Rolls-Royce at one point.
Apart from my new love affair with my BMW, I also splashed out a few years later on a Porsche and a Range Rover. The Range Rover felt like you were driving a posh tank. They were still such a rare sight on the streets of London that they hadn’t acquired their nickname of Chelsea Tractors, but I already felt funny driving this huge expensive car down the street in Purley, so I ditched it after a while. The Porsche went the same way. I blame Rick for getting me to buy one of those. He was still going on about how cool we would look both turning up somewhere in separate Porches. His did look very cool the first time he drove round to my house in it. But when, in the eighties, every flash git in London started driving one it put me right off. I couldn’t bear to be thought of as someone so fashion-conscious. Rick in a Porsche just looked right somehow. Me in one, I felt like a prick. So I got rid of that too and bought a nice new Golf Mk1. Then felt like an even bigger prick when I got it home for doing something simply for the sake of appearances, a kind of inverse snobbery. Since then I’ve stuck to BMWs. Class will out. And just as important for me – comfort.
People ask: did the success change you? Hoping, I suppose, that you will say no. But when you’ve come from where we came from, how can success not change you? The truth is you want it to change you. Or at least, you want it to change the life you can now afford to lead. Actually, one of the first lessons you learn when you make big money is how little it really changes things. The only thing it really changes is other people’s attitudes towards you. Life is life. It doesn’t stop fucking you up just because you’ve got a few quid in your pocket suddenly. The excitement the money rolling in brought me was only fleeting, really. As for fame, that’s the biggest lie of all. Fame literally changes nothing for you. It just changes the way everybody else suddenly sees you and acts around you. That can include friends and family too. You’re still the same dickhead you always were; only now people think you have some magic power all because they’ve seen you on the telly a few times.
That’s not to say that I didn’t become an insufferable tool for a while there after Quo hit it big. Partly it was the fame. Partly it was the feeling of vindication against all the people that had laughed at us behind our backs all those years we struggled to make it. And partly it was because I had gotten into amphetamines – speed – quite heavily for the first time and thought I knew the answer to everything, like you do when you are out of your head for three days and nights and your mouth is working three times faster than your brain.
While I’d deliberately developed a cocky attitude onstage, Jack the Lad, don’t mess with me, and all that bollocks, I’d always been much more sensible offstage. I liked a laugh, of course, and a naughty bit of business in the bedroom now and again, who didn’t? But I wasn’t aggressive. Now, suddenly, I became aggressive and over-the-top, showing off all my worst qualities in the best possible places. Because Quo were seen at the time as a hard man’s band, a gang you didn’t mess with, I played that up, mouthing off in posh restaurants, terrorising the waiters and other diners. Really, I was an over-sensitive little twit. You would never have known it, though, if you bumped into me on a night out in 1974.
It didn’t help that the band would all go out on the town together as one. We had to most of the time because we were always on the road somewhere. Only now instead of watching porn films in our hotel rooms we were being wined and dined in all these five-star places by record company bigwigs and high-flying promoters. It still makes me cringe when I recall how many really nice people have come up to me over the years since and told me what an obnoxious little prick I was to them back then. The joke was if someone did actually start a fight with me, I nearly always came off the worst. Or if I did manage to get one over on them, I would have ended up in tears anyway. As always, the only truly hard case in Quo was Alan. He didn’t have to act hard and show off. Despite that baby face, you just took one look at him and knew not to mess around.
I would think about these things as I sat in my big house looking out on the world. Then be dragged back to reality when the phone rang and it was time to go back to work.
Oh yes, we were living the dream all right.
But soon it would be time to wake up.
Chapter Six
An Offer You Can’t Refuse
The peak for the seventies line-up of Quo was probably 1977. We didn’t realise it at the time, of course, but looking back now I would probably identify that year as the high-water mark in that phase of our career, and of my life at that time. A year of incredible highs – and also the start of the end of not just that version of the band, but also my first marriage, and very nearly my sanity.
That was the year we released the ‘Rockin’ All Over the World’ single and album of the same name. For me, that was a weird album. It was a real step forward in many ways – it was the first time we had brought in an outside producer since the days of John Schroeder. His name was Pip Williams and there’s no doubt he was brilliant for the band. Pip was about the same age as us and had been the guitarist in Jimmy James and the Vagabonds, who’d been signed to Pye in the sixties at the same time as us. Since then he’d become this very successful session guitarist playing on hits by the Walker Brothers and later the Sweet.
Pip had gone from that to producing and arranging sessions for people like the Moody Blues and the Sensational Alex Harvey Band to name just a couple. Pip was a guy who knew exactly where we were coming from but he wasn’t crazy, the way we were now becoming from all the years on the road and the drugs and booze that were part of our day-to-day lives. He brought fresh perspective and that was one thing I definitely needed at that point.
In the early years, after I’d moved the family to The Glade, I retreated from the sleazy London nightlife I’d been living. When we weren’t touring, I would go home there, pull up the drawbridge, so to speak, and make Jean tell anyone that phoned that I wasn’t in. But I was. I never went out. It was like I was in hiding. Jean, meanwhile, had become lady of the manor, always shopping at Harrods, where we now had an expense account. Suddenly the house was full of this very expensive furniture and various antiques. I got into it, too. I didn’t like to think I was squandering my fortune. I just couldn’t resist going to Harrods with Jean and blowing huge chunks of it on all this … stuff.
The trouble was I was hardly ever home. We were at the height of our success, in terms of record sales, and still touring all the time. In 1977 alone, we had spent the first three months doing forty-five shows across seven different countries. Then the next three months recording the Rockin’ All Over the World album. Then the moment it was finished we took off for a twenty-one-date tour of Australia. As soon as the single and album were released in November, we set off on a thirty-one-date tour of the UK that included three nights at the Glasgow Apollo, three nights at the Manchester Apollo, four nights at the Hammersmith Odeon in London, followed immediately by three nights at the Lewisham Odeon just a few miles away. It was the same everywhere: two nights in Dublin, two in Blackpool, two in Birmingham, two in Southampton … We had two weeks off over Christmas then immediately began a three-month European tour. It wasn’t unusual for us to play six nights in a row, have one day off, then play another five in a row. It was the kind of pace that makes you into madmen, no matter how successful you are. The Australian tour we did that summer broke all records for British bands that toured there. We headlined – and sold out – all twenty-one shows. Four nights in Sydney; three nights in Melbourne; multiple sold-out shows in every major city in Australia. We had a week off when we got back – then headlined that year’s Reading Festival.
It was f-u-c-k-i-n-g c-r-a-z-y.
No wonder we were all going mental. Th
en Alan decided he couldn’t be arsed to fly back from Australia so we could make a promotional video for ‘Rockin’ All Over the World’. Promo vids were not the norm yet in the music business. Only a label’s biggest and most sought-after artists would be asked to make one. So it was a prestige thing for us. More than that, it was also a necessity. The ‘Rockin’ All Over the World’ single was one of the biggest hits we ever had. It was huge in about twenty different countries. To expect us to fly around the world doing TV and radio shows in so many places at once just wasn’t feasible. We were mightily pissed off at Alan for not helping us out. These days you could make a video without any of the band in it and no one would bat an eye. But back then in the days before MTV and its ilk, it was all about making an as-live performance video that different TV shows in different countries could play as though you were there live in the studio with them. Alan not being there ruined any chance of that.
Until Colin had a brilliant idea: a life-size marionette of Alan, replete with bass guitar. We all laughed and told him to roll another joint. But he was serious and went ahead and had this thing built. Just like a real puppet it dangled from the ceiling with strings. Colin even acted as puppet-master, operating the strings to make Puppet Alan move as though he was playing. We were laughing so much we had to abandon the first few takes. Then we all got so used to it – Colin was doing such a brilliant job making it move – that we forgot it was even there. During tea breaks Colin would place the puppet sitting down in a chair so that when we came back it was like Alan was actually sitting there waiting for us.
It was comical but we did worry that programme directors would reject the video as a piss-take. Instead, everyone loved it so much they all played it, including Top of the Pops, and no one even noticed it was Puppet Alan. That video followed us everywhere on our next world tour. It was only later when word got out to the press that everyone got in on the joke. Everyone thought it was brilliant – everyone, that is, except Alan, who hated it. Whenever it came on telly on that tour, which it did all the time, Alan would leave the room.
On a more serious level, that song became a real calling card for us. A bit like the way ‘We Will Rock You’ became for Queen (which, oddly, was in the chart at the same time), ‘Rockin’ All Over the World’ was one of those anthems that always got played at sports shows. One of the biggest examples of that was when England won the Rugby World Cup in 2003, and ‘Rockin’ All Over the World’ was what they played through the stadium PA. And, of course, it would also later become the anthem for Live Aid. But we didn’t know any of that yet. My main thought at the time was the huge favour we had done John Fogerty, who wrote it. Fogerty is one of the greatest American singer-songwriters ever, but I’m sure he would agree that what Quo did with his song transformed it into one of the best-known rock anthems in the world.
Appearing at Reading that year also underlined for me how much things had changed in the British music scene. The festival that year was a very strange mixture of hippy and punk – onstage and off. We headlined on the Saturday, and just below us on the bill were the Motors (who dressed as punks but were actually a couple of chaps from Ducks Deluxe, a London boogie band from the early seventies) and Lindisfarne, who’d been going nearly as long as us. Wandering around in the crowd were all the usual people we’d seen in previous years there, some naked, most drunk or stoned, or both. There was also a large contingent of punks and skinheads, which I had never seen before. But they all seemed to enjoy what we did. I don’t suppose we sounded much different to them than new punk bands like the Damned or the Ramones.
Friday night, though, was headlined by the Jam supported by Sham 69 – and that was a very different sort of crowd. The longhairs and hippies went into shock because the punk and skinheads rioted during the Sham 69 set. I wasn’t there but we heard all about it the next day. It sounded very nasty with a lot of people getting hurt, many taken to hospital. I’d seen crazy, out- of-control crowds before but nothing quite like that. It was the first time we as a band had ever experienced what was going on with the whole punk and new wave scene and we were taken aback, to say the least. Musically, it didn’t sound a million miles from what Quo was doing. Singing in English accents, playing loud fast catchy songs that didn’t outstay their welcome. True, we weren’t singing about anarchy, and, yes, we were all now pushing thirty (John had already got there, bless him), and, yes again, we all still had long hair and wore flared jeans. But anyone can get a haircut and buy a new pair of skinny-leg jeans.
According to the music press, though, none of that counted for anything. We were branded boring old farts – along with every other band that had come before including Queen, the Stones, Zeppelin, even the Beatles. We had just returned to London from Australia, where we were welcomed like heroes, so it was all very baffling to us. On the other hand, we didn’t care. A week after Reading we began a four-month break from touring: the first lengthy break like that we had ever had. We made an album in the middle of all that. We also became tax exiles. We had to. At its worst in the mid-seventies the British government was taking around 90 per cent of our earnings. 90 per cent! Who in their right mind would consider that right and proper? Especially when you’re in a band and you never know from one record to the next when your career might suddenly be over. So it’s not like we were just lounging around. Nevertheless, we were now very firmly established in our own bubble, and very little of the outside world was allowed to get in there with us.
I say that, but the truth is that against my better judgement I did still read the music press – or at least the cuttings we would get sent by the record company. We had a lot of good press in places like Melody Maker and Sounds. But the NME, which was now the leading light of the music press, would use us for target practice all the time. Even some of the new punk-era writers on Melody Maker and Sounds started having a right go. They would treat us like the old geriatrics of rock, and wonder why we hadn’t been put out to pasture yet. I kept reading that we were too old to rock ’n’ roll any more. The first time I saw that I was twenty-seven. I would read this stuff and not so quietly seethe. I would take it all very personally and think to myself: we’ll show you, you fucking pricks! It motivated me to write more hits. Rod Stewart didn’t have his first hit until he was twenty-six. Bryan Ferry was twenty-seven when he had his first hit with Roxy Music. Freddie Mercury was nearly twenty-eight when he hit it big with Queen. Even Joe Strummer, frontman of new punk leading lights the Clash, was only three years younger than me. Yet here was I being written off as an old dinosaur. Well, I would show them. As far as I was concerned, I may have had a few big hit records by now but I’d only just begun.
At the same time, our press coverage started seeping across to the national daily newspapers. In those days it wasn’t like now where every paper has dedicated pages covering music, celebs, movies and whatnot. There were just a handful of writers from the papers that wrote regular weekly columns about pop. Fortunately for us, we were now one of those higher-echelon groups they liked to write about because, unlike the punks, we were now popular not just with hard-nosed rockers but with a more mainstream audience that liked to watch us on Top of the Pops. John Peel was a bit like the music press. He had stopped playing our records after Hello! went to number 1. He was onto the next new thing. But you could now hear us on the Dave Lee Travis breakfast show on Radio 1. This was like being in the daily newspapers. Not as cool but far more people paying attention. Meanwhile, we’d made another album with Pip and had another hit single with ‘Again and Again’, and set off on another six-month tour playing huge arenas in Germany and France, and another massive UK tour that included three nights at Wembley Arena and four nights at the Hammersmith Odeon. We didn’t even go home when we played so many shows in London: we just booked into suites at the Dorchester and places like that and kept our ‘on the road’ mentality going – anything to keep our bubble from bursting. Going home in the middle of that would have thrown the whole thing out of whack.
&n
bsp; When people said all our records sounded the same, I took it as a backhanded compliment. You could say the same thing about all the major rock artists, starting with the Rolling Stones, who spent years rewriting the riff to ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’. Keith Richards is the first to admit it – ‘Let’s Spend the Night Together’, ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’, ‘Brown Sugar’, same riff to ‘Satisfaction’, just very slightly reworked – to spectacular effect. By the same token, Rod Stewart spent years living off ‘Maggie May’, which turned into ‘You Wear It Well’, then almost every other hit he had in the seventies.
I will happily admit that certain songs definitely carried on where previous hits had left off, put it like that. Like ‘Down Down’, which has the same propulsive rhythm, right where it counts, that ‘Paper Plane’ had. Same with ‘Don’t Waste My Time’ and its offspring, ‘Roll Over Lay Down’, which in turn begat ‘Break the Rules’.
Lyrically, though, they all meant something different. ‘Don’t Waste My Time’ was about what we in those days called a prick teaser. I know you can’t say that now but in 1972 you could and that’s what the song is about. ‘Roll Over Lay Down’ was about getting home from a stint on the road with the band, it’s dawn, and you don’t know what to do with yourself, your wife is sleeping and has left a note on the door. ‘Break the Rules’ was about – well, what do you think? Breaking the bloody rules!
Ironically, the one that didn’t mean a thing was our number 1 hit, ‘Down Down’. I wrote that with Bob when we were staying at a hotel in Los Angeles on our very first tour of the States. Bob and I always wrote the same way. We would just hang out, roll a joint, talk. I’d always have a guitar on my lap, strumming aimlessly, and Bob would sit there humming. Then seemingly out of thin air would come the idea for a little melody or riff and I’d start messing with it while Bob sat there making suggestions or joining in. We always knew when we had a winner. That’s when we would get the cassette player out and record the two of us bashing out this song. Sometimes they were just parts or rough ideas. Sometimes they were whole songs. The good ones would then get taken into the studio and demoed, and after that recorded properly.
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