Ricky told me about the solo album he was working on. It was to be called Recorded Delivery, and from the few tracks he played me on cassette it sounded, somewhat eerily, a bit like my own attempt at a solo record. Lots of echoes of Quo, but at the same time a quite determined effort to do something new – lighter, more pop. The guitars submerged beneath a more ‘contemporary’ bank of swirling keyboards. Except for the fact he was now doing his gruff rock voice, which I never liked, much preferring his real voice, which was lighter and much easier on the ear. I played Rick some of what I’d recorded with Bernie and he was very polite about it, though probably thinking what I was thinking about his stuff: wouldn’t it all be just so much better if we had Quo doing this material?
In the end the record company forced our hands. Or at least that’s what we were told. They said the label had produced a legally binding document that demonstrated that as a band Status Quo still owed the label one more album. And that they would sue us if we refused to deliver one. Not only that, but they were going to sit on Rick’s and my solo albums until we gave them this so-called missing Quo album.
Truthfully, I don’t know if I really believed this at the time. Lots of bands have broken up owing their record labels an album or two. The usual way of dealing with it was for the label to stick out another compilation or a live album. The fact that they also had both Rick and me signed as solo artists was another reason to be nice about it. In the end, I agreed to get Quo back together for one album, then that really would be it, finished. One thing I absolutely would not budge on, though, was working with Alan Lancaster again. There was just too much bad blood there still. Alan had been one of the main reasons I had walked away from Quo in the first place. I was damned if I was going to allow myself to become entangled again in that kind of toxic situation.
I would get together with Rick and make another Status Quo album – but not if Alan was involved. It complicated things but no one bothered to fight me over it. The label had made it clear that as long as they had both Rick and me in the band it would always be regarded by the vast majority of people as de-facto Status Quo. I knew Alan would hit the roof when he found out. But I also knew that Rick would be over the moon, even though it was only for one album.
Rick had blown through all his money, even the windfall from the End of the Road tour. But then Rick always blew through his dough then relied on the next tour to sort him out. Only this time there was no next tour. He told me that at one point he was so skint he didn’t even have anywhere to live. So he checked himself into a suite at the Holiday Inn in Chelsea, where he stayed for a few months, telling them he would pay them at the end of his stay – which they believed because he was Rick, the blond one from Quo. He must be a millionaire!
Like me, Rick had picked up a sweet six-figure advance from the label for his solo album. Once he’d paid off his huge hotel bill and rented himself a flat, then hired Pip Williams and some top-notch session musicians to help him make his album, he was heavily in debt again. The prospect of getting together with me to make a new Quo album and do a tour – and the kind of sizable advances that would immediately become available to us as a result – meant he didn’t have to think long about it.
I could hear the excitement in his voice when I spoke to him on the phone. But then he started whispering. I didn’t realise it but Alan was staying with Rick at his flat at the time. He had gotten wind that something was afoot. And yes, he would have given his right testicle to be involved. But it was either him or me and, truthfully, I didn’t feel like I owed Alan anything. I’d given him twenty years of my time and my best efforts. And through that we had both made a lot of money and enjoyed a great deal of success.
Rick, meanwhile, had to tiptoe around like he knew nothing about it until Alan had gone back to Australia. Then the minute Alan was told what was going on, he got straight on the phone to everyone he could think of to tell them what fucking bastards we all were. It was water off a duck’s back to me. I’d been listening to Alan having a go at me since I was a kid. But Ricky was quite shaken up when Alan phoned him and had a go at him too. As far as Alan was concerned, Rick and I had betrayed him. He immediately launched a very expensive lawsuit against us over the ownership of the name Status Quo.
This is where things got really messy between Alan and me. He didn’t like it that Rick had sided with me, but he was most upset with me, and now tried to do everything in his power to stop me making an album under the name Status Quo. He started with an injunction, but when that didn’t work he shelled out for some very expensive lawyers to take the whole thing to the High Court. Meanwhile, having obtained a preliminary ruling in our favour until a date could be set for the High Court hearing, the record company stuck a lucrative new contract under our noses and told me and Rick to get on with making a new Quo album. Fair enough, but who were we going to get in the band to play the bass and drums?
Andy Bown was more than happy to sign up for the new line-up. But I didn’t ask Pete Kircher if he wanted to be involved. I know that this has been a source of pain for Pete over the years, wondering why I didn’t ask to bring him in. The answer is that Rick had already found the perfect rhythm section, and it was one that already worked in tandem. You hired one, he came with the other, sort of thing. It was nothing personal – or professional – against Pete. He was a lovely bloke and a great drummer. But at the end of the day it was our choice to make. What I will hold my hands up and apologise for is that I didn’t phone Pete personally and explain my reasons. I didn’t feel I had to, actually. It was nothing personal. On the other hand, I admit now that perhaps I could have handled it better. I was still doing coke, still super paranoid, and wasn’t talking to anybody outside of the band at that point. I was somewhere else, somewhere not at all good. Though I wouldn’t allow myself to admit it yet.
The names of the new guys were John Edwards (bass) and Jeff Rich (drums). John was nicknamed Rhino from his time in Judie Tzuke’s band, because he was such a clumsy sod. I never did like the nickname though, so instead I always called him John Boy, from The Waltons. He had real pedigree though. He’d been trained as a classical violinist as a child and won a scholarship to the London College of Music when he was just eleven. Since then he’d played with an impressive array of different artists, including Peter Green, the Climax Blues Band and, most memorably of all, Dexys Midnight Runners during their chart-bossing ‘Come On Eileen’ era. That’s John with the bog-brush hair in the ‘Eileen’ video, pretending to be happy wearing farmer’s dungarees and chewing a blade of grass.
Jeff Rich was a few years younger than me and Rick but he had a similar sort of background, in that he’d been a professional musician since the sixties, when he’d been the drummer in Billy J. Kramer’s backing group. He’d also played for a time in Jackie Lynton’s band, so there was that connection too, and several other bands. He and Rhino had first hooked up as a working rhythm section in Judie Tzuke’s band, which is how Pip Williams got to know and work with them.
Pip Williams had brought them both in to play on Rick’s album and now Rick couldn’t speak highly enough of them. The fact that Pip would also be working with us now on the new Quo album also helped seal the deal. They were great players, already completely locked in to each other’s style as a rhythm section, and they were available right now.
The only question in my mind when I went down to meet them and have a jam for the first time was how would I get on with them? I didn’t want to be boxed in with a bunch of people I couldn’t stand just for the sake of convenience, that would have been like going back to square one. So I played it cool to begin with, just leaning against the wall, acting nonchalant, twirling away on my guitar. The atmosphere soon thawed though. Rhino and Jeff were a hoot. And they could really play. Jeff was a phenomenal drummer and Rhino was incredibly versatile and open to musical ideas.
I soon got the vibe from Rhino that he could be a band leader in his own right if he wanted to be – something that he did in fa
ct become when he formed his side-project, named simply Rhino, in the following years. I didn’t mind that at all. It meant he was very comfortable coming to the front of the stage alongside Rick and me and giving it some welly, as we say, during a Quo show. Jeff was simply a brilliant drummer with a lot of feel. He also had an unusually sunny countenance, which meant he was always very easy to work with.
However, I was not so sunny during the making of that album because outside the actual writing and performing the rest of the period was incredibly stressful. I thought I had my personal life in control – which just shows you how messed up I was. It was the band situation that had me on the ropes. Even as we came to finishing the album and discussing which singles we should release from it, Alan’s High Court action was looming ever nearer, which meant we still weren’t even sure if we would be able to release it under the name Status Quo.
In the end, the judge decreed that Rick and I could keep the Status Quo name and Alan was left in the unenviable position of having spent a lot of money achieving the opposite of what he’d been hoping for. I take no pleasure in this fact. But that was Alan: a born fighter. He thought he had the right so he took it all the way. He underestimated how much right Rick and I felt we had to the name too, having written most of the big hits between us and become the public face of the band over nearly twenty years. When Alan then offered to sell his rights to the name to us, we accepted, agreed a fair six-figure price, which he was more than happy with at the time, and breathed a sigh of relief as we began to look forward to a brand new chapter in the Quo story.
Of course, the bitterness on Alan’s side didn’t end there. Over the years he has made some outlandish claims about the manner in which he left the band. In one interview I read he said something about how we had ‘stolen’ his ‘children’s inheritance’. Well, there are different ways to respond to that. I could point out that without the songs I wrote that became huge worldwide hits for Quo – particularly ‘Pictures Of Matchstick Men’, which started the ball rolling – none of us would have any sort of ‘inheritance’. But I don’t like to say that. I prefer to point out that as a band, we were all in it together, all working equally hard to make Quo a success. I didn’t ask John Coghlan to leave. He was the one that decided he wanted to leave. It’s not my fault that his solo projects never took off or that his career never really recovered, leaving him to rely on his connection to Quo to keep things going.
Similarly, I didn’t ask Alan to leave us in the lurch every time we had a hit that he thought made him ‘look bad’. I didn’t ask Alan to throw his weight around and start yelling if he thought he didn’t have enough of his songs on a Quo album. Frankly, he could make our lives a misery sometimes. And if he had been given the chance to carry on the Quo name without me he would have jumped at it. He tried. No one wanted it. That’s not my fault. The fact that he still talks about how unfair the whole thing was over thirty years later says it all. In fairness, Alan went back to Australia and joined the Party Boys, having great success there for some years. The fact is, Quo were going far longer without Alan than it did with him. So when I still read the stuff he comes out with, like the most recent old bollocks about it being my years of involvement with drugs that somehow turned me against him – and still interferes with my capacity to think straight – well, I’m flabbergasted. As you’ll see as you read on, drugs and booze would play no part in my life after the eighties. For Alan to suggest that my reasons for not wanting to work with him again were because my brain is somehow still addled from cocaine is offensive, frankly. But that’s Alan. Always up for a ruck.
The sad part is that right at the end of all the legal bullshit, Alan took me to one side and told me: ‘I know you’re the main bloke in this band.’ I said, ‘It’s a bit fucking late to be telling me that now, isn’t it?’ Alan officially resigned from Status Quo in January 1987. Of course, that wasn’t the last of our dealings with Alan – or John – but we will come to that in due course.
Rick, meanwhile, had not allowed the petty backbiting to get to him. The moment he got his hands on his share of the advance money for the new Quo album, he’d splashed out on a new car. Not just any car, of course, being Rick, but a two-tone champagne-and-walnut-coloured Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow. Not a new one – he hadn’t been paid that much. But it was still a lot of money second-hand, about fifteen grand I believe. You had to hand it to Rick. He was just a born rock star. He also went out and bought Patty, who he was about to marry, a fur coat. The funniest part was he was banned again from driving at the time, for four and a half years this time. He didn’t care. He simply got Patty to be his chauffeur. The message was: Rick Parfitt is back!
I was fine with that because it meant so was Status Quo. Our first single with the new line-up was ‘Rollin’ Home’, a real rock and roller in the classic Quo style. It went straight into the charts and we did Top of the Pops for the first time with the new line-up. No one complained. No one rioted. In fact, we got a ton of great feedback from people, old and new Quo fans, people in the business, telling us how glad they were to see us back. Looking at the clip now, you can see how much fun we were having again (even if I am starting to look just a little bit bloated from my excesses, which were still raging not so quietly in the background) and how into it Rhino and Jeff obviously were. Talk about a whole new lease of life.
We didn’t write ‘Rollin’ Home’. That honour fell to John David, who was a bassist and multi-instrumentalist who worked with Dave Edmunds. Dave came in and produced the track, along with another David song called ‘Red Sky’ – which became our second single by the new line-up. ‘Rollin’ Home’ went top 10 and ‘Red Sky’ went top 20. Why we didn’t release an original number from the album was more down to the record company deciding what they thought they could turn into a hit. After a couple of flops on my own with Bernie, with songs we had written, my confidence was not high in that department, either. The fact is Quo hadn’t released an original song as a single since ‘Marguerita Time’ three years before. Looking back now, though, I think we could easily have released ‘Calling’ as a single and seen it do very well. It was written by me and Bernie again but it sounded more Quo than Quo, while at the same time sounding up to date with modern eighties tastes. I didn’t say anything at the time, though. The feeling in the business now was that you let the record label choose the singles – and if they didn’t hit they only had themselves to blame. That’s still the way it works to this day.
Pip Williams produced the majority of the album and did his best to continue what Rick and I had started when making our now-forgotten solo albums: make it more contemporary sounding, but bring even more of the recognisable Quo signature sound to it. I’d say we were only semi-successful. Tracks like ‘In Your Eyes’ still make me gag. A song I wrote with Bernie, it doesn’t sound like it belongs on the same album as the rest of the material, though I do like the guitar parts. Mostly it was a hotchpotch of different things. Good stuff like ‘End of the Line’, which was a sort of Bryan Adams-type rocker that Rick had co-written with a friend of his, Ricky Patrick – good but not really a Quo track. ‘Invitation’, which was a song I had written with Bob Young back in the day, which might have been a follow-up to ‘Marguerita Time’, only even more country-sounding. Again, good – but probably not the sort of thing our fans were longing to hear. Even a song I co-wrote with Rick, ‘Save Me’, which was very Quo-sounding, was still guilty of trying to sound too modern.
The best of the new songs was probably ‘Overdose’, which Rick co-wrote with Pip, and for all I know had originally been destined to be on his solo album. A good song, though, and Rick sang it really well. Kind of like the Who meets Status Quo meets ELO.
The rest were cover versions: the John David singles plus an Ian Hunter song called ‘Speechless’ – which I liked at the time but admit I’m baffled by now. The original sounded like Ian doing his best to distance himself from Mott the Hoople by coming up with something that might fit better into the chart
s in 1983 – the year he recorded it. Our version sounded like a faxed copy of that, only even more contrived. Us trying to sound like Ian Hunter trying not to sound like when he was successful.
There was, however, one really good cover of a song we did – called ‘In the Army Now’. I’d actually fallen for the track back in the early eighties when I was living as a tax exile in Ireland, and the original record, by a group called Bolland, was played a lot on the radio. I looked into it and discovered that Bolland was two Dutch brothers – Rob and Ferdi Bolland – and that they’d had a big hit with the song in Norway where it was number 1 for weeks on end. The record had never gone beyond that and I thought it would make a great track for Quo. But when I brought it to the boys for the Back to Back album it was rejected out of hand. Alan wasn’t budging after having to give in on ‘Marguerita Time’. He also wasn’t having any song on a Quo album that spoke out openly about the iniquities of war or being a conscripted soldier. Even Rick thought it was a bad idea so that was that.
Now, though, in 1986, with everything up for grabs, I suggested it again. I had been planning on keeping ‘In the Army Now’ for my solo album. Now things had changed. I felt sure it was a sure-fire hit and that’s what we needed for this new Quo album. Rick still didn’t like it. But everyone else did, so we had a crack at it. Its mix of Quo-style guitars and harmony vocals, and that new keyboard-synth production polish that Pip was aiming for – plus our drum tech belting out the line, ‘Stand up and fight!’ in his most gravelly voice – turned it into the best track on the album. As soon as we had finished it I knew we were onto a real winner. Lo and behold we ended up having our biggest international hit single since ‘What You’re Proposing’ six years before. It went to number 2 in the UK, where it stayed in the charts for over six months, and went to number 1 in West Germany and some other countries around Europe. That was in September 1986. As a result, the In the Army Now album went top 10 and gave us a handful more gold records. It was big everywhere, in fact, except Russia, where conscription was still in force; therefore it was viewed very poorly by the authorities, we were told.
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