Why didn’t we take note of this before we allowed ourselves to go there? Well, one: there was the money. One of the upshots of our getting back together as Quo was that we now discovered that as well as owing the record company an album we also had a huge unpaid tax bill to take care of. We also liked money. Two: Rick and I were just too out of it to give little details like apartheid our attention, while the rest of the band just did what they were told. Three, and most pertinent: we were stupid enough to believe that, following Queen’s shows in 1984, the reins had been loosened and it was now all right to play there, as long as you insisted on non-segregated audiences and ensured you employed as many black people backstage as white. What they didn’t point out was that ticket prices would be so high the local population would never be able to afford to go anyway.
Well, we did the shows. I can’t pretend we didn’t enjoy it. South Africa is awe-inspiringly beautiful, and so are most of the people. But what we did was wrong. Sure enough, we came home to a shitstorm of abuse from the media. The United Nations publicly condemned us and we were duly blacklisted in parts of Europe and Scandinavia. Of course we were. We should never have gone. Then a second shitstorm began. We may have been sleepwalking through our career at this point, but Rick and I had recently woken up enough to begin openly questioning where all the band’s money was going. We were more or less forced to, after the legal separation from Alan. That was the first time it hit us that while Rick and I were fighting off the taxman and picking up everyone else’s wage bills, a certain former advisor was living high on the hog. Rick and I, though now leading separate lives, suddenly had a new common enemy to bond over.
My belief now is that South Africa was meant to be this person’s coup de grâce. A trick to finish us off while waltzing off with the money. Later on, the more I thought about it the more I came to believe that the tabloid press had even been tipped off about the whole thing. It was a terrible way to end what should have been a triumphant year for the band, and foreshadowed a decline in my own fortunes, personal and professional.
It was in this sort of desperate headspace that I approached the making of the next Quo album. After making the comeback of the year with In the Army Now, we should have been set fair to take Quo to a whole other level. The late eighties were a great time to be in a rock band again. The biggest-selling bands in the world in 1987 were Bon Jovi, Whitesnake and Def Leppard. They all had long hair. They all played loud guitars. They were all selling millions of records all over the world. This could so easily have been a great new era for Status Quo. But I was too far gone to recognise any of this, or to even care. As long as I had my toot and my tequila and my sweet little poppadum girl, I was happy not to sweat the small stuff. Or the big stuff – which is how we came to make, as our follow-up to In the Army Now, one of the worst Quo albums ever.
It was called Ain’t Complaining – a very Quo-sounding title for the least Quo-sounding album we had ever released. That in itself was not a crime. I was the one who had long pushed for the band to be more musically adventurous. The problem was that it was so dire. Worse even than that, so derivative.
Take the title track: a nice-enough catchy tune that became a modest hit single for us. Rick and Pip wrote it and it sounds like a Def Leppard outtake. You look back at the time and you can see where they were coming from. Leppard were having huge hit singles with tracks like ‘Pour Some Sugar on Me’ and ‘Animal’, both taken from their squillion-selling 1987 album Hysteria. These were great records that relied totally on their technologically driven production techniques. They used sophisticated electronic drums and bass synthesisers. They used multiple layers of harmonised vocals. The guitars were brilliantly produced too, to within computeised parameters. These records were the future of rock and pop, way ahead of their time – and about as far from the kind of as-live rough-around-the-muzzle sound of Quo as it was possible to imagine. Yet this was seen as the new gold standard for rock bands to record by. Certainly, hip producers like Pip Williams thought so, and you can completely see why. They weren’t wrong. They just weren’t right for Status Quo.
So we ended up with tracks like ‘Ain’t Complaining’, replete with electronic drums, multi-layered harmony vocals and little production tricks, like that irritating-after-two-listens intro. The thing is, this was one of the best tracks on the album. The rest of the album sounded even less like us.
The real fault, though, was mine. That’s how I see it now. I should have had the presence of mind to question what was going on. Not allow Rick and Pip to virtually hijack the album. But I didn’t because I was too fucked up on drugs and my own personal problems. I completely abdicated responsibility. I didn’t even write that many songs for it. Of the twelve tracks I co-wrote two with Bernie – ‘Cream of the Crop’, a fairly standard midperiod Quo number I could have written in my sleep, which was smothered in keyboards and full overcoat production; and ‘Magic’, which wasn’t too bad, I suppose, but magic? Not with all those fake synthesised horns and by-the-yard melody.
I also co-wrote one with Rhino, ‘Don’t Mind If I Do’, which was forgettable. And one with Andy, ‘Burning Bridges’, which I thought was the best thing I’d done for years, but went down with hardcore Quo fans the same way ‘Marguerita Time’ had five years earlier. They hated it. Fortunately, the mainstream audience also felt the same way as they had about ‘Marguerita Time’ and turned it into one of our biggest hits.
Ain’t Complaining was one of those albums made by committee: you start by wanting a horse and end up with a donkey. Everybody pitched in. Everybody did their best. Pip bent over backwards to try and bring us into the contemporary rock scene. And it just all backfired. ‘Who Gets the Love?’, a horribly average ‘power ballad’ that Pip co-wrote with John Goodison, who’d written hits for Brotherhood of Man and the Bay City Rollers, was the second single, and it was a flop. The album didn’t do too well, either, becoming our first not to make the British top 10 since Dog of Two Head seventeen years before.
The only bright spark was the success of ‘Burning Bridges’, which we released towards Christmas 1988. I still love that song. It’s the only one from that album we still play live. It’s one of those tracks that has always worked better when played live too. It’s a real show-stopper.
They say bad news always comes in threes. Well, if playing South Africa was the first sign of things falling apart, and the relative disappointment of the Ain’t Complaining album was the second, my now failing relationship with Page was the third. I find this one harder to talk about even now, all these years later. They say karma is a bitch and it does occur to me that perhaps I simply had it coming, after the way I had treated Jean and then Liz. In those relationships, I was always the demanding one. The one that only did what he wanted to do when he wanted to, how he wanted to and bollocks to you if you don’t like it. Now I got a taste of my own medicine.
Not that Page was cruel to me. She was just … Page. When she was with me, she was with me. But when she wasn’t, well, she wasn’t. And in the end, that’s how it went. At the time, I saw it as a case of me dumping her. But really it was a mutual thing. It was a wrench at first but mainly I was relieved. You could say the age gap between us was too great. But it was never simply that. Page had her whole life ahead of her while I seemed to have put my best times behind me. How else to explain all the drugs and booze and loose living? I didn’t want to face up to it at the time, but when I look back now I can’t say I blame her. We had a lot of fun together while it lasted. But I just wasn’t very much fun any more. Nothing for me was. Not even the drugs. But my God she was beautiful.
The beginning of the end to all that came in Russia, of all places. Despite our recent travails, we were having a pretty good summer. Our Sport Aid ’88 charity single – a rejigged version of ‘Rockin’ All Over the World’ retitled ‘Running All Over the World’ – had rehabilitated our reputation after South Africa and in August that year we were booked to perform for fourteen nights at the Olimpi
ysky National Sports Complex, a massive indoor arena built specifically for the 1980 Moscow Olympics. That makes it sound quite glamorous. In truth, the venue was a dump, like a condemned building. I remember the building was partitioned into two venues and Torvill and Dean were doing their show on the other side of the partition.
This was before the Berlin Wall had come down but the Soviet Union was now under the control of Mikhail Gorbachev and his new glasnost philosophy – meaning openness. It’s a shame this didn’t apply to many of the shops or restaurants, which were nearly always closed. I don’t mean this flippantly. I mean I was appalled by how bad things were. We were lucky in that we had our own catering facilities at the shows but on those few occasions when we went exploring – chaperoned by our own over-friendly KGB team – it was shocking to discover the level of iniquity the local people suffered. Everywhere was closed, basically. There was the odd shop here and there open but they would be closed again the next day. Apart from one burger-and-chips van parked outside our so-called luxury hotel, where the restaurant only sold pickled cabbage and the bar only accepted US dollars and gave you change in any currency you can think of except roubles, which you wouldn’t have wanted anyway, there was nowhere that was open more than a day at a time. When one of the crew asked our KGB minder how come the burger van could stay open but none of the restaurants could, he replied: ‘Why do you think there are no dogs on the streets of Moscow?’ Charming.
The other problem for me personally was the sudden lack of cocaine. Moscow in 1988 was not an easy place to score good coke. I was told I could buy some awful shit masquerading as good coke that would have made the rest of my nose fall off, or I could go without and just drink more. I chose the latter.
But this is where things slowly started to change. The first few shows we did, I was drinking before, during and afterwards as per usual. Then going back to the hotel and carrying on until six in the morning. Then one night when we got back I couldn’t be bothered going to the bar. I put it down to the lack of coke at the time, but I see now that I was actually just … tired. So I did something I hadn’t done before and simply went to bed.
The following night I didn’t really feel like having a drink before we went on. No biggie. I still had a couple during the show. But again as soon as we got back to the hotel I just went to bed. Rick asked me if I was feeling ill maybe? I didn’t know. I just felt … tired. Sick and tired.
And that’s how it continued through the two weeks we were in Moscow. I was drinking less and less each show until one night I didn’t have anything to drink at all. I didn’t see this as anything particularly momentous at the time. As soon as I arrived back in London I had another ounce of coke waiting for me. It wasn’t a conscious decision to stop drinking. In my head I would have been happy to have a few tequilas any time I wanted. I just didn’t really want one that day. Or, as it turned out, any of the days and weeks that followed.
The other thing I gave up without realising it at first was my relationship with Page. I had brought her with me to Moscow, and we had planned to see each other again as soon as we got back. But I just didn’t get around to calling her. No big decision. Just waiting for the right moment to call and it simply never came. I did notice, though, that she wasn’t trying very hard to see me, either. And that’s when things really began to drift between us. The band had a couple of months off after Moscow, until we went back on the road again in November. By then ‘Burning Bridges’ was in the UK top 5 and we were booked to do a week of shows leading up to Christmas, finishing with a sold-out night at Wembley Arena. Normally, this would have been one of those occasions where Page and I partied away the whole of the Christmas and New Year holidays. Not this year though. We didn’t see each other at all. Nor did we speak. In fact, we never saw each other again. It was a bleak way to bring what had been a very intense two-year relationship to an end.
Instead, I spent the next few weeks alone, wondering how things had come to this, doing coke on my own, not even drinking. It certainly gave me time to think. I don’t like to use that word ‘regret’. But that doesn’t mean I don’t feel it over certain things; or if not regret then remorse. I know when I’ve fucked up. But to say I regret it makes me sound like I’m asking for sympathy. Whereas, remorse – genuine sorrow for something I’ve done or not done – feels more accurate. I didn’t regret my marriage to Jean not lasting longer, but I was sorry for the pain it had caused her and my children. I didn’t regret leaving Liz for Page, but I was sorry for the pain it caused her and Bernadette. I didn’t regret my wild affair with Page, but I was sorry for the way it spun out of control.
It was while I was thinking through all these things that I realised there was one other regret I didn’t have – for all the years I had spent getting wasted on booze and drugs. But now, suddenly and very powerfully, I was immensely sorry for it. I was also looking for a way to make things different, better. I had just outgrown the guy with the coke and limo and gorgeous model girlfriend. Hello Earth, this is Francis. I want to come down!
As I’d stopped drinking, not just tequila but anything with alcohol in it, the coke wasn’t having the same effect on me now. I was doing much less coke anyway by then. The two things used to balance each other out. Now when I did coke I was just permanently razzed-up, my brain whizzing like a runaway train. I was aware that stopping dead from the coke was probably not the best idea. When I’d first done it back in the seventies, the whole spiel was that coke was good because it was completely non-addictive – unlike its evil twin heroin, which was totally addictive.
In the decade-and-a-half that had passed since, however, there was far more information available about the dangers of cocaine use. Yes, it was addictive – highly addictive. Well, I was the living proof of that. How did you stop though? I looked into it, spoke to the usual private doctors, and what I learned was so scary it was nearly enough to put me off trying – possible hallucinations, psychosis, almost certain depression, even suicidal thoughts … all kinds of lovely things. I needed a line just to take it all in.
None of those nasty withdrawal symptoms happened in my case, though. All I knew for sure was that I wasn’t going to put myself into one of those posh rehab joints for broken-down celebs. I saw them as a con, which is probably unfair. I’m sure the Priory has done a lot of good for some people. I just wasn’t sure how it would work for me. So I decided I would simply taper off in my own time. Just do less and less coke until I got all the way down to not doing it at all.
For anyone that knows anything about drug or alcohol dependency, you will be thinking that this is the worst possible way to try and beat a serious addiction. And you would be right – except in my case it actually worked. I stopped. Eventually. And once I’d stopped I stopped for good. None of this one-dayat-a-time stuff. Once I was done I knew that was me finished for good. Granted, I still enjoyed smoking a joint. But I never drank again and I never did cocaine again. That was nearly twenty years ago. I even stopped smoking dope – eventually.
In case all that sounds too easy, I should add that it wasn’t easy at all. Bad habits die hard. Drugs are the worst habits of all. And yes, it was hard. For weeks I couldn’t sleep properly. For a long time afterwards I suffered from depression. I’ve always been a very wiry, excitable sort of chap, so instead of leaving me flattened and exhausted, going without cocaine for the first time in years turned me into a nervous wreck. I couldn’t rest, couldn’t eat properly, and would then binge-eat and sleep for eighteen hours straight.
Mostly, I just felt lonely – desperately alone and empty. Without the booze and the drugs, without the companionship of a relationship, I had nothing to help me fill the gap. Inevitably, my ‘tapering off’ would slide back and forth into full-on addiction. In the end, I just wasn’t going to be able to get the job done on my own. Who to turn to, though?
I was so desperate for company that one day during a visit to my chiropodist, a wonderfully warm and lovely Irish lady, I asked her if she would marry m
e. She laughed it off, of course. What else could she do? ‘I’d love to, Francis,’ she said, smiling, ‘but I’m married already.’ I was perfectly serious, though. If she had let me I would have whisked her off and married her that same day. She must have seen it in my face because she suddenly looked at me very strangely: very concerned, as though I had just shown her a new scar I had. I suppose in some way that’s exactly what I was doing. I didn’t learn, though. A few days later, I asked the same question of a music teacher friend. She also tried to laugh it off. She was married too. And again, I saw that same look in her eye. Pity mixed with confusion. They thought I was mad. I think I was mad. Mad, and desperately alone and looking for some sign of where I was to go. But none came.
Driving home at night sometimes, I would think about picking up a hooker. There were plenty of them on the high streets of Streatham and Balham in those days. I would slow the car down and they would look at me hopefully: ‘You looking for business, love?’ Not really. But I was looking for something. Female companionship. Human warmth. Someone to sit down with, just be with, quietly, and talk to. A brass on the streets of Balham will sell you a lot of different things, but she can’t give you any of that. It was no good looking to the band for company, either. They had quite enough of me on tour, and we were now always on tour again. And Rick didn’t want to hang out with some screwed-up lunatic that didn’t even drink or take coke any more. Where was the fun in that? I couldn’t blame him.
Instead, I’d go home, stick on the TV, try not to think about coke, or much of anything, just try and zonk out in front of the telly. Bored, unhappy, unable to figure out what my next move should be. Or if I even had a next move still in me.
I Talk Too Much Page 21