Then one night, completely out of the blue, a name popped into my head, someone from my cloudy past. Someone I hadn’t thought about in years, who now, as I thought about her again, suddenly seemed like the one person in the world I really wanted to see again.
Her name was Eileen Quinn and I had first met her in the early seventies, during one of Quo’s tours of America. We had just opened for Peter Frampton at a show in Long Island and were now having a few days off in New York. Bob Young and I hired a car and took a drive up the interstate to a small city called White Plains, in Westchester County, upstate New York. White Plains is where my cousin Patrick Arnone lived.
Patrick is gay but had a very close girlfriend named Eileen. When Bob and I arrived at Patrick’s place, Eileen happened to be there too. We stayed there all day, just talking and eating this delicious food that Eileen had prepared. She was just sixteen but she was already so together and mature for her age. The band was riding high at the time. We’d just had our first number 1 single back home with ‘Down Down’ and our album that year, On the Level, had also gone to number 1 in Britain and several other countries. I had met a lot of different girls by then. All shapes and sizes, all types of personality. I thought I was actually quite jaded on the subject. But there was something different about Eileen. Something really easy and refreshing and warm and true that I simply hadn’t encountered in a woman before. She didn’t really know me. Quo were not a big hit in the States. Eileen only knew the long-haired guy who happened to be the British cousin of her friend Patrick. I was nothing special to her except that Eileen seemed to have this gift for always seeing what was really special about people. Not how much money they had or who they thought they were. But who they really were, when you stripped away all the bullshit. These days you’d say she always saw the positive, but it was something more than that. Eileen always somehow saw the real, good and bad, and was always very accepting of it.
When Bob and I got in the car to drive back to the city I felt really sad that I would probably never see this incredible young woman again. However, I did finally get to see Eileen again when she accompanied Patrick on a visit to London sometime in 1986. I had just started my tempestuous relationship with Page and I invited Patrick and Eileen to stay with me at The Glade. My main memory of this time was sitting in the garden just hanging out with Eileen, talking about anything and everything. Again, no sexual tension, just a genuine satisfaction at being in her company. I don’t know where Page was at the time, but instead of getting screwed up over it, I forgot about her while I was in Eileen’s company. We just hung around the house, eating in the garden and chatting, and had a really lovely few days. Until then, my groin had always led me. Because I didn’t have that immediate yearning below the belt, I saw our burgeoning friendship as just that – really warm, increasingly close, never dull, always amusing and quite gentle.
That had been a few years ago now though. I had thought about Eileen occasionally, always with that warm glow you get when you are remembering really good moments. But my life had become such a shitstorm of career malfunctions, drug abuse and relationship breakdowns that it was only now that, out of the blue, Eileen’s name and face suddenly jumped back into my consciousness. I found myself smiling as I thought about her. This was a revelation. I don’t think I had smiled much at all for months at that point. Something was going on, something was different, and then I realised. It was me. I was different.
Suddenly I was all action. I knew I only had a very short timeframe to make something happen. The band was going back on the road in a few days for some Christmas shows. I couldn’t bear the thought of waiting until the tour was finished, then trying to find Eileen while it was Christmas. I made some phone calls and got the band’s travel agent to book me a flight the very next day to New York. When I got there I had a driver waiting and got him to take me straight to White Plains. It was winter, snow on the ground. I had left without bringing a coat. I didn’t care.
As soon as I got to Patrick’s place I told him everything. That I had come for Eileen. That I would not be returning home without her. That I was in love. I was sure of it. He looked at me sadly. ‘But Francis,’ he said, ‘Eileen is married.’
‘What? No!’
‘Not only that,’ he said, ‘she’s pregnant.’
I nearly fell down with shock. Here I was, having finally figured out where my true love lay, only to discover I was too late. Much too late …
Patrick tried to console me, offered me a drink. No, this couldn’t be. I couldn’t have come all this way for nothing, could I? Then he told me to look closely at the wedding pictures he had of the so-called happy couple. Eileen was sobbing her eyes out in most of them. She had already known that the wedding was a mistake.
That’s when I decided. I would not accept that Eileen wanted to stay where she was. Or at least, not until I heard it from Eileen herself. Patrick kindly agreed to help, even though he thought I was probably wasting my time. He phoned Eileen, told her I had come to visit unexpectedly and invited her to come and have a meal, just the three of us, at this quaint old American diner.
All perfectly innocent – until Eileen arrived, that is, and Patrick immediately made some excuse and left. Eileen looked at me and knew immediately there was more to this than simply grabbing a bite and catching up. I just blurted the whole thing out. I just knew I wanted to be with her. And that, well, I wanted her to come with me back to London, and marry me. I told her that I wanted her in my life, even if it was just as a friend. That if she agreed to come back to London with me and things didn’t work out between us, she could still live there and I would help bring up her baby as though it was my own.
She looked at me again. Was I serious? I was. Hmm. But she was already married, and pregnant, and who was I to come here and talk about giving all that up? Was I crazy? I was. Crazy serious. Hmm.
Really she should have stormed off and told me never to call her again. But then she wouldn’t be my incredible Eileen. Instead, she stayed and we talked calmly for hours. Hours and hours and hours. It was like this wasn’t really a surprise to her at all. We just got along together, it was easy and good and real and fun and thrilling and … well? Would she run away with me?
To my immense relief and joy, Eileen confessed that she had always had strong feelings for me too. That she had always thought that I had been ignoring her signals deliberately, because I was always off with some gorgeous rock chick. I listened to all this with growing hope and passion. Nevertheless, it was all too late now, surely? Or was she really as crazy as me and ready to come and start a whole new life?
She told me that she would need to go home and speak with her husband first but that I was to go back to Patrick’s place and wait for her. That she would be packed and ready to leave with me for London that night.
I was so shocked I went back and sat waiting at Patrick’s place in silence for the next two hours. I felt sure this was a dream. That she had told me to go and wait for her while she went home but probably made plans to never see me again. Either that or her husband would be next through the door, looking to kill me. Patrick was equally bemused. He had been through some pretty tangled relationships in his own life but nothing quite like this.
Then suddenly there was a knock on the door and there she was. Eileen. Come to run away with me. At this point everything took on the quality of a dream. A mad dream in which I somehow managed to win the heart of the queen and was now on my way home to London and the start of a whole new life.
No sooner had we arrived back at The Glade than the enormity of what we had done began to really sink in. It wasn’t just Eileen’s husband that had been left in turmoil. Eileen’s whole family thought she had lost her mind, giving up a good life in America for God knows what kind of life with a serial philanderer and drug-addled musician in England.
But that wasn’t how Eileen and I saw it. We knew we had a very real connection, and that if we didn’t at least give it a chance to grow into som
ething we may regret it for the rest of our lives. We weren’t trying to hurt others or ruin lives. We just felt we had a real opportunity here for the kind of once-in-a-lifetime happiness most people never get to experience. My personal life hardly existed at this point. I wanted to be with someone I could love and trust, with whom I could try to rebuild that part of my life, of my psyche. Eileen, having made a clean break of it by flying off with me to London, saw things the same, from her own perspective. We both took a chance on each other in the hope – the belief – that somehow life had offered us this one last chance at true happiness.
And fortunately for us, that’s how it turned out. Eileen’s family and friends eventually came around. Any fears they had over how I would behave towards Eileen’s baby were soon dispelled when they saw how little it mattered to me that Eileen was having another man’s child. As soon as she had the baby in February 1989 – a gorgeous little blond-haired boy she named Patrick – I was as delighted as I had been when fathering my own children. It had already been decided that Patrick would be brought up by his mother and me, and that we would also bring him up to know his real father. It worked out well, in fact. I treated Patrick just as I did my own children, and Eileen treated them just as she did Patrick.
Don’t get the wrong idea here, though. We were still far behind in the happy-ever-after stakes. We had only been back for twenty-four hours before I had to leave for the Quo Christmas tour. My mum knew Eileen already, from the previous visit, but also through the family connection with Patrick, so she was happy to have her at the house. Nevertheless, that must have been a strange time for Eileen. Heavily pregnant, thousands of miles from home suddenly, having just said goodbye to her husband and the father of her child. I brought her out for some of the shows and thankfully the tour was not a long one, just a week or so. But still, I wouldn’t have been hugely surprised if she had changed her mind during this period. Nor would I have blamed her.
But she didn’t, and we spent a wonderful Christmas together. Being with Eileen also helped give me the strength to really try and shake off my coke habit. With Eileen pregnant, and never having been a drugs person anyway, time at home was now time off the coke. Outside of our relationship, though, things were still hard for me to deal with. Thankfully, and I have no idea why, I honestly don’t, Eileen somehow saw all this, grasped the truth and gave me the strength to believe in myself, in us, in a better way forward.
It didn’t help that the band’s business affairs were still in such disarray. We now had a chap named Iain Jones as our acting manager. Iain had been with us as our tour manager and we trusted him but he wasn’t an experienced band manager, per se. That is, he was great on tour, but stepping up to be the guy in charge of the entire operation was not something he was used to yet. He didn’t even have his own office. He was just doing his best to help us as best as he could while we tried to work out the financial mess we had been left in. This, however, was proving to be almost impossible. We needed some heavyweight help.
In the meantime, we were scheduled to write and record a new Quo album. This proved to be a blessing in disguise for me, as it gave me something to focus on each day while I was trying to build a new drug-free life with Eileen. I set to work with Bernie, determined to fully contribute to the new album. I hadn’t really been present on the last few Quo albums. Or rather, I’d been there in body, but not always in spirit. We had already arranged to record the album at Compass Point Studios, on the beautiful Bahamian island of Nassau. Built by Chris Blackwell, the owner of Island Records, Compass Point was known as a luxury destination for big-name bands looking to mix a little rest and relaxation with their rock ’n’ roll. Again, I saw this on a purely personal level as being the ideal place to make my first Quo album without drugs for over ten years. In fact, it turned out that the island was the easiest place in the world to get coke. I managed to stay well away from it though. It also allowed me some proper space when we weren’t working away from Rick, who was still surviving on the old rocket fuel. I was afraid that if I spent too much time in his company, especially after dark, the temptation would prove too great.
We had Pip Williams there producing and again we felt obliged to try and keep the band’s sound as up-to-the-minute as possible, without sacrificing too many elements of what constituted the signature Quo sound. Again, though, I’m not too sure how successful we were at that. It was better than on Ain’t Complaining, where I barely recognised us on some of the tracks. But the emphasis on keeping up with the Def Leppards and Bon Jovis was definitely still there, I thought.
This, though, was not helped by the fact that – hand on heart – the songs really weren’t there this time either. Unlike with the last album, though, I had no one to blame for this except myself. Of the twelve tracks, I had co-written eight of them. Of those eight, there aren’t any that I really dislike. I can hear the effort and thought I’ve put into them all, the genuine desire to get the band back to where it needed to be. But the fact is there aren’t that many that are what you would call really memorable. They are all decent, nice, not bad at all. The sort of things you say when something doesn’t truly grab you. I knew all this but let it slide. It wasn’t like I had written anything better lately.
This time the public weren’t so easily fooled, either. We called the album Perfect Remedy but it had the opposite effect on our recording career, barely getting into the top 50. Even the singles from it – ‘Not at All’ and ‘Little Dreamer’, both written by me and Bernie – were flops. It was the first time an album of ours hadn’t gone gold in Britain since Piledriver. It seemed that in our attempt to keep Quo’s music up to date we had managed to leave the fans behind.
This became even more obvious when the touring side of the operation now suffered. We had to shelve plans to do another big European tour and ended up doing just one solitary eighteen-date tour of the UK. Yes, we finished the tour with two (almost) sold-out shows at Wembley Arena but things were suddenly not going to plan at all.
Enter our knight in shiny smile and well-coiffed hair, David Walker. It’s fair to say that, without David Walker, Status Quo may not have survived the nineties. That’s how much of an impact he had on our career. David had first made a name for himself in the music business when he was the business manager for the Sweet and negotiated a huge new deal for them with Polydor Records. He then formed a management company with former talent agent Lindsay Brown, named Handle Artists Management, where they managed Barclay James Harvest. Lindsay took care of the live work. David took care of the business contracts.
At the time we first got involved with David he had branched out into managing pop acts like Pepsi & Shirlie and other musical artists, including Pip Williams, which is how we got to know him. David was a larger-than-life character who brought sparkle to any social situation – but it was all built on a solid business background. David knew his stuff and for the first eighteen months or so he was really good for us.
He was one of those guys you heard coming before you saw them. Big, loud, upfront; tons of energy. In the years to come, Rick and I would look at some of the decisions we made with David as our guide and wonder if we had really done the right thing. But the reality is, if it hadn’t been for David we wouldn’t have had much of a career left at all, at that point.
David wasn’t interested in the music. He left all that to his artists. He took care of the business – all the things the artists are rubbish at. We poured our hearts out to David, told him of the mess we were in. He took it all in his stride – he had obviously heard many similar tales before – then told us not to worry. He would take care of it all. We had nothing to worry about now he was involved. Except for one thing. As he told us straight out at that very first meeting: ‘Remember, I don’t come cheap.’
And he didn’t. The good news was that when it came to making money, David Walker was exactly the man you needed in your corner to help you do that. The upshot of this was that the nineties became some of the most successful year
s Quo would ever have. We didn’t always make the kinds of records that our hardcore fans thought we should. But we did build our career up again, bringing in a whole new generation of fans to the party. We have David to thank in large part for that.
The first thing he did was to cancel all our plans for 1990. There had been a shorter, remixed version of ‘The Power of Rock’ from Perfect Remedy that we had talked ourselves into thinking might be a hit. David pulled the plug on that immediately. His point: another modest hit single would do nothing for us. We needed a slam-dunk top 5 hit, no argument allowed. But the problem was we didn’t actually have one to hand. Don’t worry about it, said David. We’ll find you one. Which is exactly what he did.
Or rather, he found us fifteen rolled into one.
One of the biggest-selling singles of 1989 had been by Jive Bunny and the Mastermixers, the father and son DJ team of Andy and John Pickles, who had released a novelty record they titled ‘Swing the Mood’. This was a cut-and-paste collection of cover versions done as short clips from a dozen different hits, mainly from the fifties – Elvis, Bill Haley, Little Richard, all that – sandwiched between bits of Glenn Miller’s ‘In the Mood’, all set to the same dance tempo. It came in regular 45-rpm format, which is the four-minute track radio played, and also 12-inch format, which lasted six minutes and became the track they played in clubs and at parties. You could also get it in various CD formats. The critics hated it. I didn’t much like it either. But the public absolutely loved it. So much so the record went to number 1 in Britain, where it sold nearly a million copies, and dozens of other countries too. It even went top 10 in America, where it sold over half a million.
This did not escape David Walker’s attention when he decided we needed a sure-fire, solid-gold hit to resuscitate our career. As a marketing genius, he especially loved the fact that the image of Jive Bunny wasn’t even of the people that had constructed the record: a cartoon ‘Jive Bunny’ rabbit starred in the videos, while there was a man dressed in a costume at live promotional appearances. By the end of 1989 it was the second-best-selling single of the year, just behind ‘Ride on Time’ by Black Box. By then they had released an identikit follow-up – another twelve old rock ’n’ roll hits dressed up as disco that they called ‘That’s What I Like’. When that went to number 1 all over the world again, it looked like a bulletproof winning formula.
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