David had already been working on a plan for us to spend the latter half of 1990 ‘celebrating’ the twenty-fifth anniversary of Status Quo. Personally, I hate anniversaries. And if you wanted to be finicky about it, you’d have to point out that our summer stint at Butlin’s in 1965 wasn’t actually when we first started using the name Status Quo, or even when Rick had joined the band. But none of that got in the way of David’s good idea. Which, in a nutshell, was simple and sweet: to mark Quo’s twenty-fifth anniversary, the record company would release a special compilation called Rocking All Over the Years, a double album containing twenty-two tracks, all of them major Quo hits.
The cherry on the cake, as he put it, would be the inclusion right at the end of the album of a new Quo single, to be called – wait for it! – ‘The Anniversary Waltz’. The title was mine. Not to be confused with the old Vera Lynn hit of the same name. But everything else about the record was really David’s idea. This was to be our very own Jive Bunny-style collection of old rock ’n’ roll hits all given the heads-down no-nonsense boogie Quo treatment. Our single would also be released in various lengths and formats, including a monster ten-minute-plus version on the 12-inch, which included eight extra covers to the original seven. This also comprised a Part 2 to the single, released in its own shorter, radio-friendly, multi-format.
The way David saw it, we didn’t need a cartoon bunny to front it – Status Quo was already a well-established brand in its own right. We just needed the right product to rejuvenate the brand. I’m half-wincing as I write this because all this talk of ‘brands’ and ‘product rejuvenation’ was all new to me. But I trusted David to know what he was doing. What with Eileen coming back into my life in a big way – and discovering, early in 1990, that she was pregnant with our own baby – plus my own ongoing ‘issues’ trying to stay on the almost straight and nearly narrow, frankly both Rick and I were happy to have someone strong like David lead the way.
One thing about David Walker: he didn’t pull any punches when he spoke to you. He sat us down and told us straight that the old Quo formula had dried up and that if we didn’t make a major pivot and try something different we may as well pack up and go home – or get used to the idea of playing in clubs and holiday camps again. He knew that would frighten us. Neither Rick nor I wanted to listen to this. But neither of us could really argue with him. The slackening sales figures told their own story.
So we put everything into David’s hands and watched as he did his stuff. And boy did he go to town!
Chapter Eleven
Davey Rock It
David Walker was our hero. He was going to make everything all right for us again. And for a few years that’s exactly what he did.
Having recorded what would be released later in 1990 as the singles ‘The Anniversary Waltz Part One’ and ‘The Anniversary Waltz Part Two’ – both of which were also mixed into the mammoth ten-minute full-length version, which David Walker had a field day promoting as ‘the longest single ever released’ – he then set up some huge outdoor stadium shows for us that summer: four in Germany, two in Malta and two in Finland. Then right bang in the middle of those, he got us onto the bill at the Silver Clef Award Winners charity concert at Knebworth Park, in front of over 120,000 people. Sharing the bill with Cliff Richard, Robert Plant, Eric Clapton, Mark Knopfler, Elton John, Genesis, Paul McCartney and Pink Floyd, it felt a bit like Live Aid all over again, the show being filmed and later broadcast by the BBC. Only this time we got to do an hour-long set – and I actually remembered everything about it when I woke up the next day. This felt good, really good! All that high on life stuff – sorry to disappoint any old rockers out there, but it’s true. Especially the fact that the sun came out and shone for us while we were onstage. It had pissed with rain all through Tears for Fears’ set, who were on before us. More seriously, if you compare the clips now, of us at Live Aid and at the Silver Clef show five years later, the difference is remarkable. Live Aid, we were ramshackle and hanging on for dear life. The Knebworth show, Rick and I and the whole band were absolutely on fire.
A month after Knebworth, the announcement went out about us doing a twenty-fifth anniversary tour – thirty shows around Britain, including no fewer than four sold-out nights at Wembley Arena, the final one the night before Christmas Eve. Along with this came news of the release of our new single – the ‘Anniversary Waltz Part One’ sing-along – and the new double-album compilation, Rocking All Over the Years.
Suddenly everything went from doom and gloom to unicorns and rainbows. Despite my concerns about the single being seen as too gimmicky, it flew up the charts, getting to number 2 – our biggest hit since ‘In the Army Now’ four years before. It was followed by Rocking All Over the Years going to the top of the album charts, becoming officially the biggest-selling album we had ever had, going double-platinum at home in Britain and becoming our first big hit in places like Australia, France and Germany for years.
As if I wasn’t getting my fair share of good news, Eileen gave birth to another child – a beautiful boy we named Fynn – at the same time that we released ‘The Anniversary Waltz Part One’. True to form with all my children, I barely had any time to be with my newborn son. At least, not at first. But Eileen coped in her usual incredibly confident way. She came out with the baby on certain legs of the tour and we built in more time at home so that I could be there at least part of the time. Between TV and radio appearances promoting the single and press interviews talking about the new compilation album and the whole subject of Quo reaching its silver anniversary, I did manage to get home far more than I used to.
That changed, though, as soon as the tour kicked off in October 1990. Again, David Walker surpassed himself with his event planning. He arranged for us to perform a special oneoff show at Butlin’s in Minehead – the place where it all began (sort of ). David arranged for a special Quo Express train to take hundreds of press, TV and radio people down to Butlin’s from Paddington. Despite the popular notion that Quo was much maligned in the media, we had actually made a lot of very good friends there over the years. Fantastic characters like Chris Tarrant and the Radio 1 DJs Alan ‘Fluff’ Freeman and Tommy Vance. There was also the gorgeous actress Vicki Michelle, who’d become famous through her role in the classic TV comedy ’Allo ’Allo! I can’t remember how Vicki ended up on the train but let’s just say I do know she has always been a genuine Quo fan.
Rick and I weren’t on the train down from Paddington. We were already at Butlin’s, getting ready for the show. How very weird that was to be back there, actually in the same room as the one we had worked in as the Spectres all those years before. It wasn’t called the Rock and Roll Ballroom any more. It was now the Grand Ballroom. But I swear the dressing rooms hadn’t changed at all. Same mousetraps hidden in the corner. Very different crowd, though. In truth, it didn’t really bring back that many memories. The rest of the camp had changed so much since those days, though I did notice they were still playing Dusty Springfield and Gerry & the Pacemakers out by the fairground.
After the show the huge media contingent all partied long into the night, as did Rick and the band. I stayed for a while but as I was no longer drinking it wasn’t really my scene any more. Instead, I went back to my hotel room and had a bowl of cornflakes and a cup of tea, and had a look to see what I could find on TV. I enjoyed being told about it the next day, too. Apparently a ‘suitably refreshed’ Chris Tarrant had to be helped into a chauffeur-driven car and sped back to London in time to present the Capital Radio breakfast show that morning.
The band and I all joined the media people on the train back to London. I think I was the only one on the train that didn’t have a hangover or wasn’t doing coke. Instead I tucked into what I still recall as the best-tasting scrambled eggs and smoked salmon I’ve ever eaten. Meanwhile, the champagne came out and the party for everyone else just carried on again, with Rick and me doing back-to-back interviews in a special carriage together. It was such a free-for-
all I did wonder if we were actually going to get any press out of it. I needn’t have worried, though. David Walker and our longstanding PR man, Simon Porter, made sure we got the most over-the-top news coverage for anything we’d done since Live Aid. Maybe even more than Live Aid. Everything after that seemed easy. The tour was a sell-out. The records sold millions. Even the ‘Anniversary Waltz Part Two’ single went high in the charts. The turnaround from exactly twelve months before when it looked as though the band was on its last legs was incredible.
What I hadn’t realised was that David had only just got started. He showed me this thing about market research, which was a subject no musician had even heard of before then. I remember sitting there gobsmacked, reading this. Market researchers know what car we all drive. They know what television show we’re watching. And that was then. These days they know what we’re thinking! That’s what it feels like to me sometimes. And please don’t get me started on Twitter and Facebook. I won’t know what you’re talking about. Or rather I will but I don’t want to. Back then I just had to trust what David told me.
As a result of his strategy and planning, he had us booked solidly on the road for the next two years. We had a few months off at the start of 1991 – during which he had us booked into a studio to make a new album. No running off to the Bahamas this time, either, but knuckling down to some serious graft at Bray Studios in England and ARSIS Studio in Surrey. Things to do other than work: none.
It was like the old days again, back in the seventies when the band never stopped working. Well, we needed that. A shark dies if it stops swimming. That’s a bit how it felt to me suddenly. That the moment I took my foot off the pedal with Quo would be the moment it all fell apart again. And I needed to keep going. My life had changed so much since Eileen had become a part of it and I wanted to make the most of every second.
I was now completely free of cocaine addiction. I knew that for sure the last time I ever did it. I had been taking a break with Eileen and the children in Amsterdam. Known as that city is for its legal marijuana and liberal attitude to drugs in general, this may not have been the wisest place to go, but the truth is I still enjoyed smoking a little hash or weed. Not as much as I used to. I would restrict myself to what I called the six o’clock joint – meaning a puff at the end of the day, perhaps.
We were all strolling around, looking at the canals and shopping, when I bumped into someone I knew, a waiter from an Italian restaurant, and had stopped to shake hands. As we did this, he slipped me a little gram packet of coke. Once upon a time I would have received this as a wonderfully thoughtful gesture. I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to make a big deal of it in front of Eileen and the kids. But I did make an excuse and ran back to the hotel. In my mind, I was going to give the gram to someone else I thought might like it. But of course as soon as I got to his room, I talked myself into having a toot. Hadn’t had one in ages. Surely one can’t hurt! The usual addict’s logic. Except it did bloody hurt. It was potent stuff and by the time I hit the street again my whole body had gone cold and numb, my teeth grinding. I stopped at a bar and ordered a double tequila to try and calm myself down. By the time I found Eileen and the kids again I was in full self-loathing mode. I felt I had betrayed Eileen’s trust – which I had – and really let myself down. I said to myself there and then: never again. That’s the last time I do coke ever!
And this time it really was.
The same, of course, couldn’t necessarily be said for everybody else on the team – least of all Rick, who was still going full throttle in those days, and David Walker, who apart from being like an attack dog when he needed to be, already had a significant coke habit. In Rick’s jovial life’s-a-party way, his coke habit was just another string to his bow, so to speak, in terms of always looking on the bright side, even when he was in the deepest shit. But with David, who was naturally hyperactive and full-on, the extra coke dimension could make him a fearsome prospect for people to deal with. He wasn’t just an ideas man, he was a make-it-happen-NOW man. Or else.
In truth, Rick and I loved this approach at first. Even though we didn’t have much to do with each other when Quo wasn’t working, in our different ways we both needed a protector. For Rick, that person was often me. Although he was in the early stages of what later became a recurring theme – his whole boring ‘Why am I always number two and you’re number one?’ routine – he had pretty much given up on actively wanting to lead the band’s career after he realised what a pain in the arse the day-to-day responsibility for that was. So every now and then he would take me aside and say: ‘We are going to be all right, aren’t we, Frame?’ The answer was I didn’t know. But the only way to get any peace was simply to tell him, ‘Yes, of course, Ricky, we are going to be fine.’
Going all the way back to the days of Pat Barlow, we had always liked having a strong father-figure-type running the band’s business affairs. David, though, took it to a whole new level. He was protector, saviour, bodyguard and soul-survivor. As the years went by this became something I enjoyed less and less. But while it lasted David was our hero, absolutely.
The trouble was it meant we would spend the rest of the nineties pretty much looking for new and ever more gimmicky ways to sell the group. In David’s defence, the music industry was moving in that direction anyway, but he really made the most of it. We still recorded the occasional new album, and a couple of them like Rock ’til You Drop, which I produced, I still really like. But which, it’s only fair to mention, Rick most decidedly did not like. All that gets remembered from that campaign now, though, are the surrounding publicity events. In fairness, David had absolutely bust a gut making this one happen and again it was on the grand scale and it certainly did bring us a lot of media attention.
The shtick was that we would celebrate the release of Rock ’til You Drop on Saturday 21 September, 1991, by Quo achieving a new world record by performing four shows in four different British cities, all on the same day – with 50 per cent of all the proceeds from ticket sales being shared equally among the Nordoff Robbins Music Therapy Trust and The Brit Trust. David then also made a deal for the Britannia Music Club to sponsor the event. We would start at 2 p.m. sharp with a show at Sheffield Arena, then hop on a plane to Glasgow, where we would be onstage at the SECC arena by 4.30 p.m. Then fly off straight after that show to Birmingham, where we would be onstage at 7.15 p.m. at the NEC arena. Then jump straight onto yet another plane after that to take us down to London, where we would hit the Wembley Arena stage at 9.50 p.m.
Everything was timed to the second. The whole idea was we would – wait for it – rock ’til we (literally) dropped. Geddit?
Of course, this was just the icing on the promotional cake for David. He had begun the whole build-up to that album earlier in the year when he had arranged for us to appear at that year’s Brit Awards, where we were presented with a special inaugural award in recognition of our twenty-five years in the business. All very nice, thank you, I love you too. Except I had come up with another twist. We went up to the podium and accepted the award dressed in dinner suits. Then as soon as we’d finished thanking everybody we ripped them off – they were those specially made theatrical suits dancers can just rip off in one move – revealing our usual T-shirt and jeans underneath. Cue: huge applause and much laughter. It was one of those stunts that showed we were in on the joke. It worked too as the next morning’s front page of the Sun ran a picture of us tearing off the suits with the caption: ‘The highlight of the show.’
Although we didn’t go back on tour until June, David kept coming up with new things for us to do, anything to keep us in the public eye, from me and Rick appearing on Aspel & Company, along with the late John Hurt and the irrepressible Dawn French, to a highly publicised visit to the prison workshop at Pentonville Prison, London. Again, there were pictures of me and Rick in all the papers next day as David sat there congratulating himself, and rightly so. Rabbits were being pulled non-stop out of hats.
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nbsp; In May, Rick and I attended the official unveiling ceremony of our two waxwork dummies at Madame Tussauds. Again, this was all David’s work. He may not have been able to claim credit for Quo being so famous, but he was definitely the one responsible for doing everything in his power to consolidate that position here in the nineties. The dummies, by the way, were placed in the Rock Circus section and were very weird to look at. My dummy, I thought, was better looking than the real-life me. He certainly had more hair. Rick’s didn’t really do the real-life him any favours. Not that he seemed to notice. He was too busy hamming it up for the cameras. Rick was simply one of those people born to be in front of flashing lights and cameras. If he’d been born twenty years later he’d have been a natural for reality TV shows like I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!, but he wouldn’t be passed as medically fit by the time all that came around. He was a show-off and lived for the attention. The way I looked at it was, thank God one of us is, because I am the exact opposite.
There had also been a jaunt over to Monaco to attend the World Music Awards, where we were presented with the award for Outstanding Contribution to the Rock Industry by Prince Albert of Monaco. We then spent the summer doing big outdoor stadiums again. In Britain, we co-headlined a seven-night tour of football stadiums with Rod Stewart, starting at his beloved Celtic Park and finishing two weeks later at our home-from-home Wembley Stadium.
I Talk Too Much Page 23