I Talk Too Much

by Francis Rossi

  The only track we didn’t write was the single ‘Jam Side Down’, by Terry Britten, who’d written huge hits for everyone from Tina Turner to Meat Loaf, and his co-writer Charlie Dore. Looking back now, I wish we’d gone with one of our original tracks. Not because it wasn’t a good song – just because we had more than a few candidates. I couldn’t argue though when it became our first top 20 hit in Britain for nearly ten years.

  Simon did everything he could to push the boat out with the publicity, emphasising the fact that as a band we were back on true-blue Quo form. He also showed us he could ‘do a David’ when he organised a big promotional party on the decks of the navy aircraft carrier, HMS Ark Royal. We did a special set and the whole thing was filmed for TV. We also found ourselves back on Top of the Pops again doing ‘Jam Side Down’. When Heavy Traffic was released it also made the top 20, becoming the best-selling Quo album of original material since the eighties. It seemed we had found a new formula with Simon – just being ourselves. Who’d have thought?

  In the years since we have pretty much done as we pleased. Yes, we’ve had our share of new compilations, live collections and box sets, but that’s become par for the course for every major band of our generation. Contractually there is nothing you can do about it anyway. What has made it an even more popular course of action for the major labels is that with record sales having shrunk to the size of a mushroom all their main business these days is centred on repackaging back catalogue. When you’ve got a back catalogue like Quo’s that goes back half a century you can have a field day.

  At the same time, we’ve also made some of our best original albums ever. We went on a roll after Heavy Traffic did so well with more great chart albums like The Party Ain’t Over Yet and In Search of the Fourth Chord (see what we did there?). Both albums featured great new songs from every member of the band. We still brought in outside writers like John David on occasion for singles like ‘The Party Ain’t Over Yet’, in 2005, which made the top 10 and gave us our best-selling hit for ten years. But we also mixed things up, with Bob and me coming up with two of my favourite singles from those times, both of which did well in the charts: ‘You’ll Come Around’ and ‘Thinking of You’. Both of them were cut from the same cloth as all our classic hits and for me were further confirmation that Quo was still a serious rock band to be reckoned with.

  This also underlined how much I still loved that moment when you get the phone call saying your new record has gone in the charts. For twenty years I think we all more or less took it for granted that anything we put out would get in the charts. We were already thinking ahead to Top of the Pops even as we made the records. Now, though, here in the twenty-first century, there were no such guarantees. The record business hardly exists any more with the advent of streaming of music direct to your phone, computer and so on. Most of the record stores have disappeared. There isn’t even a Top of the Pops any more.

  I’ve been told more than once that Quo doesn’t really need to make records any more. Look at the Stones, they say, they have released just one new original album in the last twenty years yet they are one of the biggest touring bands in the world. Or how about the Eagles, one of my own personal all-time favourites, they have released exactly one new original album since 1979 – and, as I write this, they are selling even more tickets than the Stones.

  So I get all that. And the upside is that Quo has always been considered an absolutely killer live band. But I still love the whole concept of an album. Yes, the days of side one and side two have long since disappeared. I know they keep banging on about the so-called vinyl revival, but that’s like saying people still make black-and-white movies. It’s a fetish. A cult. Nice if you are into it, meaningless to almost everybody else. Have you tried playing a record in the car lately? CDs have also bitten the dust. Personally, I wasn’t that bothered to see them go. They just encouraged every band, including us, to try and find fifteen new tracks every time they made an album. It was more like making a double album would have felt like in the seventies.

  All that said, I still enjoy making albums. I still think in terms of albums when I’m writing new songs. And our fans, I know, like the idea of having a new Quo album of some sort to look forward to. No, they don’t sell in the numbers they used to. Nobody does, unless it’s someone like Adele, or Ed Sheeran. But they are the exceptions to the rule. One-offs, unique. We used to sell more records in a day than the number 1 records of today sell in a month. But making records is what we’ve always done, and we’ve become really good at it again, even if I say so myself. Our 2011 album, Quid Pro Quo, went top 10 and was our biggest seller for years. Even the soundtrack album to our movie, Bula Quo!, in 2013, went top 10. Our first of two Aquostic albums, Stripped Bare, in 2014 went top 5 and gave us our first gold record in the UK since Don’t Stop twenty years before. While the second Aquostic album in 2016, That’s a Fact, was another big hit.

  The idea behind those albums came from a TV commercial we did in Australia for Coles supermarkets. Me and Rick playing around going on about how prices were ‘Down Down’ while they played the backing track to ‘Whatever You Want’. For some reason, these TV ads went down a storm in Australia, becoming the biggest for years. It was nuts. It was being talked about on TV and radio, being written about in newspapers. Simon looked into it and came back with the interesting fact that people really loved seeing me and Rick but actually really hated the ad. And that’s the winning formula apparently. You don’t want people to be indifferent to an ad, you want them to either love it or hate it. Or in the case of our Coles ad, both!

  Anyway, while we were making the ads at Pinewood Studios, Rick and I were mucking about with an acoustic version of ‘Down Down’, just to keep time for the ‘prices are down, down,’ lines. But the response among the crew was so intense afterwards Simon had a light bulb moment and said, ‘Hey, how about we do a whole album of acoustic versions of Quo songs?’ I was like, ‘No. That’s too much like hard work.’ While Rick was, ‘Yeah! Great idea!’, which was our usual response to most things. I’d start moaning about all the work that would be involved – then say yes and get down and do all that hard work. Rick would be super enthusiastic – then shy away when it came time to do the actual work.

  Anyway, the fact is I really enjoyed making those records–reworking and stripping back songs like ‘Caroline’, ‘Down Down’, even ‘Pictures of Matchstick Men’ and ‘Paper Plane’. Simon is very good at underplaying things. He just said, ‘Look, give it a go at rehearsals and if you still don’t think it will work we’ll forget it and think of something else.’ So we did and it sounded great. I still wasn’t sure how it would go down with our fans but they loved it and turned up for the shows in droves.

  That’s the difference between now and where we found ourselves at the turn of the century. Simon knows the value of being able to offer the fans something more than just another Quo album. At the same time, he doesn’t push for us to do cheesy covers albums. He’s also a great strategist. The short tour we did with the Aquostic set in 2014 was sandwiched between lengthier tours of Britain and Europe with our full live show.

  We did the same thing with the second Aquostic album a couple of years later. A short burst of acoustic shows between tours with the full electric show. It gave the band’s profile a whole new perspective. Even my driver of sixteen years saw a new side to me. ‘I didn’t know you could play acoustic guitar,’ he announced one day. ‘That’s proper music.’ I’ve even had people stop me in the street to tell me they couldn’t stand the band plugged in but that now they could hear the simple melodies of the songs they had become belated Quo fans.

  At the same time Rhino has been able to get his own side band together, Rhino’s Revenge, and take that out on the road and release a couple of albums, while his son Freddie accompanied us on guitar for the Aquostic tour dates. Andy Bown is the same. He’s also made an album of his own in recent years.

  The one that didn’t go down that route, of course,
was Rick. But Rick was busy having his own adventures. After a fallow period where he didn’t write that much new stuff, he began working with different people like Wayne Morris and Simon Climie, and came up with a lot of great stuff over the last ten years of his life. Rick also toyed with various outside ventures like a board game he came up with called ‘Rick Parfitt’s Name Game’. Catchphrase: get the name win the game! They turned that into a book, film, DVD, you name it. (Ouch, sorry.)

  Of course, not everything we’ve done in recent years has worked out as well as we’d have liked. For example, the great Quo movie that wasn’t: Bula Quo! When we first agreed to it, it was actually quite a violent film. Then the script got watered down and I think we were imagining a sort of Quotastic version of A Hard Day’s Night – which, looked at today, is actually not very good but all right for what it was at the time. Instead what we got was a ninety-minute cringe-fest. At least, it was for me watching it. Though I did enjoy a lot of what we got up to making it. Well, some of it anyway. The plot, such that it is, is this: the band goes to do a show on the island of Fiji where it stumbles upon a human-organ black market and finds itself embroiled in all kinds of whacky adventures.

  The idea came from the director, Stuart St Paul, this larger-than-life character who has done everything: TV, film, stage, acting. We flew down to Fiji in 2012 just after the island’s most devastating cyclone in its history. In terms of the acting, I realised after that what they should have done was leave it to Rick and me to see what happens, because we were both good at just going into something on the spur of the moment. We were naturals; there was always something funny to be said or done about things. Always. We would laugh at stuff together, get it wrong, then carry on anyway and it would become even funnier. But they didn’t trust us enough as movie actors to do that. Instead, we had to stick to the script. And that didn’t really work. It would have been nice if we’d done a second movie because we would have got better at it. The trouble is, like everything else these days, nobody has time any more for you to get better and lose money. It needed to make money. Just like the music business.

  The good thing that came out of it, though, was the germ of the idea to put together a set of acoustic versions of our songs. We also got to meet and work with some amazing people, like Craig Fairbrass, probably best known for his past role as Dan Sullivan in the BBC soap opera EastEnders. A completely wild man who knew how to have a good time. Also Jon Lovitz, the American comedian, a veteran of Saturday Night Live, and Laura Aikman, a wonderfully talented young British actress who I really rate and who has been in countless hit TV shows and films.

  And, of course, we’ve also kept up a steady stream of public appearances doing all manner of brilliant and sometimes not so brilliant things. When Rick and I appeared on a celebrity charity episode of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, I thought we’d never live it down. I got us out with the very first question, which was: ‘How many knights on a chessboard?’ I answered: ‘Two.’ Wrong! Doh! I knew the answer should have been four, two black, two white, but the heat of the moment just got the better of me. Fortunately, some kindly producer saved the day by scrapping the question and making us start again, because the question had been asked before. They said. I have no idea if that was true. But we got a second go at it and this time we did rather well. Rick and I ended up winning £50,000 for charity.

  Then there was our stint on Coronation Street, the longest-running TV soap in history. Now this was weird. I’d grown up watching the original series back in the sixties, when fantastic characters like Ena Sharples and Annie Walker ruled the roost. Not to mention the curmudgeonly Uncle Albert Tatlock and the wonderfully workshy Stan Ogden. The idea of Quo suddenly being woven into the present-day storyline was not one I could easily imagine. I was like: oh no! It’s going to be terrible! But it was a great few weeks, experiencing a completely different work environment. You had to be on set at 7 a.m. every day. Learning your lines. Getting your timing right. It was funny. Rick was being Rick. In one scene, going into the Rovers Return, all we had to say was, ‘You got anything to eat, love?’ And the barmaid has to go, ‘Hotpot.’ Then give us that look! I think Annie Walker passed it down through the years to Bet Lynch and Shelley Unwin, who was working behind the bar at the time we were on. Rick, who’d been brought up to show off, kept looking at the camera. He couldn’t help it. It was just in his blood. They had to say to him, ‘Rick, can you please stop looking at the camera when you’re in shot?’

  Then when the barmaid said, ‘Hotpot,’ it kept making me laugh. I said, sorry, I can’t do this. Then there was the theme music, probably the most famous theme music now in British television. I absolutely hated it when I was a kid, trying to play it on trumpet. The neighbours would be like, ‘Bloody kid with that trumpet!’ Now I love it. It’s so beautiful and melancholic and has such great chords. Not that I play it on trumpet. But on an acoustic guitar it sounds lovely.

  We were in three episodes. The story was we were on our way to a show and the bus broke down – and so we ended up in the Rovers Return for about three days. When Les Battersby finds out he persuades us to play at his wedding to Cilla. I’m sorry if you’re not a Corrie fan and none of this means anything to you but for me and Rick and Simon Porter getting to stand at the bar of the Rovers Return and have one of their coloured-water pints of ale was a bucket-list moment. It shaded into reality, too, as Bruce Jones, who played Les, really was a lifelong Quo fan and had been to quite a few gigs.

  Before that, I had a certain view of soap actors, that they weren’t ‘real’ actors, because that’s how their business sells it to us. There are the ‘proper’ actors that do Shakespeare and big films, then the poor soap stars that are in a completely different category. But the actors on Corrie were brilliant. Really great at what they do, and very serious. They are not mucking about. Not only are they great actors but they need to have the whole thing done ready for the show to be put out six times a week over three nights or however many times they’re on. They would be on set at seven in the morning, have one break for lunch, then be on set until seven at night, five or six days a week, every week. The viewers think they must be living the life of Riley. But you try it.

  There were other things we did over the past ten years or so that I enjoyed but without really feeling strongly about. I no longer hated things we did. I accepted them because they were always coming from a good place. Simon was easily as good as David at concocting fabulous promotional ideas, but he is a much more agreeable man and would never make us do anything that felt really phoney. He actually did believe in us as a musical entity, not just a brand.

  When I finally decided I was too old to carry off a ponytail, I had had it cut off – then auctioned it for charity. When we played at Glastonbury in 2009, we were treated like the coolest band in the world. It’s become almost against the law not to like Quo these days. And I loved that. But I also saw it for what it was. The wheel had turned. What was out was now in, and vice versa. Whatever you thought of our music or us you couldn’t deny we were authentic: the real deal. And authenticity is the true currency these days.

  Like when we appeared back at Wembley for the 2007 Concert for Diana. A great day, huge Wembley crowd, we even opened with ‘Rockin’ All Over the World’ again, but a totally different vibe to Live Aid. This was held at the newly opened rebuilt Wembley Stadium, and the crowd was seated. Ten years on from Diana’s death, it took place on what would have been her forty-sixth birthday, hosted by Princes William and Harry with all proceeds going to Diana’s charities, as well as to charities of which William and Harry are patrons. What’s not to like?

  But the truth is it was a huge publicity splash for all the acts involved. Does anyone really think they cared that much about Diana? I very much doubt it. Now I probably shouldn’t say stuff like that but I daresay it’s the truth. It was showbiz. Of course we wanted to do it. It’s high profile. The thing I remember most, if you want the absolute truth, is that Rick’s voice was in a b
ad way. On the recording we had to replace his voice with somebody else. It sounds like Rick. It’s fine. But when confronted with that fact he said, ‘Don’t be so ridiculous.’ I found that hard. It’s one thing to seek a little help in the technical department, shall we say, on a recording. But to brush it off like it didn’t happen? I found that frustrating. It was that whole denial thing that Rick had in the latter years.

  Which brings me to what really became the defining strand in my own story over the past couple of decades with Status Quo: my up and down relationship with my oldest friend and closest workmate, Rick Parfitt. We used to joke and say we’d been together longer than any of our marriages, as if that spoke to the strength of our relationship. But it was a hollow joke really, as Rick and I had steadily drifted apart over the years. To the point where there were times I truly despaired of him.

  Every Christmas after we’d finished our latest tour, Rick would come up to me and ask the same thing: ‘We are going to be all right, aren’t we, Frame?’ I’d say: ‘Yes, Ricky, of course. We’re going to be fine.’ And he would go off happy, satisfied that the band would be able to keep going for at least another year.

  But the truth is, I always knew there would come a day when Rick wouldn’t be around any longer to worry about that. And he did worry about things. For someone who had such a sunny public image, Rick became a real worrier. He was always either flying high or crashing down low.

  His health had suffered a great deal. After that first massive heart attack in 1997, he suffered two more cardiac arrests. He came through both and came straight back to the band with the same attitude he’d had to the first. That it was simply a case of getting a bit of biological rewiring done, like putting a vintage Roller in for an overhaul. And he always emerged ready to carry on just as he always had before.