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Still rockin' all over the world
By David Smyth, Evening Standard 15.12.06
Status Quo: still rockin' all over the world
Look here too
"People say to me, 'How can you play Rockin' All Over the World every single night?' Well you try playing it in front of people that love it and see what happens." Francis Rossi knows what Status Quo fans want from a live show. They want the hits, and that's what he and Rick Parfitt, the two remaining members of the classic line-up, deliver, nearly 40 years on.
"We must have Rockin'," Rossi continues, cheerfully, counting the songs off on his fingers, "we must have Caroline, we must have Down Down. If we don't play them, people are truly gutted. I went to see The Eagles in 1979 and when they played the song I really wanted to hear, it was unbelievable - I fell apart ..."
It's their honest, crowd-pleasing, good time approach that has kept Status Quo so popular for so long. They first reached the Top 10 in 1968 and for the last time in 1990. They have had more UK hits than any other band, put in a record number of Top of the Pops appearances (106) and clocked up an estimated 6,000 live shows, to more than 25 million people. After tomorrow night's London leg of their current tour, they will have played Wembley Arena more times (40) than any other band.
Tomorrow's gig will be the Christmas party to beat, but it nearly didn't happen. The historic Wembley show was meant to take place in December 2005, on the 40th anniversary of Parfitt and Rossi's first meeting. But it was postponed, along with 10 other shows, after Parfitt learned he had two growths on his larynx. In 1997, he barely broke his hard-drinking stride after a quadruple heart bypass, but this was, he admits, terrifying.
"It was devastating. You start thinking all the worst things, you can't help it. The tour just ground to a halt in Plymouth. I'd discussed it with Francis and he'd said to me, 'How are you gonna go out there knowing you've got cancer of the throat? And are you gonna make it worse?'"
Parfitt returned to London to see a specialist: "He told me I could go two ways - cut it out, or the long route with radiotherapy. I decided straight off and went into surgery at 8pm. I was sitting at home again at half past 11."
The growths turned out to be benign, and Parfitt has made a full recovery, but he worries that his voice is now operating at about 85 per cent power. "My singing's not as good as I would like it to be. I'm hoping it's still improving - how else can I look at it?"
He obviously has to take life a little easier these days. The Quo were always known for their wildmen-of-rock image as much as for their music, but now, as Parfitt says, "the party happens on the stage now, not off it".
And the set I catch at Amsterdam's Heineken Music Hall, where we meet, is quite the party. The cavernous venue is filled with a variously aged, mainly male crowd, most wearing the band's merchandise. Down Down and Caroline are thumpingly loud. The fans fling themselves around to Roll Over Lay Down and What You're Proposing. During Gerd Und Ulla, Rossi, Parfitt and John "Rhino" Edwards play three guitars interlinked, with each hand on another's instrument. Beer is hurled around with abandon.
I can't help wondering, what with the health scare, and the money that they must have squirrelled away, whether this is really how these two fiftysomethings (Rossi is 57, Parfitt a year older) want to spend their time. But they know nothing else. And they take a remarkably professional approach to it all.
"I can't deal with those bands who go out every two, three or four years - by the time they get to their 15th or 20th show they're slo-o-o-wly starting to get into it, and that means you may have played to hundreds of thousands of people that saw a really substandard frigging show," Rossi explains. His ponytail is fading grey now, and the expected white T-shirt and pinstriped waistcoat are replaced by a black tracksuit top.
What's amazing is not that these hardliving old rockers are so disciplined, but that they survived the years of excess. "I got to the point where I'd done so much coke that I was just sitting there waiting for the feeling to go away," Rossi says.
They had to move on, Parfitt agrees. "We've been there with the drugs and the alcohol, we've done it and we've seen it all. A lot of my friends - Phil Lynott, for example - it got them. Francis and I are very lucky to have come out relatively unscathed."
Routine is everything these days. Parfitt and Rossi arrive at each venue at 1.30pm, virtually dawn in rock terms, and have their meal of the day at 2.30 sharp. Rossi then does quick crosswords, faxed to him wherever he is in the world - "The Times, the Guardian and the one in the back of the Mail. And the Mail's code word." Peeking behind one backstage door I spy a half-finished jigsaw puzzle.
Before the gig, Parfitt, in polka-dot shirt, is supremely mellow, gently strumming an unplugged electric guitar in the near darkness ("I don't like bright lights before I go on"). I'm under strict instructions not to disturb his Zen-like calm with mention of the extra-marital threesomes he enjoyed with a middle-aged blonde fan named Angie and her electrician husband, Parfitt lookalike Nigel "Nobby" Hewitt, which led to the split with his second wife, Patty, in February 2005.
He has recently married his third wife, Lyndsay, a 46-year-old fitness instructor he has known for just a few months, and radiates post-honeymoon bliss.
The contrast between the two friends couldn't be greater. In a bright, bare room, next door, the wiry Rossi waffles at the speed of sound and almost lifts off with nervous energy.
He's discussing homosexual practices before I have even managed to sit down (his eldest son is gay), and he compares playing music to masturbating: "I dunno what the difference is between a good gig and a fantastic one, but sometimes [he makes a crude gesture, and keeps doing it for some time] it's almost like playing with your knob."
Like Quo's music, Rossi's patter isn't exactly sophisticated, but, like the band, oddly endearing. "We're all just insecure little show-offs," he sums up. "There's a contradiction going on. You couldn't walk on that stage unless you thought, 'Watch me, I'm good.' I can do Jack-the-lad, but really, I'm very shy. Elton John and Brian May are shy, too. Brian May is not a poor man, so why does he need to go out and play live? We're insecure little show-offs! Unless there's someone watching us going, 'Oh, aren't you good!', we're not interested."
• Status Quo play Brighton Centre (0870 380 0017) tonight and Wembley Arena (0870 060 0870) tomorrow.
