We've underestimated Francis Rossi
I have a friend who insists that had Status Quo hailed from Düsseldorf rather than Catford, they would nowadays be as critically revered as Can, Faust, Neu! and those other hallowed Teutonic pioneers of unyielding rhythm from the 1970s.
Maybe so. Very probably not. Canned Heat and ZZ Top seem more reachable comparisons. But it's true that 'the Quo' have been underestimated and unjustly derided throughout their six-decade career, not least by themselves. The band has happily perpetuated their position as rock and roll neanderthals: a 2007 album is titled In Search Of The Fourth Chord.
There was always a little more to it than that. Personally, I have always divined a terrible sadness at the heart of their music. Like most court jesters, Status Quo internalise great loneliness and despair. Consider the regretful pills-and-powder sentiments of songs such as 'Marguerita Time', 'Living On An Island', 'Down Down' and 'What You're Proposing', made all the more doleful by the bleached stoicism of Francis Rossi's pinched voice. Their prototypical heads-down Ur-boogie, meanwhile, is the cosmic hamster's wheel made sound, a pitch perfect aural representation of the existential treadmill.
Inelegantly billed as 'An Evening of Francis Rossi's Songs from the Status Quo Songbook and More', this two-man touring show offers a corrective to the established Quo-text, though I very much doubt that is the intention.
Having lost his brother in arms, Rick Parfitt, to a heart attack in 2016, Rossi is joined by second guitarist and backing vocalist Andy Brook. Supplied with nifty Fender Acoustasonic semi-acoustic guitars, the pair perch on a couple of red easy chairs, separated by a small table adorned with a green desk lamp.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Spectator
21-05-2025
- Spectator
We've underestimated Francis Rossi
I have a friend who insists that had Status Quo hailed from Düsseldorf rather than Catford, they would nowadays be as critically revered as Can, Faust, Neu! and those other hallowed Teutonic pioneers of unyielding rhythm from the 1970s. Maybe so. Very probably not. Canned Heat and ZZ Top seem more reachable comparisons. But it's true that 'the Quo' have been underestimated and unjustly derided throughout their six-decade career, not least by themselves. The band has happily perpetuated their position as rock and roll neanderthals: a 2007 album is titled In Search Of The Fourth Chord. There was always a little more to it than that. Personally, I have always divined a terrible sadness at the heart of their music. Like most court jesters, Status Quo internalise great loneliness and despair. Consider the regretful pills-and-powder sentiments of songs such as 'Marguerita Time', 'Living On An Island', 'Down Down' and 'What You're Proposing', made all the more doleful by the bleached stoicism of Francis Rossi's pinched voice. Their prototypical heads-down Ur-boogie, meanwhile, is the cosmic hamster's wheel made sound, a pitch perfect aural representation of the existential treadmill. Inelegantly billed as 'An Evening of Francis Rossi's Songs from the Status Quo Songbook and More', this two-man touring show offers a corrective to the established Quo-text, though I very much doubt that is the intention. Having lost his brother in arms, Rick Parfitt, to a heart attack in 2016, Rossi is joined by second guitarist and backing vocalist Andy Brook. Supplied with nifty Fender Acoustasonic semi-acoustic guitars, the pair perch on a couple of red easy chairs, separated by a small table adorned with a green desk lamp.
The Courier
16-05-2025
- The Courier
Status Quo legend Francis Rossi comes to Perth Concert Hall
'I'm not a particularly good guitar player,' Status Quo legend Francis Rossi whispers. 'I'm better than I was but I'm probably not as good as my peer group, perhaps – well, definitely.' Such self-doubt is perhaps not a quality most people would associate with the once cocksure Francis Rossi, especially those who grew up in the decades when his band seemed omnipresent on radios and TV screens. However, approaching his 76th birthday, Rossi is a much-changed figure from the hell-raiser who lived the rock'n'roll lifestyle to the max with his friend and Quo sidekick Rick Parfitt, who died on Christmas Eve 2016. A sense of reflection surrounds the frontman these days, with memories of past times to the fore both in the part-storytelling acoustic tour that he's bringing to Perth on Monday and in his 'new' album The Way We Were Vol 1, a collection of vintage demos. Having landed his first record deal with The Spectres in 1966 aged 17 and playing live virtually non-stop ever since, it's little wonder that Francis regards touring as his defining lifestyle. 'I remember being very young seeing programmes on TV that were all about travelling circuses or fairs, and they would always travel together in convoy in trucks and buses, so it's always felt like that,' he says. 'Someone asked me a question last night about how kids make it and I said you have to be between diligent and obsessed, and it's become an obsession with me. I just don't really know to do anything else. 'There are bad sides to that and there's the positive side – it makes me happy when I'm doing it.' After years of excess, the singer's London working class upbringing has informed many of his more recent decisions, so rather than expensive hotel stays on his latest tour he recuperates on his tour bus. Playing acoustic gigs with a tiny entourage compared to the mind-blowing logistics of Status Quo ventures means he's in a mainly peaceful place. 'I keep telling the audience how much I'm enjoying myself and I'm worried that it sounds like a showbiz ploy, but it really isn't,' Rossi declares. 'I mean, at my age I would just stay home. It's not that I need the money, but I probably need the audience's adoration, if that's the word. 'I've discussed with my wife when I should stop, because I do have a fear that I may outlive my nest egg. Quo are touring in '26 and planning to tour in '27, so I will deal with that two years down the line. 'It's weird, coming into 76 I suddenly feel like 25 again, like it's something to grow. That might seem idiotic to other people and part of me thinks that way.' 'It has to be the insecure show-off in me that needs to be in front of people to validate his very existence. I'm too old to start pretending that I'm this giant rock star, but I'm a part of the bulls*** that is showbiz. 'I can tell people I'm definitely not as nice as they think I am, because the fans really think I'm wonderful. I can't be, and we do that all the time to showbiz people. 'It's why we get so upset when they do things that let people down by being greedy or sex pests or just grumpy s***s. I'm probably one of the grumpy s***s.' Reflecting on his younger days, he says he was 'putting a front up' in terms of his public persona. 'Now I'm trying to say to people that I'm very much like they are, I just happen to be the one that's sat on the stage at that particular moment,' he explains. 'Quite often a question comes up at whatever venue and they laugh when I say playing here is actually far actually far more important to me than playing Wembley Arena or Glastonbury, where you're being sold something but you don't know what it is. 'I'm far too open sometimes, but that's what I am, and I've not many years left to be genuine with people.' Status Quo started in 1967 as psychedelic hipsters, later morphing into the denim-clad Live Aid-openers who scored such huge hits as Rockin' All Over The World, What You're Proposing and Down Down. 'Most of the things we do on this tour I thought would be impossible, like Roll Over Lay Down and Don't Waste My Time, but something happened,' says Francis. 'The audience tend to listen because if we go quiet, it's f***ing quiet. There have been one or two little worries – at the beginning it was how many stories there will be or whether I'd repeat them, but I just ad lib or something else comes up. 'I try not to think about it until I face the audience, and something happens in that first 10 minutes when I talk to them and then I kind of follow my nose. 'Once or twice I've stumbled and thought it wasn't really working, but that's something I've learned over many years talking for Quo, as it were. You're stood there with maybe 15,000 people and you can sense it's not working, but something happens and you change foot.' Status Quo have played a few times in Perth down the years. 'We used to stop for clothes at a shop in Perth on the way up north,' Rossi recalls. 'They used to get those Arab scarfs, the black and white ones or the red and white ones. We used to use them a lot, and various unusual garments – it was a fantastic shop.' Francis Rossi, Perth Concert Hall, May 19.
The Guardian
14-05-2025
- The Guardian
‘I terribly wanted to be liked. Still do': Status Quo's Francis Rossi on money worries, his deepest neuroses – and sounding like Nellie the Elephant
If you want to contemplate quite how far back Status Quo's roots go, consider this: the band's founders came together before the Beatles had released their first single, before the idea of 'the band' was even a thing in pop music. They're often dismissed as one-song wonders, or as proponants of brutally simplistic music – but as much as the Stones or the Who, Status Quo are carved into British rock. Francis Rossi and Alan Lancaster formed the Spectres in 1962, when the guitarist and bassist were still at school. Drummer John Coghlan signed up a year later and Rick Parfitt completed the 'Frantic Four' when he joined after sharing a bill with the Spectres at Minehead Butlin's in 1966. The Beatles showed Rossi not just what he could do with his life, but touched something very primal in him. 'Everybody liked them,' he says, 'and I must have been a wimpy kid, and I terribly wanted to be liked. Still do in some ways. That's quite sad. But we tried to emulate them – that's where we wanted to go.' Over 60 years on, he's not there yet, despite the end of his iconic partnership with Parfitt, who died aged 68, in 2016. 'I don't know what else to do. I'm obsessed by it all, and I just keep going.' Rossi, everyone says, doesn't like talking about the past. He doesn't have much choice today, because we're talking as Quo prepare to reissue the 1977 album Live!, recorded in Glasgow when the band were at their peak as a rock band: when their force and power was as blunt and brutal as the Stooges, but without the nihilism, and with added massive hit albums and singles. The first was in 1968, with the ersatz psychedelia of Pictures of Matchstick Men. 'We weren't very happy being dressed-up pop stars. And our tour manager, Bob Young, said, 'Well, why don't you change?' So we grew our hair long, got rid of the clothes and put on jeans and T-shirts. And boogie was the right music to play.' For Rossi, the boogie style – the tough, hard rock version of the 12-bar blues, exemplified by songs such as Whatever You Want or Roll Over Lay Down – also tied in with the shuffling Italian music he grew up with in south London. 'There are so many things in our lives that are shuffles, even nursery rhymes – Nellie the Elephant. Our marches do that. It appealed to me and it still does.' That was crossed with what he was hearing on the university circuit Quo were playing. 'We used to work with Fleetwood Mac a lot on the uni circuit,' Rossi says. 'You could sit down beside the stage and they'd start playing – der-der, der-der – for an hour and a half. We wanted to do that, to be that.' Quo were constantly written off as 'heads down, no-nonsense, mindless boogie', Rossi says, and were parodied as such by Alberto y Lost Trios Paranoias on a 1978 single. But there's more to them than that. Their 1975 No 1 Down Down, with its multiple sections, is like the Paranoid Android of 12-bar boogie, or consider that What You're Proposing was one of two consecutive Top 20 hits – along with Living on an Island – about cocaine-addicted alienation. The latter, written by Parfitt, was speaking plainly about waiting for people to come to Jersey with drugs for him. The former, by Rossi, was more allusive but its theme was evident. 'I used to believe what I read in the press, that there was nothing to the lyrics,' Rossi says. 'But then I'd read them and think, 'That was about my first wife, that was about such and such.' In doing it, I think it's far too' – he pulls a face to suggest a highfalutin intellectual – 'to say, 'I'm going to write about this now.' But the truth will out, nonetheless. 'That's what I think, yes.' The new reissue of the live album – the full sets from all three nights at the Glasgow Apollo in October 1976 – could really have been recorded anywhere and at any point during the mid-70s. For a start, their set didn't change a whole lot through those years: 'We had a good set and we stuck to it,' drummer Coghlan says. 'And it meant I didn't have to look at a set list.' And, second, Quo worked so hard through those years that they were like a juggernaut, night after night. 'They weren't afraid of hard work, and they got their heads down,' says Bob Young, their tour manager. 'We were just one of those bands that liked playing,' Coghlan says, plainly. One of the curiosities of Quo is that its members almost always co-wrote, and they didn't look far for co-writers. Young has his name on a bunch of Quo's biggest hits, which must have made him the highest-earning tour manager in rock history. Young laughs at the thought, though accepts it was probably true: 'I ended up in the unique position of being tour manager, songwriter and harmonica player.' But, as time went on, the writing with others reflected the fact they weren't getting along with each other. 'It got to a point where we should have taken some time off, maybe three or four months,' Coghlan says. But they didn't. Coghlan left in 1982, kicking over his drum kit during a recording session and walking out without a word, sick of his bandmates. Lancaster, who had formed the band with Rossi, departed after the End of the Road tour in 1984. And Parfitt was haunted by insecurities about his status within the band – specifically about having always been viewed as No 2 in the group to Rossi, who stood centre stage and took most of the vocals. 'He was my greatest friend, but someone' – Rossi can't say who – 'got to him. Somebody knew it was a weakness with him. And as we got older it got worse and worse. I always saw it as the two of us, because we made a great pair – and I think we were a bit unfair on the rest of them. We would sit in the car and hold hands and dress the same just to wind people up, and I think certain people decided to get between the two of us.' Rossi, plainly, is an unusual person. 'Francis has always been his own man,' Young says. 'He'll say what he wants; he hasn't got a lot of filter, like it or not.' In his autobiography, Rossi mentions his tendency to say inappropriate things and cause offence, and says he doesn't visibly grieve the deaths of those he has loved, including Parfitt. I mention to him that those were both traits of mine, that I obsessed over until being diagnosed as neurodivergent and learning they were common behaviours: a lack of grief is related to object impermanence about people. Has he, I ask as delicately as I can, ever been tested? He looks not horrified but fascinated. 'You're the first person that's ever broached that at all. And now there are loads of things going on in my mind, because that would explain …' He starts to talk about the deaths of his mother and father, how he poked at his mother's body to be sure she was gone, how when he was told his father had died he just wanted to check on the arrangements for his own perfectly normal working day: 'I said, 'Is the car coming to pick me up?' And it makes me feel like I'm cold. But if I'm in a situation and I'm told what I'm supposed to do, I can't do it. I'm supposed to grieve, I'm supposed to say certain things. And I will be thinking, 'I shouldn't say that, that's not appropriate.' It's interesting, what you said. I never thought about that before.' Rossi, 76 in May, isn't going to give up anytime soon. He outlines his plans for the next couple of years, talking about how he still loves playing to an audience. And he says something else, something familiar from my parents' generation of working-class people who grew up to be comfortable, but aware of their past. 'The thing that worries me constantly is: will I have enough money if I stop now and there's no more income? I'm scared shitless of that.' Of course Francis Rossi is not going to die in penury, but it's a comment that shows he's a more complex man than the jeans and waistcoats and winks to camera ever hinted at. Just as Status Quo were a more complex group than anyone who claimed they only had one song could ever understand. The 8-CD expanded reissue of Status Quo / Live! is out on 16 May on Edsel Records. Francis Rossi is currently touring the UK
