On The Level

Worldwide record sales in excess of 118 million, more hit singles than any other band in UK chart history, the first act on stage at Live Aid… Status Quo are bonafide British rock royalty.

Ahead of the band’s gig at the Philharmonic Hall next month, we caught up with lead singer, lead guitarist and sole continuous member Francis Rossi to discuss the new tour, memories of playing Liverpool and his Merseyside roots.

Words by Lawrence Saunders

When the ‘Out Out Quoing’ tour kicks off in Belfast on 27 February, it will have been almost two and a half years since the last Status Quo gig. Has it been strange being off the road for such a long time?

We haven’t been off this long since the band first started. We have a two-week rehearsal planned [ahead of the first gig] – which I don’t think is enough. Normally for every three weeks we’ve been off, we will put in a day’s rehearsal. I started practising a few weeks back – trying not to get my throat sore, remembering lyrics.

I want to walk into rehearsals as if it’s not that long ago [since we played live]. It’s no good to me, or any of us individually, trying to brush up on anything whilst we’re with the band. It’s band rehearsal and we need to rehearse as if it’s a show – keeping it slick and seeing whether we can breathe. As you can tell I’m not worried at all!

Save for a brief pause in the mid-’80s, Status Quo had been touring pretty much non-stop since 1968 until COVID-19 happened. Do you still enjoy it?

There’s something about rock and roll… you wake up in the morning wherever you are, usually on a bus, and you know that you’re on stage at 9pm. No matter what, [the] show goes [ahead]. Someone’s feeling under the weather, someone’s hungover, something’s missing – ‘Yeah well, we’re going on at nine so you best find it!’. It’s always been that way.

Years ago, someone won a competition to be out on tour with us. He was a big strapping lad, probably about six feet tall. I think he was due to be out for two weeks. After three days, the production manager brought him in and he was crying, saying ‘I can’t do this, I’ve never been away from home this long’. You realise that a lot of people cannot do that. Generally, people think ‘I’ll have a great time’ but I say ‘No you won’t!’. It’s what we’ve always done [but] I do miss being home and I always want to be at home.

 

 

Status Quo’s most recent record Backbone, released in September 2019, was the band’s highest-charting collection of original material since 1+9+8+2. Was it disappointing not to be able to get out there and perform tracks from the album due to the pandemic?

I have to be careful because I’m very cynical but they said ‘the album did so well’, for the time. I heard the other day that Adele had the biggest-selling album of the year at 600,000 pieces and I was like ‘what?’. The Bee Gees were doing a million a week on Saturday Night Fever. People are now saying ‘isn’t that great news… for today’. It’s like when people say ‘Christ, you look well… for your age!’. But yes, it was a disappointment and I think possibly by working it a little, people who were perhaps sceptical about it would have been won over.

[However] most of the people who come to see Status Quo, come to see the hits. We are in talks about doing a live television performance in a few weeks and I thought ‘Oh no, I’ve got to do Rockin’ [All Over the World] again’. But if you’d told me 40 years ago that we’d have a bunch of hits that people just want to hear, I would have done anything to have them.

As a Liverpool-based publication, we were interested to learn from your autobiography that your mother, Anne, was born in Crosby. Do you know much about that side of your family?

My mother and father met [on Merseyside] somewhere. My dad used to swim in something up there which he later found out was a sewage outlet! I’ve actually been talking to one of my cousins recently, Paul, who went to Merchant Taylors’ School. He’s been telling me stuff that I didn’t know about my maternal grandfather and the big house they lived in on Myers Road, Crosby.

I make jokes in shows about how everyone thinks I was taken to Italy (Francis’s father was of Italian descent) for my holidays but it was actually Liverpool! We went once [to Italy], but the rest of the time my dad stayed home and worked and my mother took us up to Crosby on the train. It was fabulous! I used to love the Ribble buses as well – much better than what we had in London. Happy memories.

Status Quo have of course played in Liverpool many times over the years – going right back to the early days of the band. Do you remember appearing at the Cavern Club in 1968?

Yes, I do. It’s funny because that was one of the venues, like the Olympia in Paris, that I would read about and think ‘wow, that’s got to be great’. But when we got up there, we discovered it was a s***hole! I used to love playing the Liverpool Stadium though (now demolished venue located on Bixteth Street) – it was marvellous. That was ‘the’ venue to play in Liverpool. We played there in 1972 with a band called Hackensack. During that period, we were all still young and pulling together.

I’ve just watched that Beatles documentary and as much as some people find it tedious to watch, to me, you can see most of the time they’re messing about and then there’s a ‘moment’. How they were pulling together reminds me what [Status Quo] were like. When we were all together going for one goal, it was a fantastic time.

 

 

The band has a famously devoted following and each new generation brings with it yet more converts to the ‘mighty Quo’. Why do you think your music has endured through all these years and continues to attract new fans?

I love that and I appreciate that but I don’t think it’s as massively important as some people think or say it is. Lots and lots of people [in the world] like Status Quo and the other few billion don’t, and don’t even know who we are! It is interesting that generationally [interest in the band] continues. I don’t know if it’s because [the music] is kind of simple and it’s based on shuffles.

It’s very tribal in its way and the rhythmic thing of it is almost addictive. Status Quo play shuffle in its most basic form and always will. There’s something [special] about the music, but I would say that wouldn’t I?!

Finally, are there any plans for a new Status Quo record?

I’d like to [make a new album] but I don’t really know. We don’t have plans right now and we’re getting old. Like I said before, even Adele, the biggest thing on the planet, she’s [only] done 600,000 units.

Status Quo play Liverpool Philharmonic Hall on 5 March 2022

Main Image © James Eckersley</h5