PLEDGE WEEK: “Pictures of Matchstick Men” by The Status Quo

This episode is part of Pledge Week 2025.

For five days this week, I will be posting old Patreon bonus episodes to the main feed to encourage people to subscribe to my Patreon.

If you want more of these, and only if you can afford it, subscribe for $1 a month at patreon.com/slash Andrew Hickey.

Whether you do or not, I hope you enjoy this one.

A brief note before I begin.

This episode contains some mention of child death, drug abuse, and alcoholism.

If those subjects are likely to disturb you, you might want to skip this episode or read the transcript.

Occasionally in these Patreon bonuses I talk about bands that were big in the US US but unknown in the UK, like, for example, The Association, or ones that were big in the UK but never did anything in the US, like Amen Corner.

But those are for moderate definitions of big, bands that had a handful of very big hits but then moved on to the nostalgia circuit.

But today, I'm going to talk about a band who are the kind of massive that very few bands ever get to in the UK.

Status Quow have sold, according to their PR at least, over a hundred million records worldwide.

I say according to their PR, because these things routinely get exaggerated and I suspect the numbers don't add up, but that number is believable enough that it gets routinely trotted out in newspapers, and most British people who read it would say, Yeah, that sounds about right.

They've had fifty seven top forty singles over here, routinely headlined stadium gigs for decades, starred in their own feature film, and I doubt there's a British person alive who was aware of music at all during the commercial peak from roughly 1970 through 1990, who couldn't sing along with at least half a dozen of their biggest hits.

They're big enough that the first time I saw The Beach Boys in 2001, The Beach Boys were Status Crow's support act.

Status Crow aren't the most successful band in history, they're not the Beatles or the Stones, but looking at the UK and Europe, they're somewhere high in that second tier of bands who were massive in the seventies, the group of rock bands that came up around the same time as them, like Fleetwood Mac, Queen, Black Sabbath.

In terms of record sales and popularity among the public, if not always critical respect, that's roughly their peer group in the UK.

And they got that massive by playing, as the phrase always associated with them puts it, heads down no-nonsense boogie, music poised somewhere between blues rock, punk, early metal, and pop, almost all of it based on twelve-bar blues, with twin guitars playing distorted and sped up Chuck Berry rhythm guitar shuffles over four on the floor drums.

This is a band whose biggest hits collection was titled Twelve Gold Bars, and who released an album in two thousand seven titled In Search of the Fourth Chord.

Their whole appeal is that they make simple, almost thuggish music for headbanging to, and they've become superstars doing just that.

Which makes it all the more extraordinary that in America, a country which generally takes bands like that to its heart far more than the UK does, they're almost unknown.

And among those few who do know them at all, they're known as One Hit Wonders, for a song that came out years before their major success in a totally different style from the music they became famous for.

So let's have a look at that one US hit, and at the 60-year career of Status Quo, or, as they were in 1968, the Status Quow.

and you.

Their watches are matched in men and you.

All I ever see is them and you.

The story of Status Quo is, in large part, the story of Francis Rossi, the group's lead singer, lead guitarist, and only constant member.

Francis Dominic Nicholas Michael Rossi, to give him his full name, went by Mike for the early part of his life in the group's career, feeling that being called Francis sounded effeminate.

He was bullied at school for his odd accent, a combination of his father's Italian accent he was bilingual in his early years, though he later lost all his Italian his mother's scouse and the south London of his surroundings, and started to hang around with another boy in school, Alan Lancaster, who was considered a tougher kid, in order to get some reflected toughness for himself.

But while Rossi wasn't a tough person in the way that school kids thought of it, he was already becoming tough-minded.

The Rossi family were all small business people who ran ice cream trucks and sweet shops, and most of the conversations from the adults in his life were about sales and turnover and the realities of commercial life, and there was little distinction between work and family life.

Rossi internalized this sense very early on, and when he started to be interested in music, that was the framework he used.

He says in his autobiography, The minute you put yourself on a stage and try and sell tickets for people to come and watch you, that's how you really measure success, by how many people actually pay to see you.

I always wanted to know how many people were coming to a show, how many records a certain song had sold, and how did that compare to other songs, other crowds?

My dad and his family always talked about turnover, and that's exactly how I've always measured success, by how many tickets we've sold, how many records.

Rossi did, though, have a genuine passion for music as well, and he talks about two influences that have stayed with him.

The first is slightly more obvious, the chugging RB-influenced guitars and two-part close harmony of the Everly Brothers on songs like Wake Up Little Susie, which is an influence that can be heard in almost every status quo hit.

We've both been sound asleep.

Wake up, little Susie, and weep.

The movie's over, it's four o'clock, and we're in trouble deep.

Wake up, little Susie.

Wake up, little

The other is an Italian pop song translated into English which his mother played for him as a small child, Papa Piccolino, a UK hip for Diana Decca, whose chugging rhythm and simple melody echo through many of his later songs.

Papa Piccalino from sunny Italy

No matter what the calendars show it can't be spring and I ought to know until I hear him singing hello hello I'm here again

a flower in his battered old hat and a smile for every doggy and cat and children get the By the early 60s Rossi was into harder rock and roll people like Jerry Lear Lewis and Gene Vincent and Alan Lancaster persuaded him to form a group with Rossi on guitar and Lancaster on bass.

They got in another friend, Alan Key, whose brother played in Wolf Harris's backing band and allowed Key to use his spare guitar Jess Jaworski on keyboards, and a drummer named Barry Smith.

Smith was soon out of the group, as Rossi was sleeping with his girlfriend, and in his place came John Cochlan.

Key soon also quit.

He decided that in two years, when they turned sixteen, he was going to marry his girlfriend, and wanted to give the rest of the group plenty of time to find someone else for when he settled down and married.

The line-up of Rossi, Lancaster, Cochlan, and Jaworski started performing as the Spectres.

The group got a manager, Pat Barlow, who got them a lot of gigs, enough that Jaworski, who wanted to stay on at school and do his A-levels, quit the band, and was replaced by organist Roy Lines.

Barlow got the group, who were now mostly turning 16, except for Lines who was in his early 20s, a summer season playing at Butlin's holiday camp in Minehead.

There they had to play two 50 song sets a night, six nights a week, and in much the same way as the Beatles did in Hamburg, they quickly became proficient live performers.

While they were there, they also met up with another performer, a Cliff Richards soundalike who was performing under the name Ricky Harrison, but whose real name was Rick Parfit.

As the season ended, the group and Parfit went their separate ways, but kept in touch.

The group gigged for another year before being signed to Pi Records by John Schroeder, a producer who was best known for making easy listening records and co-writing Walking Back to Happiness, a hit for Helen Shapiro a few years earlier.

to happiness.

I shared with you.

I'm making up for a thing to say.

Pi were a singles-oriented label, and the Spectres weren't going to get to record a whole album unless they could have a hit single.

And the label, not the band, got to choose what they would record.

So the Spectres' first single turned out to be a cover version of the Shelly Bassey hit, I Who Have Nothing.

I who have nothing

I

who have no one

adore

you

and what you saw.

I'm just a no one

with nothing to give you, but I

That was, understandably, a flop.

The group's second single was a song called Hurdy Gurdy Man written by Alan Lancaster, not the same song their label mate Donovan would record a year or so later.

You feel

That also failed, as did a third single, a note-for-note cover version of the Blues and Magoos We Ain't Got Nothing Yet.

The career of the Spectres looked like it was at an end, but Schroder didn't give up on the group.

They did, though, think that they should change their name to something a little more progressive, more heavy, something more in 1967 rather than 1964.

So they became Traffic.

And then they found out that Steve Winwood of the Spencer Davis group had just formed a new group, also called Traffic.

They changed their name to Traffic Jam and released Almost But Not Quite There, a song written by Rossi.

It makes me feel

all of ten

feet tall.

So I just try to give to you

all that I can to satisfy.

I don't like to leave you, girl.

A host, but not quite there.

That was a prophetic title, as the record started to do well, but then got banned by the BBC for having such suggestive lyrics.

At this point, at least according to Rossi's much later memory, some people in the band's management wanted to find a replacement for Rossi, and they suggested that the group get in their old friend Rick Parfit to beef up the harmonies and add a second guitar, with the secret hope that Parfit would be a replacement for Rossi.

As it happened, the two blended together so well that they would work together for nearly 50 years.

The record being banned, and the name confusion with traffic, led to the decision to change the band's name again.

They threw around various possible names.

The Crowbars and the Muhammad Ali's were Barlow's initial suggestions, but when they said they wanted something more like Pink Floyd or Amen Corner, two then popular bands they wanted to emulate, Barlow suggested Quo Vardis, which was closer.

They eventually settled on the status quo.

Now all they needed was a hit.

Rossi had been messing around playing Papa Piccolino, the novelty song he'd always loved, but in the style of Jimi Hendrix's recent hit, Hey Joe.

While noodling like this, he sat on the toilet avoiding his wife and mother-in-law who he lived with, he hit on a musical idea which seemed to work for him, and he came up with some words that he thought would be like what it must be like to be on LSD.

Well, I look up to the sky, I see your eyes.

A funny kind of yellow.

After he wrote it, he says, One minute I thought it was the best thing I'd done, the next I thought it was a bit of a joke, just a novelty song I'd patched together.

But he played it for the group and they liked it, and so did Schroeder.

They put together a subtly psychedelic sounding track, using the phasing effect that had recently been used on the small faces Ichiku Park, which had come out a few weeks before the session, and the newly fashionable wah-wah pedal that Hendrix and Clapton had been popularising.

The track was originally intended as the B-side to a song called Gentleman Joe's Sidewalk Sidewalk Cafe, but after recording it, the label flipped it, and pictures of matchstick men made the top 10 in the UK and top 20 in the US.

When the single hit the charts, the group was so obscure that they were actually touring as the backing group for the soul singer Madeleine Bell, who had yet to go on to success with Blue Mink, but who was making a living as a backing vocalist for Dusty Springfield, Serge Gainsburg, and the Rolling Stones, and who was playing the cabaret circuit doing soul covers, including a version of It Takes Two, where she would duet with Rossi.

The success of the single didn't lead to much in the way of immediate financial rewards for the group though, as like most bands of the time they were on a staggeringly low royalty rate.

Except for Rossi, who, as the song's writer, received a substantial payout, which both influenced the other members to start writing, and was the first real sign of strains in the band about Rossi being seen as the leader, a role which Alan Lancaster always thought of as as his.

The follow-up, another song by Rossi, a sound alike called Black Veils of Melancholy, which was so similar that Disc Magazine's review said, Status quo have rewritten the words to their last hit, an accusation that they would get quite a few times later on, failed miserably everywhere except Germany, where it reached the lower reaches of the top 40.

In desperation, they turned to outside songwriters.

something that would happen increasingly in the future when they got into a commercial rut.

Marty Wilde, the late 50s pop star, had not had any hits for a few years, but was still writing songs and making records.

And he'd recently released an album containing a sunshine pop song he'd co-written with a writer named Ronnie Scott, not the famous saxophone player and jazz club owner, a different man of the same name.

Like ice in the sun, I melt away Whenever she comes, I melt away Like ice in the sun

I melt away

Wilde apparently came into the studio with the group and Schroeder and contributed to the arrangement of their cover version which was reworked to sound more like the kind of music the move were doing at the time, and which made the top 10 in the UK and the top 20 in a few European countries, but which, like all their later recordings, had no success in the USA at all.

Having now had two charting singles, the group were allowed to release an album by their record label.

Picturesque Matchstickable Messages from the Status Quow was a quickie album containing the A and B sides of their three singles under that name, plus an attempt by Lancaster to write something that sounded vaguely like the Pink Floyd, a couple more songs by Wilde and Scott, and a handful of cover versions of then-recent hits that vaguely fit the group's image.

Note-for-note remakes of Tommy Rowe's Sheila, The Lemon Piper's Green Tambourine, and The Bee Gee's Spix and Specs.

And then, the group spent two years getting nowhere fast.

After two top ten hits, they were clearly not one-hit wonders, but they weren't big enough to be headliners a lot of the time.

They tended to tour supporting other bands like the Small Faces.

After Ice in the Sun, their next four singles failed to chart, as did their second album, Spare Parts, for which they dropped the definite article from their name and just became Status Quo.

Spare Parts is, unlike picturesque matchstickable messages from the Status Quo, an album conceived as such and as an artistic statement.

It's one of many albums from this period where a band decides to do R.

Sergeant Pepper, and it's actually a pretty good example of the style, with songs titled things like The Clown and Mr.

Mind Detector.

The Mind Detector

use

your power to find what's going

on.

But the album was a flop, and the main impact it had on the group's future was it was the first album to which Bob Young, the group's road manager of an occasional on-stage harmonica player, contributed.

Young would write lyrics for many of the band's originals until 1980, and again from 2000 on.

It was very nearly the last status quo album.

By this point, Parfit and Rossi, especially Rossi, had fallen out with Lancaster so badly that Rossi tried to fire him from the group, but took him back when they couldn't find a replacement.

There was talk of the group splitting up altogether, and some talk of Parfit and Rossi replacing Steve Marriott in the Small Faces, before the Faces decided to go with two members of the Jeff Beck group.

Parfit and Rossi also had a short-lived attempt at forming a power trio supergroup, with Kenny Jones of the Small Faces, which lasted only a single rehearsal.

The group seemed to be doomed to the kind of existence bands like the creation had, minor hits in Germany, where there were still pop stars, though fading ones, were playing worse and worse venues in their home country.

But this was a couple of years after the creation's peak, and there was a new network of university venues and small pubs that were putting on rock bands.

The group started playing those venues and started taking on the clothes of the audiences there.

Instead of paisley flower power clothes, they were wearing all denim, and the group started consciously emulating the fashion of their audiences.

They also started emulating the way the audiences reacted.

These audiences would sit on the floor smoking dope, but they would nod their heads vigorously to the music with their long hair falling over their faces.

Rossi, Parfit and Lancaster started doing this on stage with a spread-legged macho stance to make themselves more relatable to the audience.

Then they started changing the style of music they played.

The impetus came one day in 1970 when they heard Roadhouse blues by the doors.

Hearing that song triggered something in Parfit and Mossy particularly, and they started to push for a different kind of music.

Their main influences were the second wave of British blues bands who were coming up at that time.

People like Fleetwood Mac and Chickenshack,

who we haven't got to in the main narrative yet, but who were playing heavy electric blues influenced by people like Elmore James.

They started working on songs with their old fifties influences to the front as well.

Twin guitars and vocals like the Everly Brothers, boogie shuffles like Jerry Lee Lewis or Chuck Berry, but with melodies closer to Bill Haley or Danny and the Jr.'s than the bluesier end of things.

From the emerging metal subculture, they took a love of loudness and the riff.

The first result of this was Down the Dustpipe, a non-album single written by Carl Grossman, an Australian songwriter who had written for the Bee Gees and would go on to write for Olivia Newton John and Ringo Starr.

Rolling down the dump pipe now.

Got a $10 bill in my jeans.

Like I said, ain't no room for a kosher galvanic

New Orleans.

But I'm doing all right.

At first, that record was met with utter division.

Famously the DJ Tony Blackburn, after playing it for the first time on the radio, said, Down the dustbin for this one, but the group had built up a huge following from their live shows, and it ended up making number 12 on the charts.

The record was successful enough that a cover version was included on one of the sound-alike top of the pops budget albums released around that time.

a kosher cowboy in a town like New Orleans.

But I'm doing all right now,

rolling down the dustbike now, now.

Guess I didn't make it in the city,

but that's just the way that it goes.

And a lot of lunatics, crazy guys that maybe don't like the shape of my nose.

But I'm doing all right.

The piano player and harmony vocalist on that version was soon to become better known as as Elton John.

The first album by the new style status quo, Mar Kelly's Greasy Spoon, shows this new version of the band not yet quite fully formed.

There are some tracks that are totally typical of their later style, but they're also still showing their influences.

There are cover versions of Fleetwood Mac and Chicken Shack songs, and a nine minute progressive rock track, Is It Really Me, Gotta Go Home?, which shows a clear influence of Black Sabbath.

Live, that song was mostly an excuse to stretch out into a 25-minute or more jam, mostly on one chord in their standard shuffle rhythm, like this.

Mark Kelly's Greasy Spoon was the last album to feature boy lines.

He wasn't as invested in being a star as the rest of the group, and stopping at a petrol station, he met a woman who he fell in love with pretty much instantly.

A week later, on the train to a gig in Aberdeen, he decided he'd had enough, got off the train in Stoke-on-Trent, and the band didn't see him again for decades, by which time he was living in Australia, still married to the woman he'd met at the petrol station, and occasionally playing in a status quo tribute band.

The group's follow-up single to Down the Dustpipe, In My Chair, also charted at number 21, but then the next couple of singles flopped.

The album that followed, Dog of Two Head, is widely regarded by Quo fans as one of their best.

But as Rossi puts it, I always wonder if it was so bloody good why it was such a commercial flop.

It's another transitional album, with more prog and hard rock influences than their later work, but still very much recognisably the band that would become huge.

Like the previous three albums, it didn't chart, and the group moved across to Vertigo, a new subsidiary of Phonogram that had been set up for progressive hippie music.

The label had mostly heavy rock acts like Black Sabbath and Uriah Heap, as well as progressive acts like Gentle Giant and Aphrodite's Child, Mud Stewart's solo recordings, and a new band who had just been signed named Kraftwerk.

Supposedly, several of these cool bands complained that their label was going to give them a bad name by associating them with a joke band like Status Quow.

But the group's first album for the label, Pile Driver, became the start of a consecutive run of thirteen top ten studio albums for the group, reaching number five.

For Pile Driver, and for several albums following, the group recorded in a way that was very different from the conventional way they'd made their previous records.

They played as live in the studio, not caring about separation or instruments leaking into each other's mics, with the amps all turned up to the same volume they'd be in a show, with minimal overdubbing or production.

The single from Pile Driver, Paper Planes, reached number five, and started a string of hit singles.

Every single they released for the next 17 years would make the UK top 40, most of them the top 10.

Lightning's sleeping, can't see near.

On my foreclosed face and clear, then I realize my paper plane.

One that's really up there with me.

We don't make mistakes, forgive me.

Would you like to write my play to play?

The singles would mostly be written by Rossi and Bob Young and would mostly follow a very similar pattern, like their next big hit, Caroline.

You're my skin life.

You know, I wanna take it, I really gotta make it.

So come on to Caroline and take my hand.

Together we can rock and roll

when I'm thinking.

Or they're only number one, down down.

Down down, leave her and down.

Down,

leave her and down.

I wanna war

After a few years of essentially making the same record over and over, tensions started to rise within the group between Russi, who wanted to push the band's music into some different directions to remain commercially relevant, and Lancaster, who felt like they had a good thing going and shouldn't mess it up.

They started to experiment a little.

They released a cover version of Hank Thompson's country classic Wildside of Life, and that still made the top ten.

And then in 1977, they brought in a keyboard player, Andy Bowen, and for the first time since Dog of Two Head, worked with an outside producer, Pip Williams, who would go on to produce many of the band's future albums.

The title track for the album, a cover version of John Fogarty's Rockin' All Over the World, still sounds like all their other hits, and indeed is one of the tracks most associated with them in Britain, where Fogarty's version is almost unknown.

And I'm lying, I'm lying, I'm lying, I'm lying and I'm laughing, I'm lying.

But the rest of the album is slightly poppier than their earlier records.

Rossi later called it a poxy album, while Alan Lancaster said, When Pip Williams started producing us was when everything started to go wrong.

Lancaster disliked the single so much he refused to take part in the video, which instead features a life-sized puppet on strings dressed in a leather jacket and jeans, only shown from the back or in long shots so most casual viewers wouldn't realise it isn't a real person on the bass.

In truth, things had started to go wrong before that.

By this point, the group were playing hundreds of shows a year, but were starting to dislike each other offstage.

Parfit, Rossi, and Lancaster had all developed massive cocaine addictions.

Rossi estimates that he he had spent close to £2 million on cocaine in the 70s and 80s, and Parfit and Lancaster both resented Rossi being seen as the leader of the group.

Most of the members' marriages were failing, and none of them even lived on the same land mass as any of the others.

All four full members, Baune was still a salaried session player, moved away from the UK mainland for tax purposes, Rossi to the Republic of Ireland, Parfit to Jersey and the Channel Islands, Cochland to the Isle of Man, and Lancaster all the way to Australia.

The group continued to have big hits, though, and mostly in the same style that had been so successful for them all along, like Whatever You Want, written by Parfit and Bown, with Parfit rather than Rossi on lead vocals.

But things continued to get worse for the group.

They dumped Williams as producer, at Lancaster's instigation.

Then Bob Young fell out with Rossi and wouldn't work with them again for 20 years.

And then tragically, Parfit's two-year-old daughter drowned in his swimming pool in 1980.

This made Parfit turn even more to cocaine and alcohol than he had before.

His health, which had not been great for some time, worsened, and according to Rossi, he was never really the same man again.

Though Rossi's statements about Parfit should be taken with a pinch of salt, since Parfit's death, he has tended to minimise his partner's contribution to the band.

The first to quit was John Cochlan, who had always been a little bit of an outsider in the group, not being a big drug user and being a quiet person.

Apparently one day he came to a session, sat down, fiddled with his drums for a minute, then kicked them over and stormed out, sick of all the fighting between his bandmates.

His replacement was Pete Kircher, formerly of the band Honeybuss, and the resulting album, 1 plus 9 plus 8 plus 2, was widely considered, not least by the band, one of the worst things they ever put out.

By their 1983 album, Back to Back, things were going dreadfully.

There were arguments over what would be the single from the album.

Lancaster wanted one of his songs, All Rag Blues, which the record label didn't like.

Rossi wanted a country song he'd written, Margarita Time, of which Lancaster said, Nobody but Francis wanted to record it.

All it did was advertise that we were a bunch of nerds.

Eventually they released Lancaster's song first, but with Rossi singing.

which annoyed Lancaster, who argued that as Rossi and Parfit got to sing lead on singles they wrote, so should he.

And they followed it with the cover of Elvis's A Messive Blues, and then with Margarita Time, which became one of the group's biggest hits.

Lancaster refused to perform the song live or on TV, and so on the top of the pops performance for it, Jim Lee of Slade mimed the bass part.

Parfit was so drunk for that performance that he fell into the drum kit, though he would later claim that was a deliberate bit of business.

Eventually, Rossi decided he was going to quit the group for a solo career, and after one final tour in 1984 and a hit with a cover version of The Wanderer, the group split up.

But then, only a few months later, Bob Geldoff called on Parfit and Rossi to join Bandaid in the studio for the recording of Do They Know It's Christmas, though Rossi, again minimising Parfit's contributions, says in his autobiography that Parfit's voice was so shot from all the cocaine he did that day, and apparently the duo were the main source of coke for everyone in the studio, that Rossi had to overdub his part, mimicking his voice.

And a few months after that, Geldof told him that the only possible opening act for Live Aid was Status Quow, and the only possible song to start with was Rockin' All Over the World.

So begrudgingly, the group got back together for one last show.

That was meant to be the end, but the record label insisted that Status Quo owed them one more album, and that Rossi and Parfit's solo projects couldn't be released until they delivered that.

So, reluctantly at first, a new line-up of Status Quarmed.

Lancaster was not involved.

He and Rossi simply couldn't stand being in the same room anymore, and Rossi refused to have him in the band.

Lancaster sued to stop them using the name and lost, though Parfit and Rossi then bought out his share of the name.

Instead, Rossi, Parfit, and Bown brought in a new rhythm section, Reiner Edwards on bass and Jeff Rich on drums.

This new line-up would stay together for the next fifteen years, and Rossi, Parfit, Brown, and Edwards would remain the core of status quo for sixteen more years after that.

The group's comeback album, for which they were reunited with Pip Williams, produced one of their biggest hits, and one of the few that strayed from the formula.

The title track, In the Army Now, a cover version of a track originally a hit in the Netherlands for the duo Bolland and Bolland.

The son of God

stand up and fight.

You're in the army now.

Oh, oh, you're in the army.

That was a a massive hit in 1986, as was the album it came from, but their next album was their first not to make the top 10 since 1972.

And the one after that didn't make the top 40 at all.

By this point, Rossi's cocaine use was so bad that his septum fell out, and to this day he has a party trick of being able to floss his nostrils, which he does to warn kids off drugs.

This was a warning sign to him, as it would be to anyone, and he eventually got clean and no longer drinks or uses cocaine.

Parfit, though, continued his drug and alcohol abuse, and this contributed to a growing estrangement between the two, who by this time were colleagues, though still at this point at least amicable ones for the most part, rather than the friends they had been previously.

As their sales started slipping not hugely, but enough to worry them, they turned to ever more bizarre publicity stunts.

They re recorded Rockin' All Over the World for the charity Sport Aid, reworking it as Running All Over the World.

To celebrate their 25th anniversary in 1990, they released The Anniversary Waltz Parts 1 and 2.

The year before, one of the biggest hits of the year in the UK had been Swing the Mood by Jive Bunny and the Mastermixers, a truly awful record mashing together samples of pre-Beatles rock and roll hits and, for some reason, Glenn Miller's In the Mood, over a drum machine beat.

Crow's manager suggested that Quo do their own Jive Bunny style medley, doing Great Balls of Fire, No Particular Place to Go, Let's Dance, Red River Rock, Lucille and others over their standard chugging boogie, and it made number two in the charts.

They set a record by playing four full arena shows in four different cities in a 12-hour period, playing Sheffield Arena, Glasgow SECC, Birmingham NEC and Wembley all on the same day.

They rewrote Rossi's song Burning Bridges, a late 80s hit for the group, as Come On You Reds, and performed it with the Manchester United football squad, even though Rossi wasn't a football fan and didn't understand the new words.

That went to number one in 1994, though it was credited to Manchester United rather than to the group alone.

In 1995, for their 30th anniversary, they released an album of covers, ostensibly of their favourite songs, though rarely selected by the manager.

Titled Don't Stop, that featured various guest appearances, including the Beach Boys and a remake of Fun, Fun, Fun, which included a new verse Mike Love wrote for the record.

Well, she's making a turn, and it looks like she's coming around.

And I'm a little concerned, cause the town is closing on down now.

Well, jumping and burn for some feet, I'm getting around now.

And we

As a promotional stunt, the group sued Radio One for not playlisting it, and lost, obviously, but it reached number 24, making it the first hit the Beach Boys had had in the UK since 1988, and their last entry on the singles chart in any country to date.

It wouldn't be Status Quo's last, though.

The late 90s and on were past past their commercial peak, but they still had a further nine top forty hits after that, the most recent in twenty ten.

And indeed, of the fourteen albums they've made since their turn to a novelty act in the late eighties,

only one hasn't charted.

While their last hit single was in twenty ten, they've had five top ten albums since then.

Many of the more recent albums have apparently more serious recordings, but they've still been promoted with the same kind of stunts.

Appearances on Coronation Street, the world's longest running soap opera, as themselves, starring in a feature film where they get involved in a heist, that sort of thing.

In 2013, there was a brief reunion of the 1970s lineup of the group for Atora's The Frantic Four, but it ended rather acrimoniously, with Rossi and Lancaster on terrible terms again.

But Parfit's health was getting worse.

He had multiple heart attacks, and at least one cancer scare, but never gave up the drinking and cocaine.

The final records he made with the group were two albums of acoustic reworkings of the group's hits, titled, of course, Aquo Stick.

Pictures of Matchstick, Men, and you,

Garages of Matchstick, Men, and you.

The cover for the first album, in keeping with the band's talent for publicity, was a naked photo of Rossi and Parfit with just their acoustic guitars covering their genitals, and it was taken by Brian Adams.

Rossi has since said that Parfit didn't take part in the recording of the first Aqua Stick album at all, and that he wasn't on quite a few albums.

albums.

The video for that version of Pictures of Matchstick Men is themed similarly, with all five band members naked except for their instruments, and you can see the scars from Parfit's heart operations quite clearly.

In June 2016, between the release of the first and second acrostic albums, Parfit had his most serious heart attack yet, so serious that he was clinically dead for some time.

He was revived, but had at least a mild cognitive impairment.

The rest of the band got in a replacement and carried on touring without him, at first as a stopgap, but later admitting there were no plans to ever have him return.

Parfit spent the next few months trying to recuperate, and also working on a solo album.

He also wrote a proposal for an autobiography, in which he said he was leaving the group and, Over the last few years we've drifted a long way apart, Francis and I.

It's fairly obvious to me that he doesn't care very much about me, and the feeling is mutual.

He appeared to be getting better, but then he developed sepsis from an infection and died on Christmas Eve 2016.

Alan Lancaster died of multiple sclerosis in 2021.

John Cochlan tours with a status quo tribute band.

And Status Quo carried on.

Rossi, Baune and Edwards continued to tour, no longer playing the very biggest venues as they did from the 70s through the 90s, but still getting huge audiences.

They released a studio album in 2019, which once again went top 10.

But Francis Rossi said it was likely to be the group's last, that the royalties from streaming weren't enough to make it worth anyone's while making records.

He's still out there, still measuring success by turnover, and still rocking all over the world.

Apart from America.

in the spell called the drop and rock and rhythm of the sea.