Sometimes, a band works on an album and everything clicks. For Status Quo, their 1973 No.1 Hello! was just such an album. But that doesn’t mean there weren’t problems.
Given what we know of them today, it’s ludicrous to apply the term ‘one-hit wonder’ to Status Quo. This is a band that has notched more than 60 hits at home in the UK, spending more than 500 weeks – almost 10 years – in the charts. And that’s just their singles.
Nevertheless, from the success of 1968’s Pictures Of Matchstick Men, their first Top 10 hit, onwards, at several points in the band’s career the naysayers have thrown that undesirable tag at them. To be fair, a succession of name changes, personnel switches and flop singles that preceded Matchstick Men had hardly marked them out as contenders for long-term stardom. And after following their breakthrough moment with another misfire, Black Veils Of Melancholy, it took a song by Marty Wilde and Ronnie Scott (not the famous jazz musician), Ice In The Sun, to return Status Quo to the public eye.
But Status Quo (or The Status Quo as they were still known then) were made of hardy stuff. Six years of hard graft were not going to be wasted.
The ditching of their Carnaby Street psychedelic clobber and the arrivals of guitarist/vocalist Rick Parfitt and road manager Bob Young, both of whom would contribute hits at key moments, helped to galvanise Quo, who dropped the ‘The’, grew their hair and wore the tattiest, grubbiest jeans. Twelve-bar boogie became the name of their game, performed with unapologetic zeal in dimly-lit pubs and clubs up and down the country. Audiences that didn’t appreciate them were advised to fuck off as the band packed up and drove to the next venue. But many people did get off on Status Quo’s new direction, laid down on their third and fourth albums, Ma Kelly’s Greasy Spoon and Dog Of Two Head. Although neither of those troubled the chart compilers, and the group’s second keyboard player, Roy Lynes, ran out of patience on a train from London to Aberdeen in-between those two releases in August ’70 and November ’71 and left – thus reducing the line-up to lead guitarist/vocalist Francis Rossi, bassist/vocalist Alan Lancaster, guitarist/vocalist Rick Parfitt and drummer John Coghlan – against all the odds an unlikely industry buzz began to grow.
With sympathetic backing at last, and in spite of an entanglement with Pye Records, their manager Colin Johnson persuaded Phonogram Records boss Brian Shepherd to sign Quo to his hip imprint Vertigo. Shepherd handed o
