Status Quo Keep It Real
Two men, three chords and 30 years of unchanged melody.
Night & Day (Mail on Sunday), July 1997
‘They take a vein from your leg, and chop it up four times.’
Rick Parfitt, the big-haired, blond singer-guitarist with Status Quo for the past 30 years, is reliving his quadruple heart-bypass operation of a few weeks ago. It was a rock star thing, he says, brought about by women, divorcing women, smoking, alcohol, drugs and almost three decades of climbing on stage to ask people if they would, or would not, like to ride in a paper plane.
He’d come back from a tour of Japan and Australia, and he was looking really good. He was tanned. He felt great, at 48. He got a pain in his right arm, but was always one of those people who believed that if you ignore something long enough, eventually it will go away. So he went on tour with the band again, this time to Dubai. When he returned, the pain reappeared.
‘I was making some tea at home, and I was walking up the stairs,’ he says, ‘and this time the pain went across my chest and down my other arm, and it intensified and dropped me to my knees. At this point I can’t move or breathe and I think I’m dying.’ When it eased, he called his doctor in Harley Street, and went to see him at three the following afternoon, and by nine he was under the knife. It took almost five hours to rebuild his heart.
Eight weeks later, Parfitt is able to talk of the incident as an occupational hazard: these things happen when you’re in Status Quo. He’s well again now, sitting in the rainy garden of his publicist’s house in Uxbridge, Middlesex, not far from his own place on the Thames in Teddington. Parfitt’s publicist has produced a list of his life’s work, a monumental catalogue of albums shipped, gigs played, milestones reached. The figures are impressive and ludicrous: 110 million units sold; 51 British hit singles, more than any other band; a cumulative seven-and-a-half years in the UK charts; 4,000 live shows for 18 million people. The band are the only living musicians since The Beatles to feature as Royal Doulton ‘character jugs.’
These figures do not satisfy Parfitt. He must have more, he says. At the beginning of August he hopes to add to the stats by playing a concert with the rest of the band at Norwich City football ground, and in December it’s a British arena tour, and then round the world again in a quest to find a reason to stop. The fans demand their presence, and it would be unfair to them to quit. His two former wives demand the alimony. His soul desires the adulation. These days, Status Quo endures because that is what Status Quo does. It’s its job.
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