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 one dollar 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 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 A-M in corner. But those are from 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 quo have sold, according to their PR at least, over 100 million records worldwide. I say it 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 57 top 40 singles over here. In the headline stadium gigs for decades, starred in their own feature film, and I doubt there's a British persta live who was aware of music at all during their commercial peak from roughly 1970 through 1990, who couldn't sing along with at least half a dozen of their biggest hits. The big enough that the first time I saw the Beach Boys in 2001, the Beach Boys were status quo support act. This quo 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 70s. 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. When they got that massive by playing, as the phrase always associated with them puts it, heads down no nonsense, boogey, music poised somewhere between blues rock, punk, early metal and pop, almost all of it based on 12 bar blues, with twin guitars playing distorted and sped up truckbarry rhythm guitar shuffle over four on the Floyd Rums. This is a band whose biggest hits collection was titled 12 Gold Bars, and who released an album in 2007 titled In Search of the Fourth Corde. The whole appeal is that they make simple, almost thuggish music for head banging too, and they've become superstars doing just that. Which makes it all more extraordinary than 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, and 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 Stata's Quo, or as they were in 1968, The Stata's Quo. The story of Stata's 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 a feminine. 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 internalised 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 his show, how many records a certain song had sold, and how did that compare to other songs, or the 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 chucking R&B influenced guitars and two-part close harmony of the Avaly Brothers on songs like Wake Up Little Suzy, which is an influence that can be heard in almost every status quo hit. The other is an Italian pop song translated into English, which is more the played from as a small child, Papa Piccolino, a UK hit for Diana Deca, whose chucking rhythm and simple melody echo through many of his later songs. By the early 60s, Rossi was into hard rock and roll, people like Gervily Lewis and Gene Vincent, and Alan Lancaster persuaded him to form a group with Rossi and guitar and Lancaster on bass. They got in another friend, Alan Key, who's brother played in Wolf Harris's backing band and allowed Key to use his spare guitar. First Jaworski on keyboards, and a drummer named Barry Smith. Smith was soon out of the group as Rossi was sleeping with his girlfriend, and then his place came John Cochlan. Key soon also quit, he decided that in two years when they turned 16 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 lineup of Rossi, Lancaster, Cochlan and Jaworski started performing as the specters. The group got a major, 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, as summer season playing at Butlin's Holiday Camp in Marenhead. There they had to play two 50 songs 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-riched sound alike 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 pay 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. Pie were a singles-oriented label, and the specters 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 specters first single turned out to be a cover version of the Shelley Bassy hit, I Who Have Nothing. That was, understandably, a flop. The group's second single was a song called Herdy Girtyman written by Alan Lancaster, and the same song that a label made done of them would record a year or so later. That also failed. As did a third single, a note for no cover version of the Blues Mugu's We Ain't Got Nothing Yet. The career of the specters looked like it was at an end, but Schroeder 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 1967 rather than 1964, so they became traffic. And then they found out that Steve Wimwood of the Spencer Davis group had just found a new group also called traffic. They changed their name to traffic jam, and released almost but not quite there, a song with a Bassy. 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 Parfitt to be fucked a harmonies and add a second guitar, with the secret hope that Parfitt 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 Maharad Ali's were barlow's initial suggestions, but when they said they wanted something more like Pink Floyd or A Man 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 Piccadino, the novelty song he'd always loved, but in the style of Jimmy Hendrix's recent hit, Hey Joe. While noodling like this 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. 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 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 Idji Kupark, which had come out a few weeks before the session. And then newly fashionable Wawa 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 Cafe, but after recording it the label flipped it, and pictures of Matchstick Man 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 Madeline Bell, who had yet to go on to success with Blue Mink, which was making your living as a backing vocalist for Dusty Springfield, Serge Gainesburg and the Rolling Stones, and who was playing the cabaret circuit during soul covers, including a version of It Takes Two where she would do it with Rossi. The success of the single didn't lead to much in the way of immediate financial rewards with the group though, as like most bands of the time they were on a staggering low royalty rate. Except for Rossi, who as the songs 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, of all which Alan Lancaster always thought of 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 were still writing songs and making records, and had recently released an album containing a sunshine pop song he'd co-written with a writer named Ronnie Scott, not the famous saxophone player by Evan Justclobona, a different man of the same name. Wilde apparently came into the studio with the group and Schroeder, and contributed to the arrangements 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. Picture-esque matchstickable messages from the status quo, 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. Nope, for no remix of Tomy Rose Sheeler, the lemon-piper's green tambourine, and the Bee Gees' Spix and Specs. And then, the group spent two years getting nowhere fast. After two top 10 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 tore supporting other bands like the small faces. After icing the sun, their next four singles failed to chart, as did their second album, Spare Parts, for which they dropped a definite article from their name and just became State Disquare. Spare Parts is, unlike picture-esque 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 our Sergeant Pepper, and it's actually a pretty good example of the style, with songs titled Things Like The Clown and Mr. Mime Detector. 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 roadmage of an occasional onstage harmonica player, contributed. Young would write lyrics from many of the bands of originals until 1980, and again from 2000 on. It was very nearly the last State Disquare album. By this point, Parfid and Russi, especially Russi, had fallen out with Lancaster so badly that Russi tried to fire him from the group, but took him back when they couldn't find a replacement. There was talk of the groups splitting up altogether, and some talk of Parfid and Russi replacing Steve Marriott in the small faces, before the faces decided to go with two members of the Jeff Beck group. Parfid and Russi also had a short-lived attempt at forming a power trio super-group, 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, for 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 old 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 not their heads vigorously to the music, with their long hair falling over their faces. Rossi, Parfits and Lancaster started doing this on stage, with a spread-legged match-o-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 Road House Blues by the Doors. Hearing that song triggered something in Parfits and Rossi, particularly, and they started to push for a different kind of music. Their main influences were the second wave of British Blues bands that were coming up at that time, people like Fleetwood Mac and Chicken Shack, who we haven't got to in the main narrative yet, but who were playing heavy electric blues influenced by people like El Mar James. They started working on songs with devolved 50s influences to the front as well, twin guitars and vocals at the Evely Brothers, bruggy shuffles like Gerrilly Lewis or Chuck Berry, but with melodies closer to Bill Haley or Danny and the Juniors than the Blues Year End of Things. In the emerging metal subculture they took a love of loudness in the riff. The first result of this was Down the Dust Pipe, a non-album single written by Carl Voseman, an Australian songwriter who had written for the Bee Gees and would go on to the stage. At first that record was met with Autor Division. Famously the DJ Tony Blackburn, after playing it for the first time on the radio, said Down the Dust Pipe 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 of the top of the pop's budget albums released around that time. The piano player and Harmony Vocalist on that version was soon to become better known as Elton John. The first album by the new style staker's quote, Mark Haley's Greasy Spoon, shows this new version of the band not yet quite fully formed. There were 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 the 9 minute progressive rock track, is it really me, got to 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 Haley's Greasy Spoon was the last album to feature boy Lanes. 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 it 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 dust pipe 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 of Fog 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 Phanagram that had been set up for progressive, hippie music. The label had mostly heavy rock acts like Black Sabbath and Uriah Heep, as well as progressive acts like Gentle Giant and Aphrodite's Child, Mod 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 Quarrel. But the group's first album for the label, Pile Driver, became the start of a consecutive run of 13 top 10 studio albums for the group, reaching number 5. 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 of 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 Plane, reached number 5 and started a string of hit singles. Every single they released for the next 17 years would make the UK top 40. The singles would mostly be written by Rossi and Bob Young, and would mostly follow with very similar pattern, like their next big hit, Caroline. Or they're only number one, down, down. After a few years of essentially making the same record over and over, tension started to rise within the group between Rossi, 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 10. And then in 1977 they brought in a keyboard player, Andy Bound, 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 Foggety's Rockin' All Over the World, still sounds like all their other hits, and indeed is one of the tracks most associated with the main written, where Foggety's version is almost unknown. But the rest of the album is slightly popier 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. The Lancaster disliked the single so much he refused to take part in the video, which instead features a life-sized poppy-dance string dressed in a leather jacket and jeans, only shown from the back are in long-shot, so most casual viewers wouldn't realise it isn't a real person on the base. 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 had spent close to £2 million on cocaine in the 70s and 80s, and Parfit and Lancaster both presented 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 lamb masses any of the others. All four full members, Bound was still a Salaried Session Player, moved away from the UK mainland for tax purposes, Rossi to the Republic of Ireland, Parfit to Jersey in the Channel Islands, coccled into 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 Bound with Parfit rather than musty on lead vocals. But things continued to get worse for the group. The dump Williams' 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 equipped was John Cochlam, 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 Kertcher, formerly of the band Honeybus, and the resulting album OnePlus 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. The were arguments over what would be the single from the album, Lancaster wanted one of his songs, Old Vag 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 MSF Blues, and then with Margarita Time, which became one of the group's biggest hits. Lancaster refused to perform the song live on TV, and so on the top of the pop's performance for it, Jim Lee of Slade, Mime 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 the cover version of The Wonderer, the group split up. But then, only a few months later, Bob Geldough called on Parfit and Rossi to join Band-Aid in the studio for the recording of Do They Know It's Christmas, though Rossi, again minimizing 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. The Rossi had to overdub his part, mimicking his voice. And a few months after that, Geldough told him that the only possible opening act for Live Aid was status quo, and the only possible song to start with was rockin' all over the world. So big grudgingly, 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 we looked at it first, a new lineup of status quo formed, 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 Bound brought in a new rhythm section, minor Edward Zombace and Jeff Rich on drums. This new lineup would stay together for the next 15 years, and Rossi, Parfit, Bound and Edwards would remain the core of status quo for 16 more years after that. The groups come back album, for which they were reunited with Pit 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 of engineer hit in the Netherlands for the duo, Balland and Balland. The title track, in the Army now, a cover version of a track of engineer hit in the Netherlands for the next 15 years, and Rossi then bought out his share of the name, and lost, though the album was released in the Netherlands for the next 15 years, and Rossi then bought out his share of the name, and lost, though Parfit and Rossi then bought out his share of the name, and lost, though Parfit and Rossi then bought out his share of the name, and lost, though Parfit and Rossi then bought out his share of the name, and lost, though Parfit and Rossi then bought out his share of the name, and lost, though Parfit and Rossi then bought out his share of the name, and lost, though Parfit and Rossi then bought out his share of the That was a massive hit in 1986, as was the album it came from, but the next album was their first not to make the top 10 since 1972, and the one after that did not 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 duds to warm 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 users could cane. Perfect though continued his drug and alcohol abuse, and this contributed to a growing a strangement 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 getters running all over the world. To celebrate their 25th anniversary in 1990, they released the anniversary Waltz Parts 1 and 2. The year before, while the biggest hits of the year in the UK have been swing the mood by jive bunny and the mastermexers. A truly awful record mashing together samples of pre-beetles rock and roll hits, and, for some reason, glim-millers in the mood, over-drunned machine-beet. Quo's manager suggested that Quo do their own jive bunny-style medley. Doing great balls of fire, no particular place to go, let stands, red river rock, loose seal and others, over their standard-tugging boogie. And it made number 2 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 SEC, Birmingham NEC and Wembley all on the same day. They rewrote Russi'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 Russi wasn't a football fan and didn't understand the new words. That went to number 1 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 their 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 Lovevoke for the record. As a promotional stunt, the group sued Radio 1 for not playlisting it and lost obviously, but at each number 24, making it the first hit the Beach Boys that 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 passed their commercial peak, but they still had a further 9 top 40 hits after that, the most recent in 2010, and indeed of the 14 albums they've made since their turn to a novelty act in the late 80s, only one hasn't charted. While their last hit single was in 2010, they've had 5 top 10 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 haste. That sort of thing. In 2013, there was a brief reunion of the 1970s lineup of the group for a Thomas the frantic 4, but it ended rather raccomoniously, with Rossi online castor on terrible terms again. But Parfits' 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 record he made with the group were two albums of acoustic re-workings of the group's hit, titled, of course, A Quo Stick. The cover for the first album, in keeping with the band's talent for publicity, was an naked photo of Rossi and Parfits with just their acoustic guitars covering their genitals, and it was taken by Brian Adams. Rossi has since said that Parfits didn't take part in the recording of the first acoustic album at all, and that, he wasn't on quite a few 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 Parfits' heart operations quite clearly. In June 2016, between the release of the first and second the Quo Stick albums, Parfits 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. Parfits 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 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 Cochland tours with a status quo tribute band, and status quo carried on. Rossi, Bound and Edwards continue 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. The following rocking rolls on the front of the door, yeah, and rocking rolls on the floor, and rocking on the way, on the down, round and round, with swaying windies well in the spell of the broken rock and rhythm of the sea.
