I Talk Too Much Page 7

  Life was full of hard-won lessons suddenly. After the tour ended, when I did get around to asking about where the money was from all the sales of ‘Pictures’ I discovered, the same as almost everybody else did back then – and to this day, I have no doubt – that our deal with Pye entitled us to exactly half a per cent of the wholesale price of the record. A single in 1967 retailed for about seven shillings, or 35p in today’s money. Wholesale price would have been approximately half that. Which meant we received approximately 0.087 pence per copy sold. My arithmetic might be off there but let’s just call it bollocks. We had a slightly better deal with Valley Music in terms of songwriting royalties, but even that was heavily watered-down after they’d licensed the song innumerable times to various labels around the world, hardly any of which ever reported back sales or royalties – at least not to us. That’s before you get into all the tricky little clauses in the contracts that cover such things as the recording of the material, everybody’s wages and ‘breakages’ – which related back to the old shellac disc days when records broke very easily, but had little to do with the new wobbly vinyl we were releasing our music on – all of which gets deducted from your income.

  None of which, I have to be honest and admit, overly concerned me when I received my first royalty cheque for ‘Pictures’ – £1,200. Roughly speaking, around £20,000 in today’s money, though you also have to factor in that the purchasing power was huge in 1968 compared to now. For £1,200 in 1968 you could get a mortgage on a decent-sized house in south London, or a flash new car like a Ford Capri (whey-hey!) for about £800. So I nearly fell over when I opened the letter containing the cheque. I thought, it must be a mistake. I won’t tell anybody in case they ask for it back. Then I showed Rick and he started to hyperventilate. But he was pleased for me. He also vowed to try writing some more songs. None of us ever expected to make that much money out of the group. Suddenly everyone wanted to come up with a song for our next single. This could be a pain in the arse. Not because I wanted to hog the limelight but because the others would come up with some daft ideas. Alan decided we should be making music like Pink Floyd and wrote a song called ‘Sunny Cellophane Skies’, which he also sang. It wasn’t at all bad, but it wasn’t ‘Interstellar Overdrive’. Rick and I also had our first real goes at trying to write together, coming up with ‘When My Mind Is Not Live’, this time with Rick singing lead vocal. It was very much a song of its time, to put it politely. Meaning: about as cheesy and self-consciously ‘sixties’ as our stage clothes were at the time.

  The biggest culprit in trying too hard to come up with an obvious follow-up to ‘Pictures’, though, was me when I wrote the song that did become our next single, the cringe-inducing ‘Black Veils of Melancholy’. Apart from the horrid title, it was essentially ‘Pictures’ all over again, only not as good. Right down to the – cover your ears! – ‘Poppa Piccolino’ guitar tickle at the intro. That said, no one was more surprised than me when it spectacularly failed to follow the success of ‘Pictures’. I thought I’d cracked it, reinvented the wheel: done the classic follow-up, same as the original but just a bit different to keep you interested. That was just supposed to be the way things worked back then. Wrong. I’d come up with a dud. Oh dear …

  By then I’d spent the money I’d made from ‘Pictures’ on a deposit for a place of our own for me, Jean and Simon. I’d managed to get us out of Jean’s mum’s house by then, thank God, but only as far as a room in my parents’ house. Now, with the royalties I received, I was able to afford to rent us a flat in Lordship Lane, Dulwich. Bob Young and his wife had rented a flat in the same building. It was probably Bob who told me about the empty flat. Our place was directly above theirs, and both flats were above the local Co-op supermarket on the side of the building where they had their own morgue. I believe you can still get very reasonably priced funerals from the Co-op. Bob and I would joke about ghosts but neither Jean nor I gave a shit. It was just great to finally have a place of our own.

  What was left of my royalty money went back into keeping the band afloat. When ‘Black Veils’ was a flop I really did think I’d dropped a bollock. For all I knew, we were destined to only have one hit. Thankfully, things didn’t go that way. In fact, over the years, ‘Pictures of Matchstick Men’ has turned up in all sorts of unexpected places, from the soundtracks to movies like Men in Black III and computer games like Mafia 3, to cover versions by Camper Van Beethoven and even Ozzy Osbourne. The thing most people in Britain recall most about the single, though, is of course the clip of us miming to it on Top of the Pops in all our ‘swinging’ Carnaby Street clobber, which seems to turn up on every documentary ever made about the 1960s.

  We certainly had a look. We couldn’t take any credit for that though. It was this young gun named Tim Boyle who turned us on to all that. Tim worked as an agent at the Arthur Howe agency and booked all our gigs. It was Tim who first took us to places like Take 6, Lord John and the Carnaby Cavern in Carnaby Street. We got to know the main guy, Colin, who was also one of the usual dancers in the audience at Top of the Pops. Colin was ultra cool and would tip us off as to which other groups had been in that week and bought clothes. You’d pull a jacket out and Colin would go, ‘No, don’t pick that, Stevie Marriott was here yesterday and he bought one the same.’

  Rick and I had our trousers specially made for us at a place in Soho called Bona Clouts – real crotch-grabbers with massive 22-inch bell bottoms. We’d have our hair styled in the same places all the other groups did too. It was a real scene. One of the major worries when ‘Black Veils’ was a flop was that we wouldn’t be able to afford to go to any of these places again. Not long before that, Pat had sat us all down at rehearsal one day and told us: ‘OK, boys. You can now all give up your day jobs. From now on I want you to only concentrate on this.’ By then we had our own tour manager, which felt very big time, and we were out on one of those multi-act package tours you got back then, doing twenty-minute sets alongside Gene Pitney and Love Affair. Suddenly it looked like we might be applying for our old jobs back. We were living on our nerves, in that respect. Even when things went well, as with ‘Matchstick Men’, none of us ever thought we would last as a group more than five years, tops, if we were lucky. That’s very much the way things were back then. And if we weren’t lucky – well, the charts were littered with acts that were one-hit wonders. You’d be in despair when a record didn’t do well, which at that stage was most of the time, and over the moon when one did, like ‘Matchstick Men’, but only for a couple of days before you started worrying again about whether you would be able to follow it up.

  Fortunately, this time we were saved by the songwriting team of Marty Wilde and Ronnie Scott, who gifted us a really catchy little ditty called ‘Ice in the Sun’. Marty had made his name as a singer in his own right in the late fifties with successful covers of American hits like ‘A Teenager in Love’ and ‘Sea of Love’. Ronnie was an original pop impresario, promoter, manager and hit songwriter. Both of them were old-school hit-makers and, frankly, we were lucky to have them on our side. Ronnie worked for Valley Music and Marty had already recorded his own version of the song, which I thought was really good. It was backed with a full orchestra but what we did with it was much more ‘psychedelic pop’ – which Marty had overseen himself in the studio. The masterstroke was when, on an inspired whim, he ran a coin over some piano strings – making that little zing sound you hear on the chorus. It was like adding tinsel to a Christmas present, the finishing touch that set the rest of it off nicely.

  It certainly did the trick for us, giving us our second top 10 hit that year. God, I was pleased. Though mainly just relieved. We lived to fight another day, and spend even more money in some expensive Carnaby Street boutique. On a practical level it meant we could now go out and headline some shows on our own, at which we even started to get screaming teenage girls. Well, usually about fifty of them a night. But who’s counting? All right, we were. Especially Rick, who would get very jealous when girls
would write their names and phone numbers in lipstick on the side of our van. I used to get the most. ‘I love you Mike xxx’ – as I still was then. Not because of my looks – Rick was always going to be the winner in the group in that department – just because I was the singer. I understood that. Rick, though, didn’t like that at all. He even took to writing his own name in lipstick on the van when he thought we weren’t looking. ‘I love you Ricky xxx’. He used to consider himself the master-forger but we all knew it was Rick using his own lipstick.

  Did we ever take advantage of the situation, though? Of course we did. We were teenage boys living high on the hog at the height of the free-love sixties. It would have been weird not to make the most of it. It didn’t mean I didn’t love Jean and my baby son. It just meant I was a normal, hot-blooded, stupid teenage boy. Not just that but one that had been on the telly and now had screaming girl fans throwing themselves at him. The fact that we would be away on the road, staying in a different hotel every night, only added to the temptation. The next morning though I would always be filled with remorse, thinking: what have I done? I’m not going to lie and say we all felt like that. None of the others were married or had kids yet. They were entitled to do whatever they pleased. For me, it was a big deal, though. Even later on, when we became properly famous around the world and the temptation and opportunities were even greater, I always used to get my mind in a tangle about it. I would find myself in my room after a show with some drop-dead gorgeous girl and I’d be in the bathroom pretending to have a piss, already changing my mind, wondering how best to get rid of her. Then when I came out she’d already be in the bed. Well, what was a poor lapsed Catholic boy to do?

  I wouldn’t say we were getting too big for our boots but we were starting to get used to being on the telly and radio. Walking into the dressing room, we’d sing, ‘Hi ho, hi ho/We are the Status Quo/With a number one we’ll have some fun/Hi ho, hi ho …’ It was Alan that came up with that one.

  The other really big thrill was putting out our first album, which we did in September 1968. In another in-no-way-intended-to-cash-in-on-our-biggest-success move, the album was titled Picturesque Matchstickable Messages from the Status Quo. The title was another Alan suggestion and, to be fair, we thought it was very clever. You could see what we were going for. It was a bloody silly title, though, which of course proved to be too much of a mouthful for people to ask for in record shops. Nevertheless, it did sneak into the UK top 10 for a couple of weeks and went top 10 in West Germany and number 12 in France. Considering we hadn’t even played yet in those countries it was pretty mind-boggling to be told that.

  The other reason I was pleasantly surprised, shall we say, is that, to be honest, I didn’t think it was very good. Albums – LPs, as they were known – were still second thoughts to most record companies back then, unless you were the Beatles, and we were definitely not in that category. As a result, the twelve tracks on the LP included eight tracks that had been singles or B-sides already, shored up with covers of things like ‘Spicks and Specks’, an old Bee Gees hit from 1966, ‘Sheila’, another old hit, this time from Tommy Roe, and ‘Green Tambourine’, which had been a big hit for the Lemon Pipers not long before.

  It also contained what was supposed to have been our next single, a fairly dreadful bit of pop plod called ‘Technicolour Dreams’, which had been written by a mate of John Schroeder’s named Anthony King. It was kind of like ‘Pictures’ all over again but without any of its redeeming features, like a memorable chorus and verse and intro and … oh, forget it. As long as it was a hit we weren’t worried. Only we never got a chance to find out. Pye scrapped it when the LP dropped out of the charts. It meant we ended 1968, our big breakthrough year, on a bit of a low.

  Determined to take the bit between our teeth and really make sure we came up with a sure-fire hit this time, Rick and I sat down together and wrote a song called ‘Make Me Stay a Bit Longer’. Listening back to it now, it might just be the first thing we ever did as a group that contained musical signs of the band we would become in the seventies. It didn’t have that insistent shuffle that we would perfect on our biggest seventies hits, but it certainly had a more straight-ahead rock feel than any of the singles we had put out as the Status Quo before then. Rick and I were fairly chuffed with it. It was released in January 1969, just as we were about to go on tour in West Germany with the Small Faces. Both ‘Pictures’ and ‘Ice in the Sun’ had hit the charts there so we were really looking forward to it. We were bolstered by the fact that as we left ‘Make Me Stay a Bit Longer’ was picking up rave reviews in music papers like Disc and Melody Maker. We kept phoning home to find out where it was in the charts – only to be told it hadn’t even got into the top 100.

  When we got back from the tour we were so disillusioned that Rick and I started talking about leaving and forming our own group. At one point Rick and I had managed to persuade Pat to sack Alan. But then we had some gigs coming up so we agreed to take him back on a three-month trial – that lasted for the next twenty years. By now, though, it was clear to me that Rick was the only real friend I had in the group. Alan still thought of himself as the leader and was just harder to get along with than Rick, while John and Roy were older and less relatable to us at that age. Plus, Rick and I thought we’d written a pretty good song together. The music critics seemed to agree. But for some reason it had flopped as a Quo single. I don’t know if a touch of it’s-not-us-it’s-them crept into our thinking, or whether we were just fed up of being in a band with Alan, who still treated us like we were lucky to be in his group, or John, who could fly off the handle and be very off sometimes. It was probably to do with all of those things. We were just looking for excuses probably. Also, we had just had a really enjoyable few weeks on the road with the Small Faces, who Rick and I just felt we had more in common with at that stage. They were cheeky chappies. We were cheeky chappies. They had come back to London knowing that Stevie Marriott was about to leave the group and that it was probably the end for them. At which point, me, Rick and Small Faces drummer Kenney Jones came up with the great idea of forming a band together.

  Our bright idea was we were going to form a power trio. You have to remember, power trios were all the rage at that point. There was Jimi Hendrix with his band the Experience; Taste with Rory Gallagher; Blue Cheer, who were a huge American band. Biggest and best of all was Cream, with Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce. The fact that Cream had just broken up and Jimi Hendrix had now gone beyond the idea of a power trio, bringing in all sorts of extra musicians, had left a gap in the market, we felt.

  It just seemed to be the way music was going in 1969. The flower-power era was over and bands were getting ‘heavy’, to use the then latest phrase. Stevie Marriott had left the Small Faces with the ambition of starting a much heavier-sounding group, which he did with Humble Pie. Even the Beatles had abandoned the whole Sgt. Pepper’s thing and released a hard-rocking single with ‘Get Back’.

  So there we were, me on lead guitar (though how I ever hoped to be thought of in the same bracket as Hendrix or Clapton I don’t know) and Rick switching from rhythm guitar to bass, and Kenney on drums, jamming for all we were worth in secret in this rehearsal room in west London and … it just wasn’t happening. Expecting Rick to switch to bass wasn’t even the half of it. We would probably have gotten a dedicated bassist in anyway and let Rick get back to rhythm guitar, which he was getting really good at, if things had developed. It was Kenney, bless his heart. He was brilliant at improvising on the drums but he just couldn’t stop playing. It was like he’d been let off the leash and just went wild, all crazy rhythms and percussive beats. It was great – except it didn’t leave any room for me and Rick to come in, or not for long anyway. After the first day Rick and I looked at each other and went, ‘Er, it’s not working, is it?’ The next day we were back rehearsing with Quo. We never told them. They found out eventually, of course, but by then it was much later and things had changed again.

 
Chapter Four

  Three Grand Deutsche Car

  We came home to more doom and gloom when our next single, released in April 1969, barely scraped into the top 50 – another song by John Schroeder’s mate Anthony King, a horrible, soppy ballad that Rick sang lead vocal on this time called ‘Are You Growing Tired of My Love’. It didn’t help that Rick was being told to sing it like a Bee Gees song. It was all very hit and miss, with an even gloomier B-side written – and sung – by Alan called ‘So Ends Another Life’. We had only been the Status Quo for barely a year and we were now officially has-beens. Still, we’d managed to come back before – we would again, right?

  Maybe.

  Looking back now you can see the seeds that were sown for the rewards we would reap a couple of years later, but at the time 1969 felt like one big downer. Even the songs we were recording sound flat and uninspired now. At the same time, we were all starting to write more – including the first co-writes with our road manager, Bob Young, who I would later go on to write some of the band’s biggest hits with. We met Bob in 1968 when he was working as tour manager for Amen Corner. We were on one of those package bills together with Gene Pitney as the headliner. Bob had been offered another job with Jethro Tull, who were big news at the time. They had offered him £10 a week. We offered him £15. Bob came with us.