After five decades on the road – and still rocking – Status Quo’s Rick Parfitt has already suggested his nickname should be changed from the Wild Old Man of Rock’n'Roll to the Mild Old Man of Rock’n'Roll. And even though the guitarist’s past excesses are the stuff of legend, it’s hard to reconcile the image of hellraiser with the devoted dad chatting down the phone while his three-year-old twins play happily in the background.
But there’s more to Parfitt than boogie anthems and being the blond foil to Francis Rossi’s now-ponytail-free barnet. For example, although the sight of Quo’s twin Tele attack has passed into British rock iconography, the truth is Rick doesn’t actually spend every waking hour, legs apart, with a white Fender dangling from his neck.
‘I tend not to pick up a guitar that often when I’m at home here in Spain,’ he admits. ‘I actually play quite a lot of ukulele at home! I enjoy tinkering around on one of those. I get out the old British songbook. If I do pick up a guitar it tends to be in the evenings after we’ve had a couple of glasses of wine, and I just sit and have a singsong.
i’ve got some very strange instruments here. I’ve got a four-string Gibson, which is from the late ’30s or early ’40s – it’s a kind of blues guitar. I’ve got a couple of Gibson acoustics that my wife bought me and which are absolutely beautiful. I’ve got one Telecaster here and a couple of things on the wall that I can’t even think of the names of.
‘Then in England I’ve got all sorts of things -Rickenbackers, Steinbergers. I’ve got a 1957 Fender Escjuire which is an amazing guitar. I’ve got five or six replicas of my stage Tele and then the guitar itself, which is a 1962 [for the record the Quo website says it's a '65]. That’s my “rock’n'roll Range Rover”. That’s a tough old brute, that one.
Though the famous Telecaster is steeped in history, from Live Aid to Knebworth, there’s no way Rick would retire it to a display cabinet. ‘Oh no, I use that one on every show. I literally don’t know what I would do if anything happened to that guitar because I’ve never found a Telecaster that plays like it.
‘Of course I’ve matured it over the years and it’s bespoke to me – I’ve had all the original saddles taken off, and the strings now go over a bridge and through the body. And they’re thick strings on there — I think my bottom E is a .056″ or something. Because of that, even if you drop it, it still doesn’t go out of tune. It’s so solid and rigid, which is exactly how I need it for my role because I give it a terrible thrashing every night.
‘I play it extremely hard, and it absolutely loves it. It’s funny because when I pick Francis’s guitar up I can hardly play it – it’s strung so much lighter than mine. In fact any guitar with an unwound G, I can’t play it… I feel like I’m going to break them.
‘But that’s just what I do. The way I play may come across as fairly easy to copy, but you’ve got to really lay into the guitar and get a certain flex in the right wrist to keep that rhythm going all the while. It mustn’t let up. And for that, that white Tele of mine is just the guv’nor.
So what is it about Teles that has made the Quo sound so recognisable? T think if you listen to my Telecaster on its own through any given amp, a Marshall stack or whatever, it’ll sound like quite a rocking Tele,’ muses Parfitt. ‘If you play Francis’s through a Marshall stack it’ll also sound like a good, rocking Telecaster, but not vastly different to any other, really. But for some reason when you put the two together, it just sounds like Quo.
‘Francis always plays different inversions of any given chord to me — I’ll play the F at the bottom and he’ll play the F at the top, and we get the combination. But we don’t analyse it, we just do it.
‘There’s just something in the sound of those Teles – they’re so basic. I never ever touch the tone switch, I just put it on and plug in. It’s the same with the effects I use – I have a gain pedal for the opening of Caroline and few other bits, and I use a flanger, but that’s all. Of course it’s your fingers, your hands, your wrists, that’s where the feel and everything comes from. I’m
not a person for having an effects board with 30 or 40 different effects. I’m too old for all that, I wouldn’t be able to remember what’s what. All I’ve got on my board is “loud” and “flange”!
‘So for me, as a rhythm guitarist, I think that the Tele is a wonderful guitar. I couldn’t imagine doing what I do on a Gibson. I know that they’re lovely guitars but I don’t think a Gibson would take what my Tele will take. A Gibson isn’t as hard, it’s a bit arty-farty for me, too many knobs on it. The Tele is a rock-hard guitar. Simple as that, really.
Of course Status Quo may now be national treasures, a certified British institution – a fact that was cemented when Rossi and Parfitt were awarded OBEs in 2010 – but that’s the result of more than 40 years of hard work. The beginning, for Rick, was very different.
‘I started when I was 12 years old in the local club in Woking. Then I joined a cabaret trio called the Highlights – with twin girls – and we had a season at Butlins. That’s when I met the Spectres [featuring a certain Francis Rossi]. The trio packed up and the Spectres asked me to join. That was great because I always wanted to be in a rock band. I was incredibly lucky to be in the right position at the right time.
The Spectres became Status Quo, and the rest, as they say, is history. T remember Francis and I walking back from London one night in the early days. It was about two o’clock in the morning and we’d just played a gig in town, and we were walking back to where we were staying. We were saying: “Wouldn’t this be fantastic if we could hold this together for five years? Could you imagine putting 50 grand in the bank, we’d be made for life?” Those were our early thoughts… little did we know.
‘People often ask me about the highlights of my career and I’m always tempted to say Live Aid and things like that. But when I look back I think of first hearing myself on the radio with Pictures OfMatchstick Men. I nearly fell over! Or when we were first asked to do Top Of The Pops… that was just incredible.
‘And the OBE – when the letter came through the door I was so thrilled. But you don’t expect things like that to happen. Then all of a sudden you find yourself going to meet the old bird at the palace there. It’s just amazing and it continues to be.’
Two of the most significant reasons for Quo’s continued success are all the hard work on the road and the band’s infectious brand of rock and roll. There’s no better band to get a party started – and this Christmas there’s a new type of party coming to a UK arena near you… Quofest.
‘We’ve been developing this idea for quite some time,’ Rick says. ‘We want to make it kind of a party – the Quo Christmas Party. If we can develop this into the Quofest every year, who knows? Maybe we can have even more artists on and perhaps eventually turn it into an all-day thing.
‘It feels nice to have Roy Wood on because he’s an old pal and we’re all fans of Wizzard and ELO. It’s an honour to have him on the line-up because he’s such a nice bloke and when he does that Christmas song of his the roof just comes off the place. We’ve also got Kim Wilde who is lovely and great live too. So I’m hoping it’s going to be a really good ticket for the people and everyone is going to enjoy themselves.’
The London venue on the tour will be the O2, and for a band that must have played every pub, theatre and arena in the land it’s surprising to hear this will be Quo’s first visit. ‘I’m excited. It’s a lovely venue and I hope we get a few people in because it won’t look very good if it ain’t full.
‘But it’s nice to be doing the arenas this year – it makes it easier on our bodies as well. Our British tour is normally 32 shows and this year it’ll be 11, so in every respect it’ll be much better. The one thing you can be sure of at arenas is that the dressing rooms are going to be nice and the facilities are going to be good.
‘Francis and I always get to the gig quite early -about one o’clock – so it’s great to have decent facilities. I’m not saying we have to have the dressing rooms painted blue or pink, or the coca-cola has to be at an exact temperature… our rider is very easy, we just want water and a few chocolates. Francis and I don’t drink before the gig, we just want a decent place to get ready.’
Life on the road is pretty healthy these days. ‘We always take a chef with us – I don’t eat any pasta, I don’t eat any potatoes, 1 rarely eat any bread. I give myself a break once a week and have something with some carbs in it, but for the most part I just stick to protein.
‘That gives me enough energy and it keeps me fairly slim. I don’t want to be too slim these days because I
don’t think it really suits me. Francis goes to extremes – he exercises every day and he eats much the same as me, so he’s very slim and that’s how he likes it. But we both find we’ve got plenty of energy to do the show. ‘The only problem I find I have these days is with my brain. It’s overloaded. I’m finding it very difficult to remember things. Even on stage I think to myself, now what are we doing? We’ve been doing this set for years and the other night I missed a song and didn’t realise until we came off. Everybody said to me, “You do realise you missed Creeping Up}” And I had to say, “Oh God, I did, didn’t I?” You go to the mic sometimes now and think, oh, what do I sing? It happened to Francis to the other night at the start of Caroline.’
So if you go to Quofest this December enjoy the party and make sure you sing along – if only to help the boys on stage remember the words.