Status Quo

Alternative title: - "Guitars to The Stars (The other side of the Screwdriver)"

Status Quo and "What You're Proposing" (and what is that riff?)

Late in the craziness that was 1971, I was living alone in the infamous 13-room flat at No. 84 Overbury Avenue, in Beckenham, Kent U.K. The girlfriend had left, I was an unemployed mess and, passing the days noodling about on my Red Fender Stratocaster, which I'd purchased for about £100 very second-hand in 1969 (so it had to be of an earlier date's construction by some years).

Experimenting with tunings, for open mode and bottleneck, I chanced upon C-A-C-G-C-D.

In that cold and lonely kitchen, the seeds for a whole bunch of songwriting and a long career as a guitar technician were sown. Several months were spent just noodling about in what a friend (Rob Hendry) later named as "Devil's Tuning" and I developed some distinctive rhythms structured around that modal set of intervals on that "Strat" (®Fender). Later in 1972, I rather foolishly traded that guitar for a Zemaitis Les Paul style plank, complete with the usual fancy engraved metal plates. Dohh! (as it happens).

In 1972, thanks to the banding together of several mates from the Bromley and Beckenham area, the travelling band of loonies that went by the name of Silly Balls emerged. The idea was that you turn up to the "Silly Ball" in fancy dress and thus get in for half price. It was a mess but persisted for many "gigs" across the U.K. The Obelisk scene from the film 2001 was re-enacted with apes dancing around a giant "Surf packet". Some faces that moved on from that extremely bizarre scenario were Bob Suffolk and Tony De Meur of the Fabulous Poodles, and a character called "Gem" who briefly acted as manager to Toyah Willcox in her early career, following the demise of Silly Balls.

Many friends (and one escaped loony who burnt the place out in late 1973) came and went during my time in the depths and heights of the "Great Overbury Den". Arthur Brown ("Fire") came and stayed for six months through '72. Another lady who came to stay was Mary Finnegan, ex-girlfriend of David Bowie and founder of the Beckenham Arts Lab who introduced me to jazz pianist Keith Tippett (who bought my landscape painting) and also Julie Driscoll ("Wheels on Fire").

Roger Wootton, founder member of Comus, stayed for many months and during his stay, became firm chums with a former girlfriend of mine, Sheila MacLurkin and without any shadow of doubt at all wrote "It's A Mystery" (and I can say that because I was there), later successfully recorded by Toyah Wilcox although Roger never got credited with this composition; somehow it got credited to one Keith Hale, which is completely ridiculous in my opinion. Roger never used that name as a pseudonym and I don't think he ever sold the rights to the song to anybody - so it really is a mystery!!! Just to repeat that: - Roger Wootton wrote "It's A Mystery" and I was there when he did it.

Slipping back a few years to 1965/66 I made the acquaintance of Bernie Frost and briefly "courted" his sister, "Smudge"; Celia Frost. Bernie and I traded guitar techniques for a while, as I gave him a few basic beginner's lessons and he very quickly picked it up to a fair degree of competence. This enabled him to develop his very fine musical ear and vocal skills to a career as a session singer and songwriter, coming to good fruition as co-writer to Francis Rossi of Status Quo.

Quite independently, my guitar fixing career brought me into contact with Status Quo through their dealings with South Eastern Entertainments, a music shop on the main drag at Lewisham, S.E. London in 1977-78, where I had a residential workshop. Francis Rossi saw one of my original design electric axes with large holes drilled in it and allegedly laughed - but then proceeded to drill a large hole in his own Telecaster (®Fender), the stripped and stained green with Cuprinol timber preserver that's his trademark.

Throughout 1977-78 my wife-to-be, Ann and I, were saving towards a mortgage deposit for a house of our own and finally made the move in April of 1978. Frank Taylor, the owner of the music shop decided it made more sense that I should take on Status Quo as private customers, rather than deal with them through the retail outlet and that's the way it went.

The first thing to happen then was a call to fly out to Phonogram Studios at Hilversum, where Quo were recording the album "If You Can't Stand The Heat, Get Out Of The Kitchen". It was the first time I had ever flown and my entrance to the studio complex was heralded, quite freakishly, by a lightning bolt splitting the old tree in half that stood in the centre of the studio complex atrium. This blew every fuse in the place and it took a while to reset all the mains trips. Quite an entrance!

These were the days when Alan Lancaster, generally known at the time as "the luckiest man in showbusiness" believed he was recording bass for the band but never realised that his parts very rarely or never made it to disc. Those parts were usually replaced by Francis Rossi after Alan had gone home. Live on stage, his plectrum-picked style on tape-wound short-scale strings were masked or entirely replaced by Rick Parfitt's low"B"- tuned shuffle rhythm parts. The same thing often happened in the recording studio to the drum parts of John Coghlan - Francis would re-do them. This was common knowledge in the music business but mostly only came to light after the band's re-formed line up around the time of Live Aid or before - or after - who cares? Personally, I couldn't give a shit.

For several days in Hilversum Phonogram, I worked my way through all of the band's guitars, setting them all up ready for action. Over that period, they installed me in a 5-star motel but late one night at the studio, I sat up drinking with Francis and Rick. As ever, I turned the conversation around to UFOs and my desire to experiment with anti-gravity drives, to develop efficient interstellar transport and do away with fossil fuels and the stupid rocket ship firework technology with which we are currently (still) lumbered. Over the same evening's conversation, I showed them the weird tuning I'd been using since 1971 and played a riff from one of my songs to demonstrate how it could be used to perform a catchy shuffle rhythm.

Rick studied my finger movements and assiduously learned the riff from me.

In the interim period between that evening and my next visit to Phonogram, Hilversum, for the recording of "Whatever You Want", I had built a bunch of guitars for Francis and Rick and their producer, Pip Williams. Then one day in 1980, just as "What You're Proposing" was a substantial hit, I was having dinner with Francis at his house (with his mother), when in walked Rick Parfitt.

He just couldn't wait to tell me how, not only did he use that riff I'd showed him (and that he'd learned) to write the song, but also that the guitars used on the track were exclusively built by me. Moreover, the lyric had been based upon the conversation about how nice was "what I had been proposing" that evening back in Holland. Apparently, my frustration at not having the money to develop green technology power sources was construed as "runny-nosing" (see lyric).

I suspect he still wears a lot of gold and drives a car with a cherished number plate.

Status Quo always referred to me as "The Cosmic Cowboy". It was most likely supposed to be a back-handed way of bringing me down because they probably saw me as something of a threat intellectually, like many people erroneously do. Whatever is the truth of the case, repeated attempts to even just leave a message to say "Hi!" have fallen on deaf ears. Fuck 'em. Their loss, not mine.

Alternative title: - "Guitars to The Stars (The other side of the Screwdriver)"

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