The single stolen riff that inspired Status Quo’s entire back catalogue: “We’ll have some of that!”
A lot of dissenters would argue that Status Quo got incredibly lucky to have made it to be as successful as they were by basing their entire musical ethos on writing songs with three chords, but to say that’s all they were capable of is perhaps a little unfair to the British rock band.
The fact that the band had a sense of self-awareness about the simplicity of their music should endear people to them a little more, as if they weren’t so brazen in admitting that their songs were a little rudimentary, then the claims would be a little more justified. After 28 albums into their career, they were still able to joke about this, naming their 2007 album In Search of the Fourth Chord.
But it wasn’t always this way, as the band had released some earlier material which, while still not showered with complexities, saw them attempt to write a handful of songs that leaned into psychedelic pop and rock territory rather than playing with the same tried-and-tested 12-bar blues formula.
Songs such as ‘Pictures of Matchstick Men’ from their debut album are far removed from the direction they would head in during the 1970s when releasing the likes of ‘Down Down’ and their cover of John Fogerty’s ‘Rockin’ All Over the World’, but what exactly was it that drew them in this direction in the first place, and why did they choose not to return to the more psychedelic sounds that they’d been praised for in their early years?
According to the band themselves, a lot of the development of their trademark sound stems back to an inebriated night at a club in Bielefeld, Germany, when Francis Rossi and Rick Parfitt heard a particular song come on that completely changed the atmosphere of their surroundings in a way that felt entrancing to them.
Upon hearing The Doors’ ‘Roadhouse Blues’ roaring over the sound system at the X Club, Rossi and Parfitt were suddenly enlightened to a different style of playing that they hadn’t previously considered as an approach that would fit them as a band, but from this moment onwards, they decided that they would base their entire sound on it.
Speaking to Total Guitar, Rossi said: “We’d been watching this couple dancing, and when ‘Roadhouse Blues’ came on, they started moving together in a totally different way. Really sexy. The tempo was like, ‘Wow!’ We were mesmerised by it. The way that guy and that girl moved was just phenomenal. And we just looked at each other and said, ‘We’ll have some of that!’ So that song is where the Quo 12-bar boogie shuffle came from.”
They would then begin to double-track the guitars on later releases, such as 1972’s Piledriver, in order to bulk up their sound and generate something more powerful, and Rossi would go on to claim that his and Parfitt’s approach to playing guitar was even altered by this eureka moment.
“Fundamentally, what made it work was Rick playing that rhythm, and I played off that,” he added. “He played very much downstrokes and I had the left swing stroke, and they worked so well together.”
Neither member particularly cared about being regarded as simple, or as having been playing derivative songs for decades, because in order to be able to maintain that energy is something that other musicians who are considered to be of a higher calibre could never do. Status Quo wanted things to be straightforward so they could never wear themselves out, and it worked a treat.
