In the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal, Status Quo's Rick Parfitt says: 'Everybody was at it on Top of the Pops' http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/rockandpopfeatures/9639096/In-the-wake-of-the-Jimmy-Savile-scandal-Status-Quos-Rick-Parfitt-says-Everybody-was-at-it-on-Top-of-the-Pops.html
Rick Parfitt lived the rock ’n roll lifestyle to the full in Status Quo’s heyday. But he knew 'there was something not right’ at the BBC’s flagship show
Quo vadis? Rick Parfitt, left, and
Francis Rossi, the two remaining members of the original Status Quo, at
the UK premiere of 'Hello Quo' in London Photo: Tim Whitby/Getty Images
Rick Parfitt will be down in a minute, says his PR. “He’s just collecting his
thought.” His thought? “His thought,” repeats the PR, nodding. I sit down
and try to collect mine. Is it possible that the 64-year-old only has one
thought, and if so, how will I keep this interview going for the allotted
hour? I suppose he has done a lot of drugs, and that £3,000 a week of
cocaine could do some serious damage to the brain cells, but just one
thought seems to be pushing it a bit. How would you dress or feed yourself
or be able to play the guitar for Status Quo?
So lost am I in this particular thought that I’m taken aback by the slight
figure who comes through the door with an electric cigarette in one hand and
a latte in a glass – so chic! – in the other, skin like sandpaper and a
solid gold guitar hanging on a chain around his sun-beaten neck.
Rick Parfitt doesn’t look like Rick Parfitt, because he has cut off all his
hair. If the long hair didn’t exactly suit Parfitt – it was never a good
look – it did at least make him look like the faded Seventies pop star he
is. But now he just looks like a man going through a midlife crisis, one who
has raided his 16-year-old son’s wardrobe: scuffed-on-purpose jeans, shiny
trainers and a white T-shirt under a bomber jacket.
What has happened? As well as double denim, waistcoats and only knowing three
chords, the Quo are famous for having the long, flowing tresses of Timotei
girls – indeed, I wonder if all those locks hid the fact that they only had
one thought between them.
“I’ve always had great hair,” nods Parfitt, when I mention its sudden
disappearance. “It’s always been thick and long, and I’ve never had a
problem with it. I never even conditioned it, you know – it made it too
smooth. But earlier this year we were filming our movie in Fiji, and it
started coming out by the comb-load. I was putting it down the loo, flushing
it, combing it again and even more was coming out. I started the movie with
a full head of hair and by the time I’d finished a month later, it was just
strands.”
He sighs and shakes his head. “It looked awful. It was so thin. So I came back
and immediately had it cut short. People said, 'Don’t do it! Leave the hair,
what is the matter with you?’ But it had to go.”
He explains that the reason he is late is that he is having a bad hair day. “It just won’t go at the moment,” he says solemnly. He has always had his special, set hairdressers, he says, but because it’s so short now he thought he could just go to any old place.
“So I was in Teddington [near his house in Middlesex] and I went to the local place for a trim. And, oh God, I didn’t realise that it’s a different world. A different world! You have to get it done properly. So it’s still recovering from this awful haircut and I just can’t do a thing with it.” Does he feel like Samson? “Sorta,” he says, fiddling with his electric fag. “No matter what I wear, if my hair don’t look good, I don’t look good. And I’m a bit annoyed about it – waking up this morning with another day of it just not going anywhere.”
We are here to talk about the new documentary, Hello Quo, which has been made about the band. It features everyone from Paul Weller to ELO raving about how wonderful Status Quo are. Having just made a comedy rock movie as well – Bula Quo! (that’s Fijian for Hello Quo), which features 12 of the band’s songs and sees Parfitt brandishing a gun and crashing through a pane of glass – they seem to be having a bit of a moment.
They have been together for almost 50 years now – Francis Rossi and Parfitt are the beating, if slightly clogged, heart of the band, the only original members left – and have sold almost 120 million records. Their most recent album, Quid Pro Quo, was released last year. They still tour (this winter they will play the O2 and various other arenas), and the night before we meet, Hello Quo is launched with a premiere in Leicester Square.
It was “all right”, says Parfitt, but “it wasn’t very well arranged”. He didn’t like having to get out of the car and walk across the square. “We said, 'We can’t do that, we’re in a movie!’ Logistically, it was a bit of a disaster, but the movie itself was good, if a bit too long. And the lip- and hand-synching was out as well. It should be spot on. This is the modern age.”
The documentary is two-and-a-half hours long, and the friend I watched it with said it was “like the sequel to Spinal Tap, but without the laughs”. Sir Cliff Richard appears a lot, people allude to all the sex and drugs and the rock ’n roll of the time, and a beaming Linda Nolan appears on screen to let us know that during the Quo’s heyday, “terrible things went on that a Nolan sister shouldn’t know about”. There is footage of them on Top of the Pops, a show they appeared on 106 times. All of which begs the question… well, was he surprised by the revelations about Jimmy Savile?
“No,” says Parfitt, “because a lot of us, like everybody else, we all kind of knew. We were all kind of suspicious of Jimmy Savile. We all felt, 'There’s something not right there.’ But we didn’t know what, and it was kind of in the back of our minds. But you could never quite suss him out. We did so many Top of the Pops, so many Jim’ll Fix Its…”
And did he ever see anything? “No, of course not. At Top of the Pops in those days, all the bands were down in the cellar, as it were – just endless dressing rooms. It was like being in a prison. If you watch those early editions of Top of the Pops, all the girls there have got skirts up to their chins. There were a lot of girls knocking around downstairs and people would invite them down to the dressing room.
“There were loads of little birds about at Top of the Pops, of course there were. What used to happen upstairs in the upper echelons where Savile and the other DJs were – well, I never, ever knew where their dressing rooms were.”
He doesn’t stop talking, Parfitt – you’d think he was still on cocaine, although he says the last time he took it was eight or nine years ago, “with my ex-partner, at our place in Teddington, I think, or at a restaurant”. Anyway, on he goes about the Top of the Pops years, which makes for uncomfortable reading, even though he says that all the girls were 17 or 18.
“I think that anybody would be forgiven around that time if you’ve got a girl in the corner – everybody was doing that. There were loads of girls, and they were willing. They were all coming into the dressing room – you’re walking into a rock band’s dressing room with a skirt up to your chin. Everybody was messing about. Of course we were. Everybody was groping everybody – that was it at Top of the Pops, everybody was at it.”
Those were different times – times when rock stars slept with several women at once and never paid any tax and nobody batted an eyelid. Indeed, Parfitt used to go off on “tax years”, where he’d live in Jersey and go out of his skull with boredom. Today he mostly lives in Spain and is part of “a government-recommended scheme whereby you invest in a data centre [company], which I think is fair enough”.
Anyway, back in the Seventies and Eighties he took loads and loads of drugs, and it sounds like he was a truly unpleasant husband and a very absent father. “I used to drive into town on a Monday night, and I would be away until Wednesday evening with coke, booze, fags, non-stop. No sleeping. I didn’t want to sleep.
“I don’t know how my wife at the time stood it,” he says, before remembering that “she didn’t for too long [he has been married three times and has had five children; his first daughter, Heidi, drowned in the family pool when she was two]. You come home and try to force your eyes shut and your heart’s beating and you think: 'God, I want some more coke.’ But you’ve had two days of it and you’ve got to stop now. You’ve got to sleep and have a normal day and then go back and do it all again.”
Didn’t he ever feel miserable, depressed about all the drugs? “No, I just took more,” he says simply.
He claims not to regret it, though. “No. I missed my kids growing up and I lost my little daughter as well, but that was just a pure accident. That’s something to live with, but you never get over it.” He doesn’t recall changing a nappy. “I don’t remember anything about them being young. I lost all of the Eighties, pretty much.”
Now he lives with his wife Lindsay and their four-year-old twins. He had a quadruple heart bypass in 1997, and the only vestige of rock and roll left is the cigarette he lights during our interview, flapping his arms around so as not to set off the hotel’s smoke alarm.
He still drinks a bit – the night before we meet, he and Lindsay went to the private club Morton’s for a civilised bottle of champagne after the premiere. That was odd, he says, because when the band went there in the Eighties, “it was all about the Niki Lauda”.
The what?
“The Niki Lauda. The powder.”
How’s his health now? “It’s great. I haven’t had a heart attack for months. The last one was in December. I had it on the Thursday, they operated on the Friday, and then I played the NEC on the Saturday. The nurses said to me, 'Don’t jump around on the stage,’ so I just walked around.
“That,” he says, taking a drag on his electric cigarette, “is rock and roll.”
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