Piledriver

Product Information

AL: We very much played as a band, we didn’t do much of that one at a time stuff that bands do today. All of that stuff on Vertigo was played live. None of it was played individually like playing in the studio on your own – except for the vocals, we always did the vocals separate. Consistent but fairly pedestrian. It just doesn't sound like The Quo. You may need a drink after listening to all of this. Status Quo land 500th week on Official Albums Chart". officialcharts.com . Retrieved 24 December 2016. JC: I’ve always played a lot of stuff with what they call four-on-the-floor, four beats to the bar on the bass drum. Played hard and loud, that’s what makes the people leap up and down and do that Quo dance, shuffle. A lot of drummers don’t play four-on-the-floor, they do two to the bar, it doesn’t work, you have to play four to the bar, for the shuffle, which I’m pleased to say I’m good at.

FR: All of a sudden the engineer would come in and say, “You’re going to have to stop”, because the Chinese embassy next door was sending morse code messages and they were coming through our amplifiers! It was hilarious at the time. Someone’s sending a message to China, do-do-do-doo-do-doo-do-do, all you’d have to do is sit down and work it out! FR: It’s not necessarily my decision to end it now, but it can’t go on without me, and I’m not going! [laughs] I think it’s fine to have it one more time and then that’s it. The friday gig at the famous New York Academy of Music with Savoy Brown, ELO andManfred Mann was cancelled. AL: I wrote ‘A Year’ with Bernie Frost, a guy that John had introduced us to. He had this one line, he played it for me once at my house, “da-da-daa-da-da-du-da da-da-la,” he says, “that’s all I’ve got”. I took it from there. It’s got a certain vibe, we thought about playing it live, but it’s quite a down sort of song. When you’re young the things you think about are sex or death, and I guess sexual death is what that song is about! Losing someone you love. ‘A Year’ was one of those one-offs, I was just trying to make a nice dramatic song.Offiziellecharts.de – Status Quo – Piledriver" (in German). GfK Entertainment Charts. Retrieved 22 April 2018. Alan Lancaster: At Pye Records we were in our evolutionary days, if you like. We sort of graduated while we were on Pye and our producer at the time John Schroeder (a very good producer) realised it was going in a different direction, the bluesier boogie direction. He let us have a bit of free reign, and that’s when we made Ma Kelly’s Greasy Spoon, which was the start of the change, then we did Dog Of Two Head. John Coghlan: I remember we were in Germany in a club and this ‘Roadhouse Blues’ came on and the audience loved it, they were leaping about, having a good time, so we put it in our set and it paid off. The second acoustic album suffers because the strongest songs were chosen for the first acoustic album.

I really don't recommend anything but you could listen to Cross That Bridge and Burning Bridges for a bit of a laugh.AL: It was a lovely big room with high ceilings and it had a fireplace in it. It was a massive so you could all play in it together and the sound wouldn’t smash your ears when you played hard. We’d play in the soundroom together and we used to call it the ‘magic circle’, all facing one another with John behind us and the lovely high ceilings would just pass it out and we would play and play and play, and in a few takes we’d have it down.

London Paris Theatre - this gig was recorded by the BBC and pressed onto a transcription vinyl disc in limited quantities. This is one of the rarest QUO recordings and has been heavily bootlegged, both on vinyl and CD ("Roadhouse Blues" and "It Was Just A Good Name - and One That we All Liked") Pedley, Dean. " Status Quo: Piledriver (Deluxe Edition)". Sea of Tranquility . Retrieved 15 December 2018. All songs published by Valley Music Ltd. except "Junior's Wailing" published by Artist-Musical Productions/Franklyn Boyd Music Ltd.; "Roadhouse Blues" published by Doors Music Company (erroneously printed "Door Music Company"); "Bye Bye Johnny" published by Arc Music Corporation Lonely Night" (Lancaster, Young, Rossi, John Coghlan, Parfitt) (B-Side of "Break the Rules") – 3:16

On The Go

AL: Piledriver was one of our natural albums. Our first big hit. We were playing that stuff on stage in concert and usually when you’re recording you’re making an album and you haven’t played the stuff before and you’re getting it all together and writing and then the album is made and then you realize when you’re playing them live that the recording was a lot better. But with Piledriver we were playing that stuff live and when we went into the studio we were ready to go! So that’s what I mean by natural, we didn’t have to work on the songs or write too much in the studio. JC: When someone told me that, that there were grown men crying, I said, “Christ! We weren’t that bad were we?” RP: On our first European tour, Francis and I went out to a club. The Doors’ ‘Roadhouse Blues’ came over the sound system. There was this couple dancing really kind of slinkily to this dunk-du-dunk-du-dunk-du-dunk kind of rhythm and I just looked at him and he looked at me and the hairs stood up on our arms. We thought, well, we’ve got to play that! That was really the start of the Quo style of music, the 12-bar blues shuffle rhythm.