I Talk Too Much by Francis Rossi

Author:Francis Rossi
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781472130174
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2019-03-14T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

Twelve O’clock in London

Demand for tickets to our farewell, the End of the Road tour, was incredible. That said, a combination of comparatively soft sales of Back to Back in Europe and virtually none in Australia, plus the fact that I wanted to get the thing over and done with as soon as possible, meant that our ‘final’ tour only lasted about three months.

We did five big shows in Ireland. Eight big shows in West Germany. Two in Switzerland, France and Sweden and one in Holland, followed by the forty-two shows in Britain. All finishing with the grand finale in front of 60,000 fans at the National Bowl, Milton Keynes.

I sat down and looked at the tour itinerary and was happy with it. No one else was happy with it. The record company made it very clear to us that they saw the whole thing as a disaster for our career. They were quite blunt in their summation, which they put simply like this: the day Quo stopped touring was the day Quo stopped selling records. The day Quo stopped selling records was the day Quo no longer had a record deal. The day Quo no longer had a record deal was the day Quo was finished.

So what? I was sick and tired of the band.

A fourth single was released from Back to Back in the middle of the tour, a version of a song called ‘Going Downtown Tonight’ by a new guy I’d discovered named Guy Johnson. On reflection it was a piss-poor record, with chirpy keyboards and synths replacing the guitars, and with that heavily processed drum sound that was suddenly popular in the eighties. It wasn’t much of a hit, barely getting into the top 20. Alan was clearly disgusted by the whole thing and having to deal with his reaction was just another reminder of why it was the right time to end it all.

Pete Kircher and Andy Bown were going to be OK once the end came. They would no doubt get work with other bands. But poor Ricky was absolutely beside himself. He stood to make a lot of money from the End of the Road tour. We all did. But he was still spending it like there was no tomorrow. I was hardly a role model, in that regard, having split from my wife and kids and taken to shovelling most of my own money up my nose. But Rick took being a spendthrift to new dimensions. He was still always buying cars, Mercedes, Porsches, a Corvette Stingray. Always crashing them then buying new ones. Always throwing parties, always high on life and everything it had to offer him as a rock star. He was also, as usual, embedded in some incredibly tangled relationships with various glamorous women. He had moved in with Debbie Ash for a while, becoming a surrogate dad for her daughter Candie, whose dad was the stunt rider Eddie Kidd. Then that ended and he hooked up again

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