“We used to work with Fleetwood Mac a lot on the uni circuit. You could sit down beside the stage and they’d start playing - der-der, der-der - for an hour and a half. We wanted to do that”: Francis Rossi on how Status Quo developed their 12 bar boogie

Status Quo have a reissue of the 1977 album Live! coming out and Francis Rossi has been talking to the Guardian about the band’s long career and the evolution of the Quo’s deceptively simple 12-bar boogie style.

Rossi has previously talked before about how hearing The Doors’ Roadhouse Blues was a turning point, but it seems that the shuffling Italian-style music he heard in his South London family home was also a factor.

“There are so many things in our lives that are shuffles, even nursery rhymes – Nellie the Elephant,” Rossi said. “Our marches do that. It appealed to me and it still does.”

Then there were the bands Quo were supporting in the late '60s: “We used to work with Fleetwood Mac a lot on the uni circuit. You could sit down beside the stage and they’d start playing – der-der, der-der – for an hour and a half. We wanted to do that, to be that.”

For decades the band’s trademark style was the butt of jokes. It’s only in recent years that more respect has been paid to how tricky it was to pull off, and how much skill that took. Indeed, in one of the last joint Rossi/Parfitt interviews before the latter’s death in December 2016, they pointed this out.

“It has to be done with 100 per cent commitment, and played with power and conviction,” Parfitt told MusicRadar. “And if you don’t do that, it’ll sound pathetic. There is something about the two Teles, when Francis and I lock in with our right hands. There’s a chemistry.”

“It’s not as easy as it sounds,” his partner added. “Because if you don’t believe in it, it sounds like a sack of shit. There’s millions of people doing it. You hear that shuffle everywhere. It’s just that Quo do it in your face.”

In the Guardian interview, Rossi also talks frankly about his relationship with Parfitt, which from the outside always looked close, but which, it seems, deteriorated over time.

“He was my greatest friend, but someone got to him,” Rossi says. “Somebody knew it was a weakness with him. And as we got older it got worse and worse. I always saw it as the two of us, because we made a great pair – and I think we were a bit unfair on the rest of them.

"We would sit in the car and hold hands and dress the same just to wind people up, and I think certain people decided to get between the two of us.”

63 years after they first formed Quo are still an active concern and Rossi is currently on a solo tour. For ticket details click here.