quo.htm

In 1978 I moved out of town. Lewisham, S.E. London had become unbearable. My lady fiend (that's a mis-spelling but I'm going to leave it) could not go out on her own without being hassled by very pushy Rastafarian brothers. Sad but true. I had been doing guitar service work for a little known band called Status Quo for some months. They were a multi-million album selling band but had never cut the mustard in the USA, so didn't really count on the world stage.

The music shop with whom I had been housing my then workshop handed "Quo" over to me as private customers upon my move out to the countryside of Kent since they didn't want the hassle of middle-man handling at a distance; I was no longer in the "garden shed".

Soooo... the summoning came to go out to Hilversum, via Amsterdam airport; and that was to be the first time I'd ever flown. Quo were recording the "Rocking All Over The World" album and wanted every one of their many guitars to be "race-tuned". Arriving at the airport I was greeted by a roady with a big cardboard sign, held high, proclaiming "Steve guitar man". From there, into a Chevrolet at a hundred miles per hour across the flat lands of Holland to Phonogram studios, a complex of high-tech environment arranged as a square around a grassy atrium, centre of which stood a huge old oak tree.

At the very second I entered the studio, bag of tools in hand, there was a massive lightning strike, which split the oak tree in two and blew every fuse in the entire complex. Some entrance!

Rather like in the Bowie story, upon my second visit to Holland, for Quo's album, "If You Can't Stand The Heat...", I had a late night conversation with the band in the 5-star motel. It was, as usual for me at the time, all about antigravity research and how much better the world would be when we had finally managed to control fusion power. This earned me the title: "Cosmic Cowboy" or just "Cosmic", to which it got abbrieviated.

Some weeks later, the single from that album, "What You're Proposing", had gone to number one in the UK charts and I was invited over to lunch at Francis Rossi's house to talk over the specification for yet another custom guitar that he wanted built. In walked Rick Parfitt, their rhythm guitar player. Rick took great delight in telling me that not only was the song all about that late night conversation (about antigravity research and how much better the world would be when we had finally managed to control fusion power) but that they had used the riff/lick I'd shown them to build the song around; and... that they'd used my guitars exclusively to lay down the track.

They don't like it up 'em. Not at all they don't. I had to be a fairly mean player to stay one step ahead of my customers and that quite often led to conflict and a clash of egos. The "rock stars" I worked for were frequently intimidated by my playing, which is a bit sad really. I rarely play these days. The last time I picked a guitar up was to move it out of the way so I could get to my painting easel...

Mail to the Web master of Status Quo's site

Hi, Mike. I know Francis will smile at this.

It was the summer of 1977 that I got a workshop (my second) behind the old "South Eastern Entertainments" shop in the main drag at Lewisham, SE London, having previously held surgery at Wing Music, Bromley where I'd got to do stuff for Jeff Beck, Gallagher & Lyle, Tom Jones band etc. Many apochryphal stories abounded about the things that Francis had got up to after making something of a success of the band. Like how (and I don't know if it's true) he ran the wheels of his car over a brand new guitar outside the shop after having just bought it from the infamous Frank Taylor, the proprietor. For several years prior to my joining that shop I had been jamming with Bernie Frost and taught him some basic stuff on guitar. We used to be quite close. Is he still around?

I was busy "re-inventing the wheel" - designing weird and wonderful guitars way into the night; crazy stuff - Leo Fender had, after all, done a very fine job indeed many years before. The idea of having holes in a solid guitar wasn't my original thought; I'd seen it done in some American pop magazine photo and decided that it looked really cool so decided to incorporate it in a design I was working on at the time.

A very strange-looking multi-holed and unfinished bright orange prototype left my bench some time in 1977 to be shown to Francis, who was in the process of buying something else from the shop at the time. It went via some shop "roady" or other. Apparently Francis opened the case, laughed out loud and shut it again. Nevertheless, he drilled a hole in the famous green machine immediately after seeing my monstrosity. The hole was purely cosmetic and really just a statement about guitars not being holy and sacrasanct objects: - just a plank. I did a fair amount of service work for the band and Pip Williams that year.

Around the same time, I was doing some service work for Marc Bolan, rolled around the floor with baby Roland Bolan and I had his dad's stage guitar on my bench the day that he died. Eric Clapton had given Marc an old Les Paul covered in white emulsion paint, strings, pickups, tuning machines - the lot! My job was to remove the paint from the bits that mattered (frets, nut and bridge) but to leave it all over everywhere else. That way, Marc had a painting by Clapton and a guitar that played just fine.

When in I moved out of town, out into the wilds of Kent the following year, 1978 , the shop let me take Quo as private customers and I spent many days in Marquee studios, Chipping Norton and Threshold (the old Decca studios) "banging nails into" various axes. The visits to Phonogram, Hiversum were particularly memorable, except that the old adage: "if you can remember it you can't have been there" rings very true! It was amazing to behold Francis re-doing the bass and drum parts after the dis-interested Alan Lancaster and John Cochlan had packed up and gone home. A well-kept secret indeed! Andy Bown was playing keyboards at the time and I remember him saying, "I used to be interesting"! A great quote...

Soon after moving out to the country, I made a very strangely shaped guitar (inspired by the Minoan double-axe) which Bernie Frost took along to Francis, who said he liked the neck and feel but "couldn't I make something more like a telecaster?" That is where the 'Mouse' series started. I made something more like Leo Fender's masterpiece.

Out in Holland, Rick Parfitt wanted me to replace the bridge on his blonde telecaster with a 'slab' Gibson unit, which job took most of a day in the studio workshop, having to saw the original tail plate in two, in order to accomodate the very different bridge design. It turned out fine though and it was heartwarming to hear the very first notes of "Band Aid" played on that bridge modification (so he kept it that way for at least seven years).

The "Mouse" series of guitars extended to about ten prototypes in the end; Field Mouse, Harvest Mouse, Super Mouse, Minos Mouse Extra Mouse etc. They mostly had piezo bridge pick-up systems; I used to make the transducers from the raw crystal, which gave me a feel for the properties of the crystal (lead zirconate titanate) which in turn enabled me to design the machine described in the pages of this web site. (I have just begun prototype experiment on the machine.)

It was due to a late-night conversation in Holland with a very depressd Alan Lancaster, with Rick Parfitt present, that "What You're Proposing" got written. I was always a UFO nut (not so much these days) and it had been my life-long ambition to come up with the answer to a real anti-gravity drive (laugh). That was the subject of the conversation and I taught Rick a riff that I played in a strange tuning which he adapted for the song - and they used my custom guitars exclusively on the track.

When the chancellor changed the tax threshold for "time spent in the country" (1982/3?), I ceased to be a tax loss to the very many "name" bands that had become my regular customers and I had to diversify (get a different, maybe even "proper" job). So I went to work in an ICI chemical factory; conveyor belt stuff. Utterly tedious three years.

There was never any regular "season" to the guitar technician trade; it could just come and go like the wind and it was usually a case of "feast or famine" but through 1988 -1995 I ran a very busy workshop in Tunbridge Wells, employing casual labour and driving Transits-full of guitars around the Kentish music shops. During that period, I made a numbered series of nearly sixty direct telecaster copies, and that included hand-made pick-ups, plates, bridge saddles et al, having succumbed to the commercial drift of taste. Fact is, I couldn't make them fast enough. Everybody loves a telecaster!

It all came to a horrible end in 1995 when I was commissioned to write and produce a catalogue of humourous jingles for the launch of Talk Radio UK. It was a con (fraud) and I lost everything; house, wife, dogs, business and temporarily my peace of mind. Apparently it's called severe clinical depression. My teeth and hair fell out with the stress.

I went undiagnosed for two and a half years but ended up in the loony-bin in 1998, culminating in attempted suicide (failed obviously). Most suicide stories are not in the slightest bit funny but mine is hilarious:

Lost in a sea of alcohol and half-consciousness, not wanting to be awake, I had lost track of the days and nights, let alone the date. So when the announcement came on Radio 4 that the film company who'd made "Titanic" such a huge hit had decided to do next -"Teletubbies - The Film" - and all of the world's greatest Shakespearian actors were queuing up and hassling to get a part in it, I decided that it was time to leave the world; so it was tablets, whisky and polythene bag time for me.

Anyway, I got out of the crackpot museum in early summer 1998 and went for a holiday in Wales (- it was going to be Ireland but I reckoned £180 one-way to take the car was unreasonable). Spent three weeks in among the wild horses and sheep (and there are some really good looking ones of those) and upon returning to Kent only to discover that I'd been burgled in my absense; I turned the car around and came back to Wales, where I still live.

I rarely play guitar now except that the Welsh love a bit of Beatles in the pub (something that simply couldn't happen in Kent) and can't get enough of me, toothless and bald - which is bizarre. I even have to sing "Rockin' all over the World" and they all join in. But I don't have a workshop and never do any guitar service work. I "exist" on incapacity benefit as I am, as a direct result of the Talk Radio rip-off, unemployable, suffering from horrifically regular convulsive belching fits which seem to be incurable. Nasty, but you can't fight money. Win some, lose some.

Here's a copy of the Mona Lisa which has taken nearly two years to do:

- and I work on my website. I have food and the air is free ;- as is the sea -