Piledriver

Product Information

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") The album was released in December the same year, and reached the highest position of #5 in the UK charts, spending 37 weeks there. [13] Pennanen, Timo (2006). Sisältää hitin – levyt ja esittäjät Suomen musiikkilistoilla vuodesta 1972 (in Finnish) (1sted.). Helsinki: Kustannusosakeyhtiö Otava. ISBN 978-951-1-21053-5. Francis Rossi, a man's man". The Independent. 23 October 2011. Archived from the original on 26 May 2022. 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.

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. I really don't recommend anything but you could listen to Cross That Bridge and Burning Bridges for a bit of a laugh. All songs published by Valley Music Ltd. except "Roadhouse Blues" published by Doors Music Company (erroneously printed "Door Music Company") 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. Tour Crew: Bob Young (Tour Manager), Mal Kingsnorth (Sound engineer/Equipment), Paul Robert Lodge (Roadie/Stage Equipment) Management: Gaff Management Manager: Colin Johnson / Billy Gaff The friday gig at the famous New York Academy of Music with Savoy Brown, ELO andManfred Mann was cancelled. JC: ‘A Year’, ‘All The Reasons’, ‘Big Fat Moma’, they’re great songs and those three guys are great songwriters, as is [Quo roadie and collaborator] Bob Young.

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 JC: When someone told me that, that there were grown men crying, I said, “Christ! We weren’t that bad were we?” Lonely Night" (Lancaster, Young, Rossi, John Coghlan, Parfitt) (B-Side of "Break the Rules") – 3:16 FR: It’s a learning curve for me because I hear ‘nostalgia’ and I think, “Puh! Bad word." But it’s not! We all have nostalgic feelings about all sorts of things. I could see these people at the shows and they were crying. JC: I’ve never smoked cigarettes in my life because I hated the idea of it, but I remember having a joint because in those days as far as I was concerned it was pretty mild and it was pretty harmless. It was part of that scene. But I had to be careful because if I smoked too much I couldn’t play!

Status Quo land 500th week on Official Albums Chart". officialcharts.com . Retrieved 24 December 2016. 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.

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. A much better album than any of the five preceding releases but still fairly average in comparison to the band's early seventies output. JC: I think we knew what we wanted. We didn’t want to be told by a producer how it should be. We didn’t want to spend all our time trying to explain how we want to go in one direction and have him trying to pull us in another way. He would want it to be really commercial and we wanted it to be more heavy. Pedley, Dean. " Status Quo: Piledriver (Deluxe Edition)". Sea of Tranquility . Retrieved 15 December 2018.The opening song, "Don't Waste My Time" was written by Francis Rossi and Bob Young in the soon-to-be trademark shuffle style the group would become famous for. The lyrics complain about a girl not being serious about a relationship and messing around. The song became a live favourite, and frequently got audiences bouncing around at gigs. [3] 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. Main Setlist: Junior's Wailing, Someones Learning, In My Chair, Umleitung, Railroad*, Is It Really Me/Gotta Go Home, Big Fat Mama, Paper Plane, Don't waste My time, Roadhouse Blues*, Mean Girl, Bye Bye Johnny. It’s the marker, isn’t it? It’s the ‘BANG! Yes! You found it.' Like now we know where we are and we can go on,” says Alan Lancaster. “On Piledriver, we nailed it. We really found ourselves, we found our sound.” Covers album from a band which had released 21 original albums. Very average and unnecessary. Please do stop.

Consistent but fairly pedestrian. It just doesn't sound like The Quo. You may need a drink after listening to all of this. AL: We realised we had to get out of it because they would always see us as the glammy pop band that we were being marketed as at the time. But it was such a natural change we probably would have made Piledriver as it is either way. But Vertigo came and they gave us a free hand to go into the studio and self-produce.

The acoustic album comprises mainly songs from the seventies catalogue. There are enough good songs here to consider this quite an acceptable release even if somewhat pointless. FR: We’d come to a point with Pye Records where we were kind of manufactured somewhat. We were taken out and told what to wear, what to play, how to do. We had a crossover with managers and we were doing something similar to what we’re doing now, but Pye really didn’t see it. Offiziellecharts.de – Status Quo – Piledriver" (in German). GfK Entertainment Charts. Retrieved 22 April 2018.