photo from BBC

I have always had a soft spot for Status Quo despite their woeful lack of credibility, not helped by the fact that a lot of their hardcore fans are such weirdos. On several occasions when I worked at Riga Music Bar in Southend-on-Sea we hosted a Quo tribute band (featuring original Quo drummer John Coghlan) and the fans used to turn up in force. At first I thought they were in fancy dress as traditional heavy metal fans; blue jeans, white trainers, faded tour t-shirt, sleeveless denim jacket festooned with sew-on patches (with optional leather jacket underneath) and a mullet/receding hairline combo. It turned out that this wasn’t fancy dress at all, this was serious and the fans of Status Quo were not being ironic. In fact, these bizarre people were not treating the band as a ‘guilty pleasure’ one bit; there was no guilt about their love of the Quo. As far as they were concerned this was real, as far as I was concerned they didn’t get the joke and the band were laughing behind their backs at the thought of getting away with it once again while they rolled around on piles of fifty pound notes.

Don’t take this the wrong way, as I said before I enjoy their music. Okay so you can recognise a Quo song a mile off due to the chord formation, but if you’re at a party and someone puts on ‘Rocking All Over The World’ on, people will dance. Even John Peel liked them and would play them during DJ sets.

Somewhere along the lines, Status Quo went beyond the point of parody and came out at the other side as a band it is okay to like. When they appeared at Glastonbury in 2009 it was interesting to watch, as although they were booked in the Sunday afternoon ‘irony slot’ the crowd ranged in age from cool indie kid to Clarksonesque pot-bellied old rocker, all of whom knew every word of every song. It has to be said that nobody leaves a Quo concert in a bad mood and the time has come to accept the band for what they are, a hard working, dedicated, and above all, talented collection of musicians.

Chas & Dave are another band who suffered in the past with their image and were categorised as a comic turn. The cock-er-nee sing-along styling, entrenched in old style Music Hall and an image of pub sing-songs around a piano obviously added fuel to this, along with novelty hits such as ‘Snooker Loopy’. However, Chas Hodges is a musician of pedigree dating back to The Tornados and taking in session work with Jerry Lee Lewis and Gene Vincent alongside working in the bands The Outlaws and Cliff Bennett and The Rebel Rousers (with Dave Peacock, the ‘Dave’ half), and in recent times has worked with The Libertines and Merrymouth. This year they released That’s What Happens, an album that showed a more serious side to them and has finally seen them acknowledged as the fine musicians that they are. This is the same outcome that will now save Status Quo from equal derision, as they have just released Aquostic, a collection of acoustic reworkings of their popular hits.

This evening before heading out to a gig in town (Josh Kemp’s EP launch if you wish to know), I watched Status Quo performing as part of Radio 2’s In Concert series. They were playing acoustic guitars with an orchestra and they sounded amazing. We have MTV Unplugged to thank for this sort of thing, back in the days when MTV was a music channel. Listening to them tonight I was impressed at the musicianship on show, turning classic Quo anthems on their heads and showing a totally different side to a once laughable band. Guilty pleasure? I’m not in the slightest bit remorseful.

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