Status Quo – Down Down

1st March 2021 · 1970s, 1975, 1986, Music

The venerable denim-clad 12-bar boogie merchants of Status Quo have had a record-breaking 60 hit singles, but only one number one, in January 1975. This is it.

Curiously, it lends itself rather well to a hoedown treatment, as can be heard on the album In Quo Country, a surprising solo effort by the band’s road manager and occasional harmonica player Bob Young, which adds a country-and-western twang to their hits.

Unfortunately it also adds Young’s rather ropy vocals, sung in a cod-American accent. But you can’t have everything.

Rossi’s lyrics, penned in Los Angeles while the rest of the band were out “exercising their pencils” (Rossi’s words), take a swipe at both the British music press, who never really took the Quo to their hearts, perhaps believing them to be a tad limited in their artistic ambitions, and his ex-wife, particularly the line: “I want all to the world to see, to see you laughing – and you’re laughing at me.”

Young’s version of Down Down, on his 1986 album of countrified Quo tunes that he co-wrote, throws in a jaunty sax solo for good measure.

If you’re in the mood, you can let this clip play on and hear a few more favourites performed by a crack band including guitarists Albert Lee, Billy Bremner and Micky Moody, once of Juicy Lucy, Snafu and Whitesnake (and Young’s own less successfrul rock duo Young & Moody), with the ubiquitous B.J. Cole on pedal steel. Plus a bloke called Rick Parfitt on backing vocals.

Apparently it’s inspired by T. Rex’s early song Debora, although only in the sense that Rossi wanted the words in the chorus to have “a D sound.” To my ears it starts off sounding more like another Bolan song, Jeepster – not that Bolan was averse to borrowing from the blues himself – and by Rossi’s own admission the rhythm of the verses reppropriates Quo’s own early hit Pictures Of Matchstick Men.

The original title was Get Down, until they remembered it had already been used by Gilbert O’Sullivan. Young then came up with the minor adjustment Down Down but pointed out the small flaw that it made no sense.

Rossi, however, was adamant that such trifles were irrelevant when it came to pop songs. And he was right.