Piledriver

Product Information

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. 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. a b Kent, David (1993). Australian Chart Book 1970–1992 (illustrateded.). St Ives, N.S.W.: Australian Chart Book. p.19. ISBN 0-646-11917-6. 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!

Consistent but fairly pedestrian. It just doesn't sound like The Quo. You may need a drink after listening to all of this. 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. 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. Slade drummer Don Powell wrote in his Diary about this tour: "We were on our first Australian tour with Status Quo, LindIsfarne & Caravan. Pennanen, Timo (2006). Sisältää hitin – levyt ja esittäjät Suomen musiikkilistoilla vuodesta 1972 (in Finnish) (1sted.). Helsinki: Kustannusosakeyhtiö Otava. ISBN 978-951-1-21053-5.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. I really don't recommend anything but you could listen to Cross That Bridge and Burning Bridges for a bit of a laugh. Lonely Night" (Lancaster, Young, Rossi, John Coghlan, Parfitt) (B-Side of "Break the Rules") – 3:16

FR: We used to sit in a circle at the IBC Studios in Portland Place, London. We’d be making the album, there’s the smell of kebabs and we’d be smoking joints. 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.The second acoustic album suffers because the strongest songs were chosen for the first acoustic album. 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]

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. 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 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") RP: On our first European tour, Francis and I went out to a club. The Doors’ ‘Roadhouse Blues’ came over the sound system. There was this couple dancing really kind of slinkily to this dunk-du-dunk-du-dunk-du-dunk kind of rhythm and I just looked at him and he looked at me and the hairs stood up on our arms. We thought, well, we’ve got to play that! That was really the start of the Quo style of music, the 12-bar blues shuffle rhythm.

RP: I like to imagine other bands going, “Look, I’ve come up with this song that goes dunk-du-dunk-du-dunk-du-dunk” and the other members going, “Well, we can’t do that because we’ll sound like Status Quo!” 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] Pedley, Dean. " Status Quo: Piledriver (Deluxe Edition)". Sea of Tranquility . Retrieved 15 December 2018. By the time of their next studio set, Hello, the new Quo sound was on its way to No.1, and the band were certainly making up for lost time.