Why I was ashamed to love Status Quo

I bought a record in a second-hand shop in the summer of 1981. A double album. I made sure nobody was looking when I handed over my money, and kept the purchase hidden in its brown paper bag all the way home. Back in my room, I locked the door to make sure my house-mates couldn’t surprise me — and plugged in my headphones. What followed was more than an hour of dirty bliss, a guilty pleasure before the term had been invented.

What I was listening to was a compilation album of Status Quo’s singles and most popular album tracks. I can’t remember what it was called — ‘Again and Again and Again and Again and Again’ would have been fitting, but too arch for the Quo. My housemates, if they had known what I up to, would have been both mystified and contemptuous. The music we were supposed to enjoy at the time was either the angular, dour and humourless post-punk of the Gang of Four and Echo and the Bunnymen’s portentous scouse warbling, or the glitzy cheap synth New Romantic dross which was rapidly becoming flavour of the decade. An awful decade for popular music, in the main, I would contend. By then Status Quo were the sine qua non of all that was bad about rock music, in their naff denims and with their strangely thin estuarial whine.

To be honest, they always had been — even when the brand of music they played, hard rock, dominated the pages of the music press to which I and other gullible idiots dutifully paid homage. Quo were a bit of a joke — for their simplicity and repetetiveness — in the mid-1970s and quite beyond the pale five or six years later. Anyway, I sat there, and the guitars went chug da chug da chug and I experienced a sense of elation.