A new book and a new album. Francis Rossi has been really busy lately. There is also a tour in the house. But the whole thing has to do only marginally with Status Quo, the band with which he became famous and which has determined his life for over fifty years. Nevertheless, it's worth talking about all this with the 69-year-old. At the same time we garnish the whole thing with an excerpt from Rossi's recently published autobiography.
"We Talk Too Much" is the name of the album Rossi is releasing with singer/violinist Hannah Rickard as a duo project. The two are supported by the veteran status quo songwriter/harmonica player Bob Young. At the same time there is the autobiography "I Talk Too Much". It was written by Rossi together with the English music journalist/author Mick Wall and deals not only with the relationship to the late Rick Parfitt but also with the ups and downs in Rossi's career, which he presents in all openness. With Wall he will also go on a kind of spoken word tour through Great Britain between 20 March and 20 May.
Below we document an exclusive excerpt from "I talk too much", which has been available in bookstores since 14 March. In this, Rossi - still a member of the Quo predecessor The Traffic Jam - describes the difficulty of reconciling a family and a rock band.
The day after the wedding we moved into a free room in Jean's mother's house in Dulwich. Her husband had died a few years earlier, leaving plenty of room. Two months later our son Simon was born. At that time it was quite common for young couples to have children at a very early age. For me that didn't mean a big deal, because I had grown up in a huge family and all the kids were raised equally by different relatives. Still, in our situation it has never been easy - teenage parents trying to raise a child while one of them has to work away - and apparently everyone seemed to conspire against us to throw us off track. Jean's mother wasn't much help. Before our wedding, Jean had always kept me from meeting her mum. And now I found out why! The woman could be very complicated. One had the feeling that she had sprung directly from the side of a Les Dawson joke about mothers-in-law. She sat slumped down in an armchair and smoked a chain, the dress slipping up to her hip, so that you could see her big old granny panties. She also let some of the most devilishly smelly farts escape her bowels. Which annoyed her daughter and touched her with great pain.
