STATUS QUO - A great album that the world doesn't need

3. September 2019

Status Quo

STATUS QUO - Ein großartiges Album, das die Welt nicht braucht

"Backbone" is Status Quo's first studio album in eight years. It's not only the first work without Rick Parfitt, but also the best the band has released in decades. But does the world really need a new song collection from Status Quo? eclipsed spoke with the only remaining founding member Francis Rossi as well as with Andy Bown, the longtime keyboarder who almost simultaneously re-released his lost solo album "Unfinished Business" from 2011.

Conversations with Francis Rossi always have a certain entertainment value: Mr. Rossi likes to come from the hundredth to the thousandth, asks counter-questions and thus tries to get the interviewer off his game. Andy Bown, who first appeared on the Quo agenda in 1976, takes on the more prudent part. However, the 73-year-old certainly has his songwriting shares on the new album.

eclipsed: Francis, we have 30 minutes interview time, which means: I ask a question, you don't answer as usual, but you talk for 28 minutes.

Francis Rossi: Then I skip my speaking time and ask you a question.

eclipsed: I'm listening.

Rossi: What do you think of "backbone"? Really shit or okay?

eclipsed: Much better than most of what has been published under the name Status Quo in recent decades. But it still doesn't have for me the class of the Quo albums of the seventies.

Rossi: (laughs) In the seventies, I was also more powerful at other things.

eclipsed: However, some things remind me of your seventies albums.

Rossi: I'm surprised, because we used the latest technology. You're the first one to say that, too. However, you also claimed that my duet album was not a country album, but rather a folk one.

eclipsed: Which it is to a large extent.

Rossi: The truth is sometimes boring.

eclipsed: What did you like most about working on Backbone?

Rossi: The cooperation with the producer.

eclipsed: You produced it yourself.

Andy Bown: He was a friendly dictator.

Rossi: I hate having to explain to people what I want. That's why I produced it myself.

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