Rick Parfitt

The late Rick Parfitt’s first-ever solo album, poignantly entitled Over and Out, is released in March 2018 via earMUSIC, across a number of formats, including a special two-CD collectors’ edition.

Status Quo are one of Britain's longest-lived bands, staying together for over six decades. During much of that time, the band was only successful in the U.K., where it racked up a string of Top Ten singles across the decades. In America, the Quo were ignored after they abandoned psychedelia for heavy boogie rock in the early '70s. Before that, the band managed to reach number 12 in the U.S. with the psychedelic classic "Pictures of Matchstick Men" (a Top Ten hit in the U.K.). Following that single, the band suffered a lean period for the next few years, before the bandmembers decided to refashion themselves as a hard rock boogie band in 1970 with their Ma Kelly's Greasy Spoon album. The Quo have basically recycled the same simple boogie on each successive album and single, yet their popularity has never waned in Britain. If anything, their very predictability has ensured the group a large following.

Who would've thought that 35 years into their career, Status Quo would release their finest album long after the general public lost interest? Leaving Polygram, their major-label home for nearly all of their career, Quo (guitarists Francis Rossi and Rick Parfitt, bassist John "Rhino" Edwards, keyboardist Andy Bown, and drummer Jeff Rich) signed with Eagle Records in the U.K. and proceeded to record a new platter. What came out was an amazing collection of pop songs by one of England's top rock & roll bands. Though they've left their trademark boogie behind, Quo proved on this album that they could still rock out and write great songs. Rossi's vocals are still smooth and his and Parfitt's riffs are rich and plentiful, while Bown, Edwards, and Rich prove that they are more than hired sidemen.

"Is There Anybody Out There That Wants To Rock?" is the war cry for fans of those denim clad boogie rockers Status Quo, and the fans are in for a real treat on Friday 20th October, when Quo's famous 1982 show at Birmingham's National Exhibition Centre (NEC), is set to be re-released in it's entirety, as a standalone release for the first time, on both double CD and triple vinyl.