THE ODD COUPLE
“The cocaine and arguments had made things horrible, so I told everybody what a bunch of dicks they were.”
Bob Young
“Iwas a pretty hopeless roadie,” Bob Young admits, before sheepishly recounting the tale of his first ever unaccompanied chaperoning of The Status Quo (as they were then known) during a concert at the Top Rank in Bristol. On the night concerned, June 4, 1968, the new boy received an electric shock after unwittingly linking everything – lights, PA, equipment – to a basic five-amp plugboard.
“I was knocked right out,” he says, laughing. “And when John Coghlan saw me sparko on the floor, he went into the dressing room and said: ‘That lazy bastard is having a kip already’. But I ended up in hospital.”
Having encountered the band on a package tour with Gene Pitney, Young joined Quo’s payroll that same year, around the time of their first hit single, Pictures Of Matchstick Men. Up to then he’d been “doing some driving” for Amen Corner and The Herd. “When their management approached me I said I’d been offered a tenner a week to work for Jethro Tull,” he recalls. “They upped that to fifteen if I could start on Friday, so I did.”
With the band’s music toughening up, Young earned the title of Quo’s Unofficial Fifth Member, road managing the group, playing harmonica with them on stage and joining in the often riotous post-show entertainment, although he never lost sight of professional obligations. and – all with Francis Rossi – and and with Rick Parfitt. More than 100 songs were written with various members of Quo, and these are just the tip of the iceberg.
