Stars of the 60s – Status Quo

Status Quo and the search for the fourth chord: How three notes made music history

They had to endure being ridiculed as the band with three chords. Therefore, Staus Quo self-ironically titled their 28th studio album "In Search Of The Fourth Chord." On the cover, the two protagonists , Francis Rossi and Rick Parfitt , grinning at each other in an Indiana Jones pose and setting. Self-irony, in other words!

"Pictures Of Matchstick Men" is the first single by the quintet Status Quo , and they immediately enter the charts almost everywhere in the world. The song opens with a simple four-note riff, which is repeated several times between the individual verses. In the chorus, the song uses what's known as 'flanging,' in which two identical audio signals are mixed, with one of the signals delayed by approximately 20 milliseconds.

This mixture results in a song that immediately catches your ear and sticks in your head. A perfect recipe for success! The title »Pictures Of Matchstick Men« is a reference to the pictures of British landscape painter Laurence Stephen Lowry , whose depictions of people were often referred to as matchstick men. The record is classified as psychedelic rock, which incidentally applies to many songs from the late 1960s. The follow-up »Black Veils Of Melancholy« followed the same principle, the same successful formula, but flopped, which prompted Status Quo to reorient themselves musically and turn to the hard rock/boogie woogie style. Francis Michael Rossi , writer of the Matchstick Men song, later reported that he wrote the song on the toilet. He often went there not to do his 'usual business', but to avoid his wife and mother-in-law.

In BRAVO No. 50 from 1968, Status Quo commented on their success: "We don't believe in waiting for success. We prepared for our pop career for a long time – and when the moment finally arrived, we knew it would work. Some bands wait years and years for a hit. We would have been angry long ago. Of course, it could happen that our star falls as quickly as it rose. Then we'll just become bourgeois again. But in any case, we made a big splash!"

Before becoming Status Quo , they had already released singles under the names The Spectres and The Traffic Jam, but none of them achieved success. The band was founded by Francis Rossi and Alan Lancaster , who had already formed The Scorpions in 1962. In 1963, they welcomed John Coghlan into the band and renamed themselves The Spectres. Roy Lynes joined the band in 1965, and when Rick Parfitt joined the group in 1967, Status Quo was complete.

In the UK, "Pictures Of Matchstick Men" reached number seven; in the US, it reached number twelve, but it remained Status Quo 's only Top 40 hit in the States.

The song spent twelve weeks in BRAVO 's Music Box , climbing to eighth place. By 1986, Quo had another 16 singles in the box, but never reached the top spot. They reached second place twice: "Rockin' All Over The World" and "In The Army Now"; and once, they reached number three: "What You're Proposing." Status Quo subsequently underwent several lineup changes and reunions. However, with the death of Rick Parfitt in 2016, the search for the fourth chord is still not over.