Status Quo say recovering from a fall onstage is easily the most embarrassing thing that can happen to a musician.
Rick Parfitt and Francis Rossi recall their onstage nightmares and both agree it’s the getting up, rather than the falling down, that hurts the most.
Parfitt tells Total Guitar: “I was up on a riser – and that was in the days where we used to really jump up and down and flit about like ballet dancers – and I was due to do the lead vocal.
“I sprang down from the riser and fell flat on my face. It’s not falling onstage that’s the embarrassing thing, it’s getting up. You see the whole front 15 rows laughing their fucking heads off at you. I clambered up the microphone and tried to do the lead vocal but I realised I had cracked the neck of the guitar.
“It was a black Gibson and I loved it. It was a complete disaster. God forbid it ever happens again because it’s so fucking embarrassing.”
Rossi adds that falling over onstage is known as “getting your wings” within Status Quo. He says: “The thing with falling over is you’ve got to get up. You have to pretend it didn’t hurt but it’s fucking killing you.”
Quo had to cancel six gigs after Parfitt was taken to hospital in Croatia this month. The guitarist underwent a quadruple heart bypass in 1997.
