It was moving and painful at the same time.
They played basically a mid- and early seventies set (even Rocking all over the World did not make the song list) and the sound was excellent, Wembley Arena full and the (more than middle-aged) audience lapped it up.
I've seen Quo three times before (once with and twice post-Lancaster) and if I have one impression from this concert then it is how Parfitt's forceful and accurate rhythm guitar propels/propulses the band forward and how everything is arranged around this force of nature. He is Keith Richards, Malcolm Young and Johnny Ramone combined. And at the same time totally Rick Parfitt.
Rossi (who has matured as a lead guitarist and has a more commanding tone in his solos these days than he used to have) unselfishly took a backseat in the set, most of the singing was done by Parfitt and Lancaster (who for all his health issues was in fine voice, his gravelly tone hasn't aged a bit). There wasn't even Caroline for Rossi to sing. It's no secret that Francis doesn't really like hard rock nor does he consider himself to be a hard rocker, much of the schism of the band in the late seventies and early eighties had to do with Lancaster's refusal to follow Rossi in branching out in pop territory (which gave Status Quo hit singles, but a loss of credibility with their original seventies audience). And watching him playing the very hard rock arrangements from Quo's quintet of monolithic albums until the mid seventies (Piledriver, Hello, Quo, On the Level and Blue for You), I detected parallels to Eric Clapton doing the Cream reunion, Rossi is doing this more to close a chapter with Coughlan and Lancaster (and help them with their pensions no doubt) than to gratify his own musical tastes. That doesn't speak against the man, he played and sang well, but his heart is somewhere else (Parfitt on the other hand was in full seventies mode and probably sang the lion's share of the evening).
Coughlan drums with Quo like no other drummer does though probably all his successors know more chops than he does, but his drumming just complements the sound in the way Bill Ward comlemented Sabbath, Criss complemented Kiss, Ringo the Beatles or Watts the Stones. He fluffed the intro break of Junior's Wailing right at the beginning (will kick himself for it, the gig was being filmed and recorded for posterity, but I'm sure they have evened it out by the time the DVD hits the stores!
).
Which brings us to Alan Lancaster, the bass player I patterned my early style on most. Alan was all smiles that evening and relished being before the old Quo audience who loved him for simply being there. He sang well and forcefully. But ... the man is health-wise clearly not well. For all his denials about suffering from MS, if it's not MS then it must be something equally terrible. Lancaster was always the most muscular with Quo, the most agile, the one with the macho moves on stage. On Sunday he could hardly move at all - think Mick Mars - and stalked actoss the stage bravely but less than confidently. He's frail, severely hunched, the whole right side of his body seems to have motoric issues, the pick was taped to his right hand (and he would sometimes relocate it with his left hand which is in obviously better motoric shape), his picking movements are stiff and awkward and while his Mustang bass was mercifully mixed between Coughlan's bass drum and Parfitt's deep chugging rhythm guitar so that the casual listner would not notice anything, his bass playing can no longer throb like it used to (he used to be mainly a down stroker and was fast at it), he now strums his bass Phil Lynott style (but less agilely) which is ok to fill the music with deep frequencies but doesn't pulse anymore. No comparison to the forcefulness of, say, Rhino, his successor in Quo. It's hard for me to write this as Alan was visibly (and deservedly) happy and proud about the gig, but if his motorics deteriorate further, he won't be able to do this for very long. When he sat - together with Parfitt - on the drum riser while Rossi was crooning Most of the Time, I was worried he might not be able to get up again and sure enough, in a touching moment, Parfitt helped him a little as inconspiciously as possible. Likewise at the end of the encore - and Alan's picking strength was already waning, you could see and hear it - you could see that the second he was behind the curtain, someone was by his side to support the poor guy.
Physically, Parfitt and Rossi walked the very fine line between doing the old "Quo Row" routines then and now (especially Parfitt - four heart bypasses or not - was muscular in his playing and movements) and not doing it too often so Alan's illness-induced inertia would not be too evident. Sometimes the two would even take him in the middle of their Quo formation, but the Quo member that used to be the most agile and athletic on stage can no longer move to the music.
I just hope that Alan is not in pain. Bitch of a disease that is. But I'm happy that he has/had the chance to do this once more/one final time with the band where his lifeblood is in. Unlike Rossi who sometimes muses about life outside Quo, Alan lives and breathes Status Quo and very little else, musically at least. In more than 30 years after his departure from Quo he never found another musical home (let's forget his various stints with the - Aussie - Party Boys which are basically a tribute band living off the glories of its members mined with other, previous bands).
