Status Quo – Whatever You Want

Ten months after Status Quo stood in front of 50,000 fans at Milton Keynes and told them this was the end of the band, they were back at Wembley opening the biggest concert ever held — a farewell that turned out to be the warm-up act for the moment that defined their career.

Few rock bands have buried themselves as publicly as Status Quo did at the Milton Keynes Bowl on July 21, 1984. Roughly fifty thousand people came out for the closing date of a national farewell tour they had been calling, plainly enough, the End of the Road. The band were sixteen years into a career that had churned out top-ten hits at a rate few British groups could match, and they had simply decided they were done. The concert was filmed and released that same year on LaserDisc, Betamax, and VHS as End of the Road ’84: The Farewell Concert. Whatever You Want was right where you would expect it — near the centre of the set, the crowd doing most of the singing, Francis Rossi and Rick Parfitt grinning at each other as though they could not quite believe they were really walking away.

The song they were playing had been five years old by then. Whatever You Want was the lead single from their 1979 album of the same name — Quo’s twelfth studio record, produced by Pip Williams and cut at Wisseloord Studios in Hilversum across the winter of 1978 and 1979. Rick Parfitt wrote it with keyboardist Andy Bown, opening with a teasing, almost backwards-sounding guitar figure that hangs in the air for a few seconds before the band crash in behind it. The single came out on September 14, 1979 and reached number four on the UK chart inside three weeks — their ninth consecutive top-ten hit in nine years. It went silver almost immediately. The album that followed it in October climbed to number three, kept out of the top by Blondie and The Police.

What was remarkable about the song was how exactly it captured what Quo had become. The Frantic Four — Rossi, Parfitt, Alan Lancaster, and original drummer John Coghlan — had spent the 1970s perfecting a kind of head-down boogie-rock that critics could not work out how to take seriously and audiences refused to stop turning up for. Whatever You Want distils all of that into four minutes: the twin-guitar shuffle, the call-and-response chorus, the lyric that just keeps insisting the listener can have whatever they want as long as they show up tonight. By 1984 it was already one of the songs the audience would not have forgiven them for skipping.

An end that lasted less than a year

The Milton Keynes show was, by all the metrics that should have mattered, a farewell. The lineup that walked out — Rossi, Parfitt, Lancaster, Bown, and drummer Pete Kircher, who had replaced Coghlan two years earlier — played a long set drawn from across the catalogue, said goodbye, and went home. Within months Lancaster had moved to Australia, Rossi was making noises about a solo career, and the End of the Road home video was sitting in record shops as the official document of what had been.

Then, on July 13, 1985, the same band walked out at Wembley Stadium at one minute past twelve in the afternoon and opened Live Aid. Bob Geldof’s organisers had needed someone to go first; nobody else wanted the slot; Quo’s manager said yes. They played Rockin’ All Over the World, Caroline, and Don’t Waste My Time in fourteen minutes, in front of 72,000 people in the stadium and an estimated 1.5 billion watching on television. The crowd was clapping before Rossi had finished the first line. Less than a year after telling the world they were finished, Status Quo had played the most-watched fourteen minutes of their lives.

The End of the Road, it turned out, was not the end of the road at all. Lancaster eventually left for good after Live Aid; the band reorganised around Rossi, Parfitt, Bown, and bassist John “Rhino” Edwards, and kept going for nearly forty more years. Parfitt died on Christmas Eve 2016. Lancaster died in 2021. Rossi, alongside Bown, Edwards, drummer Leon Cave, and rhythm guitarist Richie Malone, is still leading the band. Whatever You Want still sits where it has always sat in the set, the audience still does most of the singing, and the version on the End of the Road ’84 LaserDisc remains one of the strangest farewells in rock — a goodbye that, watched now, is really a snapshot of a band a year away from the biggest stage of their lives. Watch the video.