Album review : STATUS QUO – Driving To Glory

Cherry Red [Release date : 06.12.24]

You’ve really got to hand it to whoever guides Status Quo through the pop and rock music jungle.

Brilliantly marketed, with ads that hit all the right notes in the right places, Quo’s latest release, Driving To Glory looks like another winner. And just before Christmas too. What a stroke of luck.

Yes, the band’s considerable core fanbase will buy it anyway. But once word gets around, and a stocking or two needs filled, it’s easy to see it climbing the charts.

The basic logistics: Driving… brings together many of the band’s rare tracks from the late 1990s and early 2000s for the first time.

Producer, Mike Paxman has remastered all 14 of them – tracks he produced for the band back then.

It certainly proves that the half life of a quality Quo recording is impossible to calculate… Some of these songs have been unavailable for over 20 years. And still…

Understandably, ‘Driving To Glory’, a 1999 co-write between Rick Parfitt and Rhino Edwards leads the album and gives it its title.

Parfitt’s singing and playing here is at his fiercest and most undiluted, and surprisingly on the chorus, at his most melodic. Perhaps an attempt to navigate out of the “epic pop” cul de sac in which they found themselves in the late nineties.

A pounding, stripped back, ‘Analyse Time’ and the ornately arranged ‘Obstruction Day’, are again from 1999, both appearing as back up tracks on the ‘Twenty Wild Horses’ single.

Apart from their un Quo like titles, they seem like an English band’s attempt to emulate Tom Petty’s merge of rock and roots. A path never followed. Too many commercial risks.

The highlights elsewhere are a full length version of the fabulously titled ‘Famous In The Last Century’, and there’s a new version of ‘Whatever You Want’, a ‘98 version of ‘Don’t Waste My Time’ and a cover of ELO’s eminently danceable ‘Don’t Bring Me Down’.

Stocking filler tracks for a stocking filler album? ***

Review by Brian McGowan

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Power Plays w/c 9 December 2024

In this sequence we play ‘The Best of 2024′ GRTR! reviewer selections

Featured Albums w/c 9 December 2024

09:00-12:00 The Best of 2024 (Melodic Rock)
12:00-13:00 The Best of 2003-2024 (Melodic Hard Rock)
14:00-16:00 The Best of 2024 (Singer Songwriter)