The night’s theme is survival. Career-wise for the headliners, celebrating their sixth decade with yet another best-of and tour. And physicially so for Wilko Johnson, whose near-fatal encounter with pancreatic cancer was recently the subject of Julien Temple’s wonderful Imagine... BBC film.
The Dr Feelgood songs in Johnson’s stodgy, bluesy pub-rock set underline why he wasn’t the singer in that band; the highlight is his own cod-Arabic reggae tune, Dr Dupree. But as a guitarist, he’s magnetic. You can’t take your eyes off him: the forward stare, the machine-gun strut as he peels off those staccato chords and riffs that so influenced, among others, The Clash.
Status Quo’s show is, barring a few lumps in the middle, one of the most streamlined things you’ll ever see. Their stage layout looks as if it has been clicked together like Duplo. There’s scarcely an ounce of fat, either, on the band or in their set. At least half the things for which The Ramones are celebrated have for years made Status Quo the object of mockery.
As a kid, I heard jokes about their monotony. Status Quo outlasted the jibes and remain exactly the same, which is the point of them.
Their notion of variety is swapping one Telecaster for another. The charge against Status Quo was always how trad they were; that they never had an original idea. But being Status Quo was the original idea: the relentless repetition of rock’n’roll’s basic phrases, hugely amplified, until they induce a form of hypnosis. It’s trance music for boogie-rock fans. This gig is those people’s rave, and my money says they’re having as fine a Friday night as anyone in the country, pogoing en masse to Burning Bridges. The only thumbs-in-jeans dancing to be spotted comes from a nearby youngish indie/hipster type. Dude, do keep up.
That song’s folk roots prefigure the only boring part of the show: when the repetition stops for the fiddly-diddly intrusion of Gerdundula and the weird anomaly that is You’re In the Army Now. It feels like they’re sullying the kind of single-minded purism that would be lauded in a more experimental act. Maybe I’m projecting my own relief on to the group when they launch with gusto back into their trademark chugalug rhythm on their greatest song, Down Down. The world’s least nuanced band would be much lesser were they anything else.
- O2, London, 13 December. Box office: 0844 856 0202.
