Author: uylrjp

It’s not quite Beatlemania, but the parallels are obvious. Eleven years after the Fab Four had made history at Shea Stadium, another British band are on stage at the famous baseball mecca in Queens, home to the New York Mets. It’s a damp Friday night in July 1976, but the crowd is in high spirits, launching firecrackers into the rainy sky. Under an enormous canopy upheld by two cranes, Jethro Tull are playing in front of 50,000 fans, flanked by giant screens relaying the action via their own unique video system, Tull-A-Vision.

Support acts Rory Gallagher and Robin Trower have done their best to warm up the audience, but Tull – led by the charismatic Ian Anderson – are the reason why everyone’s here. Anderson himself isn’t having a particularly great time of it. The noise of rush-hour jets at LaGuardia Airport, just two miles away, is making it hard for the band to hear themselves play. What’s more, some joker had thrown a pint of urine over the frontman, from a great height, as he made his entrance from the tunnel. So now he’s covered in piss. Despite these irritations, however, the significance of the moment isn’t lost on him as he looks out into an endless sea of faces: Jethro Tull have become a massive stadium band.

This is just a relatively modest turnout compared to their West Coast visit three weeks later. 80,000 people will descend on LA’s Memorial Coliseum that night in August, confirming Tull’s status as superstars of Led Zeppelin-style proportions. Back home, Melody Maker’s recent headline – “Jethro: Now The World’s Biggest Band?” – didn’t seem quite so fanciful as it first appeared.

So just how did a weirdo bunch of Limeys manage to crack America? The mainstream US market was notoriously difficult for foreign artists to penetrate in the ‘70s. Many bands who sold bucketloads back home couldn’t manage it Stateside – T.Rex, Slade, The Kinks and Status Quo included. Even David Bowie didn’t hit megstardom until the ‘80s. All of which made Jethro Tull an anomaly. Their strange hybrid of folk, jazz and prog was an unlikely hit in a land where the big stage was traditionally ruled by barnstorming rock‘n’roll.

Yet it was no fluke. Jethro Tull made great records that succeeded in translation. They were also a band that instinctively grasped the value of rock as high theatre, sending themselves up – along with the whole ludicrous business – in a manner as flashy as it was knowingly preposterous. Above all though, they had a plan. Repetition, they decided, was the only way to conquer America.

Jethro Tull hardly stayed away. As a measure of the band’s devotion to the task, they’d already toured the States 11 times by the end of 1971, despite being barely three years into their recording career.

Their first trek across the ocean had been in late January 1969, just ahead of the US release of debut LP, This Was. They were supporting Blood, Sweat & Tears at the Fillmore East in New York City, under the auspices of promoter Bill Graham. “He was a guy without whom probably Jethro Tull would never have gotten started,” Anderson told Smashing Interviews magazine in 2017. “We were there for 12 or 13 weeks on that first tour. A lot of the time we were sitting on our hands in very cheap accommodations, hoping there’d be somewhere for us to play tomorrow night.”

Tull found themselves doing short residencies at venues like Boston’s Tea Party (another Bill Graham stronghold) and the Stone Balloon in New Haven, Connecticut, playing to less than 30 people per night. During their downtime at the Stone Balloon, Anderson took the opportunity to write a new song.

“I remember being in a Holiday Inn somewhere,” he told Prog in 2015. “I was in the lobby of the hotel and our manager Terry Ellis said ‘Could you rustle up a three-minute hit single? Something we can release in the UK while we’re away, to keep the pot boiling back home’.” The resultant song, Living In The Past, made the top three in Britain on release in April ’69.

It was a different approach in the States. Still unsure of Tull’s commercial viability, Reprise chose to hold back Living In The Past. “Our American label didn’t want to release it in the USA because people wouldn’t get it and it was too complicated,” recalled Anderson. “People couldn’t tap their feet to it because it was in 5/4…I’m rather glad they didn’t because we needed more time to evolve.”

Allowing Tull to gradually develop an audience in the US was a crucial decision. This Was made its mark immediately in the UK, reaching the Top 10, whereas it hardly made a dent on the Billboard album charts. By the time Stand Up was issued as a follow-up in September ’69, the band had been gigging around the States with Led Zeppelin and Creedence Clearwater Revival.

With the album already at number one back home, Tull’s reputation was growing further afield too. Elvis Presley even invited them to join him backstage after a show in Las Vegas. Having sat through Presley’s less-than-great gig that night, Anderson thought it best to politely decline the offer.

“He was slurring his words, he didn’t know where he was,” the Tull singer explained later. “It just wasn’t the way to see Elvis.”

Stand Up made Tull a more confident live unit. “We had some new material to play,” said Anderson, “and it was an opportunity to get noticed in some other markets in the USA other than just the obvious major cities. So we expanded our position.” It’s the kind of statement that you might associate with a high-powered strategist in a company boardroom rather than a rock singer, but it’s a telling example of Anderson’s business savvy.

The album was their first to breach the Billboard Top 20. Tull now found themselves headlining at the Fillmore West in San Francisco, supported by the MC5, and filling places like the Civic Auditorium in Santa Monica. Released in the US in May 1970, the more riff-oriented Benefit seemed perfectly primed for American audiences too. The band reached an early peak that spring, at a sold-out Long Beach Arena in California, where they packed in around 15,000 people.

As the year drew to a close, Benefit was certified gold in the US. Tull’s appeal was all too evident. Anderson endeared himself to American audiences as the latest in a steady chorus line of great British eccentrics – part-jester, part-shaman, a wild-eyed piper with mad hair, flailing arms and hobo coat.

“Jethro Tull is the best rock group to come along since The Who,” gushed The Detroit Free Press. “The Who is good to use in comparison because of their theatrics. The scene-stealer is Ian Anderson.” The New York Times called him a “showpiece”, noting that “he dresses like a Dickens character and leaps about the stage like a man standing barefoot on a hotplate. While playing flute he stands on one foot like a stork, or else he seems to be shinnying up the mike stand.”

Impressed the visual exuberance of the entire band, Creem magazine was quick to declare: “Live rock as theatre has been standard since Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard first attacked a piano, but no-one has carried it as far as Anderson without resorting to props.”

Speaking to Circus magazine in 1970, in a hotel room high above the Sunset Strip, Anderson attempted to make sense of Tull’s burgeoning popularity: “We never went down like Led Zeppelin. We didn’t come to this country and take it by storm…With us it was a steady kind of climbing up, it’s a pleasant sort of thing.”

Whether the band had actually anticipated it or not, Tull’s ascent was about to quicken. 1971’s Aqualung – Anderson’s treatise on the broken trinity of God, man and organised religion – was an artistic and commercial triumph, striking a masterful balance of acoustic pieces and stadium-heavy rockers. It would eventually shift over seven million copies at home and abroad, becoming their first album to make the Billboard top ten.

In another echo of The Beatles, its US success even survived a backlash down South. “Aqualung got its share of bashings, particularly in the Southern States of America, where it was burned,” Anderson said in 2009. “It created a fair amount of localised anger amongst those ultra-conservative Baptist types in the States. But it blew over fairly quickly.”

Indeed, Tull’s pulling power was enough to sell out Madison Square Garden three weeks in advance. In October 1971 – the first of 18 visits to the Garden over the next few years – they played before an audience of 23,000. The following summer saw the band hit the top spot in the US for the first time, with their satirical concept piece, Thick As A Brick. Crucially, it was their first release to perform better in America than in the UK, where it stalled at No.5.

“I thought it might be a step too far for an American audience, but Monty Python had become a cult phenomenon there and Saturday Night Live and other things were starting to come along,” Anderson told Classic Rock in 2011. “So I think Thick As A Brick arrived there just at the right time. It went fairly quickly to the top of the Billboard charts and did very well. It’s Jethro Tull’s second biggest-selling album in America.”

The band’s commercial status was compounded by a double-LP compilation, Living In The Past, issued later in 1972. It was a release tailored for the American market, with one side devoted to a live show from New York’s Carnegie Hall. Chrysalis, now running Tull’s US affairs, finally saw fit to issue the title track as a standalone single. By January ’73 the song had become their first Top 20 hit Stateside.

The pattern had been set for the rest of the decade. As Tull’s popularity back home started to wane in slow increments, the US held steady. “America is consistent for us but here it’s trailed off as far as most people are concerned, in that we are not talked about so much,” Anderson told Melody Maker during a stopover in the UK. “In the final analysis, we do all right. We were too fast coming up in England.”

Despite mixed reviews, A Passion Play – another conceptual monster – gave the group their second consecutive chart-topper on Billboard. Anderson responded to the harsher critics of the music press with Only Solitaire, a caustic effort from 1974’s War Child. The album fell away quickly in the UK, but did smart business in America, buoyed by the inclusion of another major chart hit, the breezily direct Bungle In The Jungle.

Minstrel In The Gallery, released in September 1975, followed suit, going gold in the States but losing traction in Britain. It was a year in which the band sold out five dates at the 20,000-seater Los Angeles Forum. Tull fever was so intense that, on opening night, Anderson ordered his bandmates to stop playing due to the crowd making an unholy din. Melody Maker observed that “Ian Anderson had only to raise an eyebrow to bring the first ten rows to their feet.”

These were heady days. The addition of Tull-A-Vision – “Large Multi-Sided Video Screen Projection In Colour For Close-Up Viewing From All Seats!” screamed the gig posters in an age when such technology was still novel – only boosted the live experience. Even the relative failure of 1976’s Too Old To Rock‘n’Roll: Too Young To Die! didn’t dampen the party.

The idea for the album had occurred to Anderson during a turbulent flight between gigs in the US. “I hate flying anyway, but this was a really bad flight and I was convinced we were all gonna drop out of the sky,” he told Rolling Stone. “Just the words came into my head: ‘I’m too old to rock and roll, but I’m too young to die.’” A concept LP about an ageing greaser who refuses to bow to current trends, it could be taken as an allegory of Tull’s own bloody-minded attitude.

This singular approach couldn’t have been better illustrated than their next effort, Songs From The Wood. Released a week before The Damned’s first long-player, in February 1977, the album was a playfully bucolic take on British folk mythology and legend. But what seemed on the surface like a hopelessly contrary move in the era of punk, disco and AOR – and in a year when the airwaves were ruled by The Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, Meat Loaf and ELO – instead proved a huge success, both at home and abroad. Songs From The Wood quickly went gold in the US and returned the band to the Billboard top ten.

The same went for its follow-up. On the surface, 1978’s Heavy Horses couldn’t have been less suited to the American market. Dedicated to the “indigenous working ponies and horses of Great Britain”, adorned with a photo of Anderson leading two Shire horses across a field, the album was an extended hymn to the value of homegrown traditions and the perils of consumerism.

Nevertheless, the US still happily lapped it up. It proved another big international hit. When Tull fetched up in New York in October that year, for another sell-out show at Madison Square Garden, it was beamed live via satellite on BBC’s Old Grey Whistle Test. In doing so, they became the first band to appear on a live simultaneous TV broadcast from America.

They continued to pack out arenas throughout 1979, culminating in a huge UNICEF benefit at Santa Monica’s Civic Auditorium in November. Broadcast live by radio station KMET-FM, the show found Tull promoting their latest effort, the eco-themed Stormwatch. The album may have been another sizeable hit, but it also effectively signalled the end of the band’s extraordinary run of success since Stand Up, ten years earlier.

This didn’t have anything to do with shifts in popularity. Rather, it was the result of seismic changes within the band itself. As the Stormwatch tour drew to a close in early 1980, drummer Barrie Barlow, piano player John Evan and multi-instrumentalist Dee Palmer all quit. A major catalyst was the tragic demise of bassist John Glascock, who had died of congenital heart failure while Tull were away on tour.

“The ‘70s were very productive for us in terms of people and musicians together,” Anderson reflected in 2013. “But elements within the band had been growing apart. It was just a sense of people heading in different directions. I got to the point where I thought: ‘OK, probably best to put this on ice for a time and do something different.’

Tull would eventually regroup and plot a more synth-based course through the early ‘80s. They would revive their commercial fortunes as the decade wore on (culminating in 1987’s Grammy-winning Crest Of A Knave), but they were never likely to repeat the successes of the ‘70s, when they held their own alongside Led Zeppelin, Queen, Elton John and The Rolling Stones as one of our most prized American exports.

Anderson was always at a loss to fully account for Jethro Tull’s massive popularity in the US. But he did have some idea. “I think the Americans kind of liked it because we didn’t look like we cared too much,” he suggested to Prog in 2017. “Some other British artists cared too much about being loved. When you do that, the chances are audiences don’t because they see through the mask…I think those of us who appeared to not give a damn were the ones who made the impression.”

Originally published in Classic Rock Presents Jethro Tull

Freelance writer for Classic Rock since 2008, and sister title Prog since its inception in 2009. Regular contributor to Uncut magazine for over 20 years. Other clients include Word magazine, Record Collector, The Guardian, Sunday Times, The Telegraph and When Saturday Comes. Alongside Marc Riley, co-presenter of long-running A-Z Of David Bowie podcast. Also appears twice a week on Riley’s BBC6 radio show, rifling through old copies of the NME and Melody Maker in the Parallel Universe slot. Designed Aston Villa’s kit during a previous life as a sportswear designer. Geezer Butler told him he loved the all-black away strip.

Depeche Mode ended the 80s as one of the most successful bands of that decade, but everything was about to ramp up significantly. Their seventh album Violator, released in March 1990, would make them global superstars, a record that sold millions upon millions of copies and spawned some of the Basildon group’s most enduring hits. It was the sound of a band at their majestic peak. “Violator is a perfect 10,” their late keyboardist Andy “Fletch” Fletcher told me when I interviewed them back in 2017. “It’s a perfect 10 record.”

Fletch wasn’t wrong, and their masterpiece of an album was preceded with a single equally as flawless. It is 35 years in early February since the release of Enjoy The Silence, a song that hasn’t aged a jot in the intervening three and a half decades, an anthem that melded their minor-chord mournfulness with the euphoria of house music and soaring synth lines, a trailblazing electro-rock all-timer.

And yet, for long periods of its creation, the band’s chief songwriter Martin Gore was sulking in the corner because he didn’t like it. Gore had originally brought the song in as a stark, haunted ballad, the demo of which you can hear below:

This was how Gore envisioned the song playing out, an idea that was turned on its head when the band had a pre-production meeting and Gore’s bandmate Alan Wilder suggested they turn add a disco beat and turn it into a thumping dance banger. “I was really averse to that at first,” Gore recalled to BONG in 1998. “I thought, ‘The song is called Enjoy The Silence’, it’s supposed to be about serenity and serenity doesn’t go with the disco beat’.”

It was Flood who came up with the idea for Gore to try and replicate the hook on a guitar, something that would result in one of the band’s most iconic and indelible hooks. But Gore was still not sold. “He went, I don’t want to do that, we’re a synth band,” Flood said, convincing him to give it a go and, after what he called “half a day” of going through guitar sounds finally arriving at the right one. “Suddenly, everyone was engaged,” said the producer.

Hearing what the song was becoming, Gore’s resistance dissipated, and then some. “It was the only time in the studio where we thought we had a hit single,” he confessed. Looking back on the making of the track in 2019, he offered up an apology. “I was dead against it and then it started making a bit more sense to me… I’d like to take this moment to apologise to Flood and Alan.”

Who knows how the success of Violator might have played out if Enjoy The Silence had been recorded as the stripped-down hymnal that Gore was after. It became their highest-charting single to date in the US, whipping up an anticipatory frenzy that resulted in the infamous LA riot after the band’s appearance at a record store what shut down due to overcrowding. Speaking to this writer in 2017, Gore pinpointed that event as a breakthrough moment for Depeche Mode.

“We felt like we were hitting our heads against the wall in America,” he stated. “All of our albums from Some Great Reward to Music For The Masses seemed to do the same and we expected Violator to do the same thing. I think we were fortunate in a way that the warehouse records signing thing we did in Los Angeles turned into a riot, which made us national news. I think that was the thing that tipped us over the edge there, all these people in rural areas, places we’d never been, were seeing us on the news and thinking, ‘Who is this band? Maybe I’ll check them out.’”

In Enjoy The Silence, they had a singalong as lofty as their new status. Watch its iconic, Anton Corbijn-directed video below:

Niall Doherty is a writer and editor whose work can be found in Classic Rock, The Guardian, Music Week, FourFourTwo, on Apple Music and more. Formerly the Deputy Editor of Q magazine, he co-runs the music Substack letter The New Cue with fellow former Q colleagues Ted Kessler and Chris Catchpole. He is also Reviews Editor at Record Collector. Over the years, he’s interviewed some of the world’s biggest stars, including Elton John, Coldplay, Arctic Monkeys, Muse, Pearl Jam, Radiohead, Depeche Mode, Robert Plant and more. Radiohead was only for eight minutes but he still counts it.

In 2014, the daughter of former Chicago guitarist Terry Kath launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds to complete a documentary about her father, who died from an accidental gunshot wound in 1978. Early the following year, Classic Rock spoke to Michelle Sinclair and told her father’s story.

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“What do you think I’m going to do? Blow my brains out?” These were allegedly Terry Kath’s final words before he accidentally put a bullet in his head in 1978.

It was never meant to end like this. A fatal gunshot wound. Blood on the walls. A dead body.

Lee Loughnane, trumpet player with the US rock band Chicago, vividly recalls January 23, 1978. It was the day his friend, Chicago’s guitarist Terry Kath, shot himself dead after a game of Russian roulette went horribly wrong.

“I took a call from our manager, who said: ‘Lee, are you sitting down?’” Loughnane says now. “He told me what happened. But I had to see for myself. They’d taken Terry’s body away, but there was blood everywhere.”

Terry Kath was just a week shy of his 32nd birthday when he accidentally killed himself. A singer, songwriter and wildly adventurous guitar player, Kath was the bedrock of Chicago, the daredevil group who had been meshing rock, jazz and classical styles across 11 hit albums since 1969.

Prior to his death, though, Kath’s love of booze and cocaine was impacting on his talent and his judgment. Kath’s accidental shooting was a tragic final act for a husband and father, and a musician once described by Jimi Hendrix as “better than me”.

Chicago are still touring and making music. Their last album, Chicago XXXVI: Now, appeared in 2014. But the memory of Terry Kath is in danger of fading with each passing year, which is why in 2012, Kath’s daughter, Los Angeles club DJ Michelle Sinclair, decided to try to make a crowd-funded documentary about him. The result of her work, Searching For Terry: Discovering A Guitar Legend, was released in 2016.

“I wanted to discover more about my dad and preserve his legacy,” says Sinclair, who was just two years old when Kath died. “But also because whenever you see those lists of Top Ten guitarists, he’s never on them.”

Terry Kath is still the greatest guitarist most people have never heard of. Before Chicago’s sugar-coated 80s ballads, there was the freewheeling Chicago of the late 60s and 70s, best sampled on A Hit By Varese, Dialogue (Parts 1 & 2) and the massive hit 25 Or 6 To 4. Back then, Chicago albums featured wailing horns, grooving Hammond organ and head-spinning time signatures, all harnessed by Kath’s howling lead guitar.

Terry Alan Kath was born in Chicago on January 31, 1946. His father, Ray, and his mother, Evelyn, loved music. “They ran a lodge and enjoyed entertaining people,” says Michelle. “That desire to bring people together and entertain them has been a generational link in our family.”

Kath learned to play piano, accordion and banjo, and inspired by the instrumental combo The Ventures and jazz musician George Benson, took up the guitar. By the age of 19 he was playing bass in local act Jimmy Ford And The Executives, where he met two future Chicago members: sax player Walt Parazaider and drummer Danny Seraphine. “I was running with a gang and Terry pulled me off the streets,” Seraphine says now. “Once I got that gig, my life changed.”

Seraphine remembers that Kath exuded a “charisma that intrigued me from the beginning”. At six-foot‑two, the burly guitarist with size 12 feet and a lazy grin was difficult to ignore. “He always reminded me of Robert Mitchum,” says the drummer. “A real man’s man.” But Seraphine also got a strong sense that there was “something darker” lurking beneath the happy-go-lucky guitarist’s smile.

A year on, the trio had joined The Missing Links, where they met Lee Loughnane. “Terry had that gruff exterior, but he was a pussycat inside,” Loughnane says, recalling their first meeting. “And he was never without his guitar. I don’t think I ever saw that thing in its case.”

In 1967, Kath, Loughnane, Seraphine and Parazaider teamed up with trombonist Jimmy Pankow, vocalist/keyboard player Robert Lamm and, finally, vocalist/bass guitarist Peter Cetera and renamed themselves The Big Thing.

It was the era of Sgt Pepper, the Vietnam War and LSD. Artistic boundaries were blurring. For a club band, though, it was still smart suits and Top 40 covers. In protest at these restraints, Kath showed up one night with his suit jacket worn backwards. When The Big Thing played the Mothers Of Invention’s How Could I Be Such A Fool, a Milwaukee club owner fired them on the spot. “The music we wanted to play was rock’n’roll with horns,” says Loughnane.

By now, the band had come to the attention of ambitious songwriter/producer James Guercio, who had just written pop duo Chad And Jeremy’s US hit Distant Shores. Guercio signed them to his production company, brought them to Los Angeles and changed their name to Chicago Transit Authority.

In 1968, Chicago Transit Authority signed to Columbia and were soon recording their debut album, with Guercio (who also controlled their management and publishing) producing. “Jimmy was great, but Jimmy was a walking conflict of interest,” says Loughnane.

Released in April 1969, the Chicago Transit Authority double LP distilled a dizzying array of styles, most of them in its six-and-a-half-minute opener, Introduction, written by Kath and sung in his wonderful bluesy baritone. “The best opening cut on any album ever,” states Seraphine.

The album also included Kath’s dissonant, one-man mini-symphony Freeform Guitar. “Classical stations played that track,” says Loughnane. “But Terry was doing all that stuff Hendrix was doing before we heard Hendrix do it.”

As Kath told Guitar Player magazine in a rare interview in 1971: “Jimi was playing all the stuff I had in my head. I couldn’t believe it when I first heard him.”

CTA supported the album’s release by opening for Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin in the spring of 1969. The band had first encountered Jimi and The Experience’s drummer Mitch Mitchell when they dropped by their gig at the Whisky A Go Go. According to Walt Parazaider, it was here that Hendrix told him, “Your guitarist is better than me.”

“That’s been Walter’s soundbite for years,” Loughnane chuckles, while Seraphine adds to the myth by recalling how Hendrix and Mitchell came backstage at The Whisky and told CTA: “You are the best band I’ve ever heard in my life.”

“Hearing that wasn’t just good for our egos,” he adds. “It was good for our souls.”

As the band’s lone guitarist, competing with three horn players, Kath knew how to make his presence felt. Trombonist Jimmy Pankow recalls how even in their club days, Kath was “banging his guitar off his amplifier” – Pete Townshend-style – “to make it talk”.

As well as being a phenomenal rhythm player, Kath was ceaselessly inventive on stage and in the studio. He did it all: wah-wah pedals, distortion, endlessly sustained notes and the two-handed tapping heard on Freeform Guitar that would become Eddie Van Halen’s trademark in the mid-70s. “He had a sound that no other guitar player could get,” marvels Eagles guitarist Joe Walsh in Searching For Terry. “How in the world did he get a guitar to sound like that?”

Great as it was, Chicago Transit Authority wouldn’t budge beyond No.17 in the US, although it cracked the Top 10 in Britain. It didn’t help that James Guercio’s other new signing, fellow Columbia “rock’n’roll with horns” act Blood, Sweat & Tears, had just hit No.1 with their second album. “But Blood, Sweat & Tears didn’t have our songs, or our guitarist,” states Seraphine.

Undeterred, Guercio changed their name to Chicago (after the actual Chicago Transit Authority threatened them with legal action) and sent them back to the studio.

Chicago II arrived in January 1970, complete with Ballet For A Girl In Buchannon, a near 13-minute piece split into seven movements, encompassing film soundtrack-style instrumentals, and beginning with Kath’s Make Me Smile. But the album’s other hit-in-waiting was 25 Or 6 To 4, a Robert Lamm song that captured every facet of their sound: musical virtuosity, melodic nous and Terry Kath’s hooligan guitar. No sooner was the album out than Chicago were on a brand new Boeing 747 on their way to Europe.

At their Royal Albert Hall gig in London, each band member was introduced separately and received a standing ovation. Interviewed for an NBC news story in 1970, James Guercio declared: “If Johann Sebastian Bach were alive today, he would probably be performing in a band similar to Chicago.”

“On that first UK trip, we felt like we were true artists, not just a pop commodity,” wrote Seraphine in his 2011 memoir, Street Player. Not that this artistic validation ruled out the usual rock’n’roll misadventures. “There was women, booze, drugs,” admits Loughnane. “We were kids, ferchrissakes.” Seraphine himself flew home to discover that the late nights and overindulgence had left him with tuberculosis.

Back in the US, Chicago finally got their break when an edited version of Make Me Smile reached the Top Ten. “At first we were upset that Columbia were bastardising our music,” admits Loughnane. “But then we realised we were getting played on the radio.”

It was Chicago’s first but by no means last experience of art-versus-commerce. When an edited 25 Or 6 To 4 went Top Five in the US and the UK, though, nobody could complain.

So began a relentless cycle of album/tour/album that Lee Loughnane now marvels at. “Thank god we had so many writers in the band as we were constantly on the road,” he says.

Although America had embraced them, Britain’s love affair with Chicago had cooled. On a return trip to the UK, Kath’s gruff persona got the better of him during a press conference at the London Hilton. Weary of the praise journalists were heaping on home-grown guitarists Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page, Kath slagged off Clapton (“He sucks!”) and shouted: “Fuck you England, you motherfuckin’ teabag faggot motherfuckers!”

“That queered us,” says Seraphine. “We were so embarrassed. We took Terry aside and said, ‘My God, did you really just say that?’ But Terry could be very outspoken.”

Recorded in the summer of 1970, Chicago Live At Tanglewood, an unofficial but readily available album and film, offers the perfect snapshot of their outspoken guitarist. Kath, his lank hair flying, resembles a linebacker with an electric guitar. He grins, he sways, he shuffles, he rips out an astonishing solo on 25 Or 6 To 4, and he looks like the boss.

“Terry was the musical leader,” confirms Loughnane. “When you took solos, you’d listen for Terry’s whistle. It was high-pitched and permeated any decibel level. That whistle was the sign that you had eight bars left, and then it was time to go back into the bridge.”

Chicago V arrived in July ’72 and gave the band their first US No.1. Songs such as Dialogue (Parts 1 And 2) and Saturday In The Park hit a new peak. But a planned Japanese tour was postponed when Robert Lamm was taken ill. The entrepreneurial James Guercio was now directing a movie, Electra Glide In Blue, about an Arizona motorcycle cop’s run-in with local hippies. Guercio suggested Loughnane, Kath, Parazaider and Cetera play the hippies. “After all, we were hippies,” says Loughnane – and it meant Guercio didn’t have to pay real actors. The film soundtrack featured the exquisite Kath-sung ballad Tell Me. But in a chilly omen of gun-related events in real life, Kath’s character shoots a cop.

By January 1978, Chicago had split from “the man who controlled everything”, James Guercio, and had appointed a new manager. “Chicago was still an amazing band, but it wasn’t such a happy band,” admits Seraphine. “There was the constant pressure to write hits, and Terry was frustrated.”

Seraphine admits that some band members weren’t getting on, and that Peter Cetera’s “level of self-confidence” had been an issue for Kath as far back as 1968. Cetera is also the only member of the original Chicago not to participate in the Searching For Terry film.

Did Kath plan to leave the band? Lee Loughnane thinks not, but says the guitarist was planning to record a solo album: “And that might have helped ostracise some demons.”

In Terry’s private life, his volatile marriage to his first wife Pamela Robinson had ended, and he was now with Camelia Ortiz, whom he’d marry the following year. Their daughter, Michelle, would be born two years later. But the partying never stopped.

When Chicago started recording their sixth album at Guercio’s Caribou Ranch studio in the Rocky Mountains, their drug use escalated. “That’s when the drugs got heavier and things got weirder,” says Seraphine. “There was cocaine everywhere.”

Meanwhile Back At The Ranch, a 1974 US TV special, showed the band and their partners at the Colorado studio. In one scene, Kath is seen racing his motorcycle around the mountains. But with their spaced-out grins and thousand-yard stares, most of the group, especially Kath, look like they’ve been awake for days.

“Terry could handle more drugs than any human being I have ever met. Way more than the normal bear,” says Loughnane. “But it was killing him.”

Unfortunately, Kath had acquired another dangerous hobby: guns. “He collected guns and started taking them everywhere,” says Seraphine. “And guns and drugs are a bad combination.”

The Number One albums kept coming, but there was now a conflict between those who preferred Chicago’s jazz-orientated style (Seraphine, Kath) and those who wanted shorter songs that would get played on the radio (Guercio and Cetera). Perversely, the song that re-branded Chicago as a radio-friendly pop act very nearly didn’t make it on to 1976’s Chicago X. Cetera’s string-laden ballad If You Leave Me Now was added at the last minute on Guercio’s insistence.

Naturally, Loughnane, who still plays the song most nights on tour, is reluctant to bite the hand that feeds. “You can’t deny its success. Number One all over the world and it still works today.”

If You Leave Me Now was a fine pop song, but it didn’t sound like Chicago and it didn’t feature Terry Kath, who excused himself from the recording to ride his motorcycle.

By now, however, Kath’s drug use was becoming a serious issue. “He was incredibly unhappy and depressed,” revealed Jimmy Pankow, “and doing drugs on top of that compounded the situation.”

Furthermore, Kath’s obsession with guns scared his bandmates. In his Beach Boys biography, The Eyes That Smiled, writer Paul Mendoza recalls an incident in which Beach Boy Carl Wilson was partying with Chicago and saw Terry playing Russian Roulette, panicked and knocked the gun from his hand: “And Terry punched Carl in the face, knocking him down,” forcing Robert Lamm and others to restrain him.

On his last night alive, January 23, 1978, Terry Kath ended up at Chicago roadie Don Johnson’s apartment in Canoga Park, California. Johnson was one of Kath’s regular drug buddies and, according to Seraphine, “Terry had been on cocaine for a couple of days.”

Johnson, the only witness to Kath’s death, told the band what happened. According to him, Kath brought his guns into the apartment and began cleaning a 9mm semi-automatic pistol at the kitchen table. Johnson warned him to be careful. Terry showed him the gun’s clip in his hand. Without the clip, the pistol wouldn’t fire.

Kath then put the clip back into the gun and began waving it around, believing the chamber was empty. “What do you think I’m gonna do?” he’s supposed to have said. “Blow my brains out?” Unknown to Kath, though, there was a single bullet in the gun. According to Johnson, the guitarist waved the revolver near his temple, with his finger on the trigger, and accidentally released the round. He died instantly.

Danny Seraphine remembers learning of Kath’s death in a call on his newfangled car phone. He drove straight to Johnson’s apartment, to find the roadie sobbing in the corner.

“Terry’s lifeless body was sat back on the couch, his head angled towards the ceiling,” he recalled. “Two steps forward revealed a bullet hole in the side of his head. His eyes were wide open, staring off blankly into the distance.”

The drummer was still there when the police arrived. The coroner struggled to lift Terry’s body and asked Seraphine to help. He refused. The guitarist was too tall to fit in the body bag, and Kath’s corpse was carried out of the building with his size 12 snakeskin boots sticking out of the end.

Rumours of suicide circulated, but everyone in the Chicago camp disputes this. “It was a stupid accident,” sighs Lee Loughnane. “I had to touch his body at the funeral, to realise that it was just a shell, that Terry had gone.”

The band talked about splitting up, then decided against it. But carrying on was one thing; coping with Kath’s death quite another.

Terry’s replacement was former Crosby, Stills & Nash sideman Donnie Dacus. He lasted two albums. “Donnie looked like Peter Frampton, he had the image…” says Seraphine. His voice trails off. “We were still reeling from Terry’s death, and there were still drugs in the band.”

“It took me two more years to clean up,” admits Loughnane today. “I’ve now been sober thirty “seven years.”

There have been further line-up changes over those years. Cetera quit in 1985, Seraphine was fired in 1990 (“That hurt,” he says flatly) and Keith Howland has been Chicago’s guitarist since ’95.

Ultimately, there are two Chicagos: the one with Terry Kath and the one without. And the one without scored some huge hits in the 80s, including the Peter Cetera ballads Hard To Say I’m Sorry and You’re The Inspiration. “When we started, we thought we could get away with anything musically,” sighs Loughnane. “And we had to learn that you can’t. There will always be a compromise.”

In the end, perhaps, Terry Kath wasn’t one for compromise, and ultimately, it cost him his life. “Making this documentary, I’ve learned that my dad was a complex guy,” admits Michelle Sinclair. “But part of doing this film is to let people who’ve lost someone because of drugs know they’re not alone.”

The Chicago of 2015 are clean, sober and slicker, and still playing over 100 shows a year. They still do some of the old songs. But, inevitably, it’s different. “It’s not the same band,” says Lee Loughnane. After all, how could it be? “But Terry Kath is still in the music. His legacy is in everything Chicago does.”

Perhaps the big man with the loud whistle and the even louder guitar sound isn’t going to be forgotten after all.

Searching For Terry is also known as The Terry Kath Experience, and can be streamed via Amazon Prime. This feature originally appeared in Classic Rock 208 (April 2015)

10 Greatest Terry Kath Moments

Mark Blake is a music journalist and author. His work has appeared in The Times and The Daily Telegraph, and the magazines Q, Mojo, Classic Rock, Music Week and Prog. He is the author of Pigs Might Fly: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd, Is This the Real Life: The Untold Story of Queen, Magnifico! The A–Z Of Queen, Peter Grant, The Story Of Rock’s Greatest Manager and Pretend You’re in a War: The Who & The Sixties. 

“When you’re hot,” Omar reflects, “your management is telling you, ‘You gotta hit it now. You worked so hard and so long to get to this actual moment, now is the time not to take your foot of the gas.’

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Omar and Cedric: If This Ever Gets Weird will be released on DVD on February 21.

A music writer since 1993, formerly Editor of Kerrang! and Planet Rock magazine (RIP), Paul Brannigan is a Contributing Editor to Louder. Having previously written books on Lemmy, Dave Grohl (the Sunday Times best-seller This Is A Call) and Metallica (Birth School Metallica Death, co-authored with Ian Winwood), his Eddie Van Halen biography (Eruption in the UK, Unchained in the US) emerged in 2021. He has written for Rolling Stone, Mojo and Q, hung out with Fugazi at Dischord House, flown on Ozzy Osbourne’s private jet, played Angus Young’s Gibson SG, and interviewed everyone from Aerosmith and Beastie Boys to Young Gods and ZZ Top. Born in the North of Ireland, Brannigan lives in North London and supports The Arsenal.

By 2022, there were two versions of The Quireboys operating at the same time. Two years later, frontman Spike launched a new version of the band, while the “other” Quireboys, led by guitarist Guy Griffin, eventually reemerged as the Black Eyed Sons. It was always thus in the ever-fractious, ever-chaotic world of one of the UK’s greatest rock’n’roll bands. In 2004, as The Quireboys released their Well Oiled album, they told Classic Rock their riotous, booze-soaked story.

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For the first of what would be many times this afternoon, Spike leans across our table at London’s Kensington Gardens Hotel and addresses me in friendly, conspiratorial yet unmistakably alcohol-charged tones: “You want the story of The Quireboys?” he retorts, slurring slightly. “That’s easy. We met all these journalists – Geoff Barton, Mick Wall, Krusher – and none of them had any work to do or any drugs to take. So we created a rock’n’roll band. If it wasn’t for The Quireboys, all of youse bastards wouldn’t have jobs. We paid for all your booze, birds and drugs, and still to this very day all you bastard journalists do is slag us off.”

Also for the first of numerous occasions this afternoon Guy Griffin winces and raises his eyes to the heavens. Better-known to his mates as Griff, The Quireboys’ guitarist is by now aware that nobody will change Geordie barfly Spike, nor is the singer likely to dilute his opinions for public consumption after having sunk a few. But then we wouldn’t want it any other way.

The Quireboys have existed on and off since 1985, having formed shortly after Newcastle-born Jonathan Gray had relocated to London. He was laying paving slabs outside Buckingham Palace when workmates dubbed him Spike, because of his Rod Stewart-style coiffure. The nickname stuck, although, strangely when one considers the style of music that he would sing for almost the next two decades, Spike wasn’t a fan of either Rod or The Faces.

“To me, Rod Stewart was Sailing and Maggie May – all the hits,” Spike says dismissively. “It was always the Rolling Stones, Humble Pie and old soul stuff that I loved. Plus I’d been trained on the classical guitar when I was a kid, so I wasn’t even a singer in those days.”

As I discover during the next hour-and-a-half, Spike has a bagful of anecdotes, and his transition from Ralph McTell-fixated folkie to gravel-throated aspiring rock frontman is no exception. By then Spike had long since met guitarist Guy Bailey in the latter’s local pub, and he eventually ended up sleeping on the floor of Bailey’s flat for two years. One fateful evening, much to the astonishment of his flatmate, Spike produced an acoustic guitar and three songs were written (Seven O’Clock, I Don’t Love You Anymore and Misled), all of which eventually appeared on the first Quireboys album.

Bailey and Spike were playing an early gig at a community centre in Brixton, London, when the latter broke a guitar string and had no replacement. “Guy went: ‘You sing into the mic – just have a go’. And nobody knew what would come out,” Spike recollects fondly. “It was crap, like, but that was the beginning of the band.”

In a roundabout way, the group’s name also originated at the same central London building site, where Spike had also blagged Bailey a job. Having watched The Choirboys, a movie about New York cops, the night before, a chat about how cool a name it’d be for their new band was rudely interrupted.

“We worked with all these Italians who went: ‘The Choirboys? You’re the fucking Queerboys’. Funnily enough we preferred being The Queerboys. It was meant as a laugh, but it got us banned from all the universities, everywhere.

When bassist Chris Johnstone departed briefly in late 1985, the band’s rhythm section was completed by Nigel Mogg (nephew of UFO singer Phil Mogg) along with existing drummer Coze. Johnstone did return, but as the keyboard player. Nigel had been a page-boy at his famous uncle’s wedding, and craved his own shot at rockstardom.

“I’d met Guy and Spike at Dingwall’s one night. They’d said I looked good and wondered if I played bass,” Nigel Mogg recalls.

Coincidentally, he did. Pete Way, UFO’s four-stringer, had already kindly given Nigel a bass of his own. “It was a Thunderbird,” Nigel grins now. “I played it at a few gigs – ’til Cliff Evans from Tank asked for it back. It turned out that Pete had apparently borrowed it from Cliff’s instrument shop, so it wasn’t even his to have given me.”

“Nigel joined the band because he looked good,” Spike points out helpfully. “He couldn’t play – he still bloody can’t! – but he’s Mr Fashion. It wasn’t ’til Griff joined that The Quireboys became a proper band.”

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. For a while, Phil Mogg even became the group’s manager, making phone calls on their behalf and introducing them to industry figures like photographer Ross Halfin, who handled their first-ever photo session (“Ross was just as annoying then as he is now,” Nigel says).

The group kept themselves visible, becoming the Marquee’s unofficial ‘house’ band. In London and beyond they would open for anybody and everybody, and did so for a list that includes Johnny Thunders (“He treated us like shit, but introduced me to mixing Bailey’s liqueur with cognac,” Spike recalls), Yngwie Malmsteen (“He was furious that Sounds had printed a full-page picture of me, and a postage stamp-sized one of him” – Spike) and the Cherry Bombz. Then during a Queerboys Friday night headline residency at The Marquee in June 1987, Guns N’ Roses walked in.

“They were playing the following weekend and had come to check the club out,” Nigel recalls. “We met them, they thought we were good, and they were great too. I hung out with Axl, Slash and Duff at their hotel, and we struck up a friendship.”

The Queerboys’ run of good fortune brought them the offer of a spot on 1987’s Reading Festival bill, where they had the opportunity to appear alongside Alice Cooper, Magnum, The Stranglers, FM, Quo and Zodiac Mindwarp. But there was a condition: they had to change their name.

“We became the Pretty Girls for a very brief time,” Nigel divulges, “before the idea of the different spelling came up. With hindsight I wish we’d stuck to our guns. Nobody would bat an eyelid at a band called The Queerboys these days.”

As Spike relates unexpectedly, the group actually decided to call it a day, but then Phil Mogg came up with his biggest coup. “I’ll never forget it,” the singer beams. “We were in the middle of what was gonna be our very last rehearsal, when Phil walked in with these two bags full of booze. He’d not only got us the gig opening for Guns N’ Roses and Faster Pussycat at Hammersmith Odeon, but the whole bloody UK tour.

“UFO were so good to us,” he continues. “Guy Bailey didn’t even own a guitar at the time, so they lent us loads of equipment. When Duff [McKagan, GN’R bassist] saw we had UFO’s crew and flight cases he said: ‘Fucking hell, you’re professional’. How wrong he was!”

Nevertheless, the attention The Quireboys were receiving hadn’t gone unnoticed by a young guitarist called Ginger. Having recently arrived in London from Newcastle, he lacked the funds to buy a ticket for the Hammersmith gig so he employed extreme methods to gain admission.

“I went to a nightclub [Buttz ’N’ Spike’s] that Spike used to run and told him: ‘Look, I’m your new lead guitar player’. They didn’t need a new guitarist, but Phil Mogg had already suggested getting one,” Ginger told us in March 2004. He also claimed that he was eventually booted out of The Quireboys for being “too wild” for them. Spike and Nigel remember things very differently, however.

“That’s absolute bollocks,” Spike seethes. “Ginger’s still one of my best friends, but I’m a Newcastle United fan and he’s a fookin’ Mackem [nickname of arch rivals Sunderland]. Our problems weren’t about drugs, drinking or women, it was because he supports Sunderland. Man, I’m being deadly serious with you.”

What Ginger actually told Classic Rock was that he was “well into my drugs, but the rest of The Quireboys only drank. Which was funny, as months after I left they were all in the Betty Ford Clinic with coke addictions.”

“He was also supposedly too wild for The Throbs,” Spike chuckles, referring to Ginger’s even shorter tenure with the hard-partying New York band who invited him aboard after his Quireboys sacking. “They thought they were getting Nigel, but they’d rung the wrong guy.”

“That’s quite true,” Mogg says. “Ginger was apparently so drunk while they were trying to make their album that they’d had enough. They took him to the airport, went out to a bar to celebrate getting rid of him, and by the time they got back Ginger was waiting outside their apartment. He wouldn’t leave.

“For Ginger it was all new,” Mogg continues. “He’d never been in bands that had had much attention. We were used to headlining shows and signing a few autographs. In a sense he had it on a plate, because he missed out on our transit-van years. Ginger was the last one in, so there was also some piss-taking. He also had this annoying habit of pretending to be drunk to seek attention from the ladies. But, God bless him, he was trying.”

“When you’ve met people like Mick Jagger or Steven Tyler, who are up here,” Spike says, his hand above his head symbolising the very pinnacles of excess, “and Ginger’s down here [the same hand is now at knee level], I mean… Just don’t do it, man. Please, it’s embarrassing. You wanna talk drugs? I’ve taken more than Ginger’ll ever do, but I don’t go on about it all the time.”

“But there’s nothing glamorous in talking all the time about drinking or taking drugs,” an anxious-looking Griff chips in, forgetting for a moment that we’re here to promote a new Quireboys album called Well Oiled.

With Ginger still on board, and Marquee Club boss Bush Telfer booking the band’s shows, The Quireboys signed to Survival Records, a feeder label for EMI, for the princely sum of £18. They enjoyed success with their first two singles, Mayfair and There She Goes Again, although in typically ramshackle fashion the latter was written just six days before it was recorded. The group also had a meeting in Cardiff with Larry Mazer, an important US manager (who, ironically, now looks after The Wildhearts). Incredibly, while Mazer was making them all sorts of promises they all fell asleep – Ginger face-down in a plate of chips.

“But we were on a roll,” Spike points out proudly. “By then we’d sold out The Astoria and The Dominion [in London] without a record deal. That’d never happen today.”

The band played the Reading Festival again in 88, along with Iggy Pop, The Ramones, Meat Loaf, Uriah Heep and Starship, although Ginger was arrested en route and almost failed to materialise. Also, by this point Sharon Osbourne was considering adding The Quireboys to her management roster.

Ginger’s aforementioned dismissal took place in January 1989, following an American tour on which he had consistently misbehaved. “Sharon had probably seen Ozzy’s dark side in me,” Ginger later theorised. “I knew that something was up, because nobody would speak to me on the flight home.”

On the band’s return to the UK, ex-Cradle Snatchers/Feline Groove guitarist Guy Griffin joined, while drummer Coze was also being shown the door.

Griff’s first meeting with Sharon Osbourne was a memorable one: “I was extremely nervous, because I didn’t know whether or not I was in the band – Guy Bailey hadn’t wanted me,” he explains. “Sharon asked me: ‘Are you a cunt?’. I said that I didn’t think so, and she replied: ‘Good. If you’re not a cunt then you’re in the band; when you become one, then you’re out’.”

Even in those early days, Sharon was known for her ruthless management style. Indeed, Chris Johnstone would later claim that Sharon once purposely placed Bailey at the end of the line-up in a band photo session so that he could be cropped out of the picture when she’d found a reason to sack him.

Spike grins sheepishly when he’s reminded that he once told an interviewer: “Anyone who can get [ex-Runaways guitarist] Lita Ford a platinum album has to be alright.” These days he has nothing but praise for Ozzy’s missus.

“I gather she’s a completely different person now, but when I knew Sharon she was one of the nicest people I’ve ever met,” he says. “There’s no bad feeling from me. When she had no time to work on us any more she introduced us to loads of other managers, instead of just dropping us in the shit.”

If Spike is to be believed, he received the news that The Quireboys had been promoted from Survival to EMI by letter. “The fee was just a pound – how the fuck does that happen?” he ponders, still mystified. “Rupert Perry [head of EMI] rang to talk about the deal, but it was the morning after a Buttz ’N’ Spike’s club night and I fell asleep on the phone. He couldn’t cut me off to speak to anyone else for five bloody hours!”

Ian Wallace (of Bob Dylan fame) filled the drum stool when The Quireboys flew to LA to record their debut album. The intention had been for Ron Nevison (Led Zeppelin, Bad Company, UFO) to produce the sessions, but he wasn’t available when the band wanted him (he did, however, handle the mixing). At the last minute, Rod Stewart’s producer George Tutko and guitarist Jim Cregan flew into London to make their own sales pitch. “Afterwards, everybody went to Buttz ’N’ Spike’s and they said: ‘C’mon, let’s drink’. We had to pick them up off the floor,” Griff laughs. “In fact there was a party atmosphere throughout the whole album.”

Each time the doors to LA’s Cherokee Studios swung open, a stream of models and musos would drop by to hang out. When Rod Stewart and Paul Young both came on the same day, Spike was mortified that Stewart would hear his guide-vocal recordings.

“Tom Petty and Don Henley [Eagles drummer/vocalist] also came down,” Spike recalls. “You’ve got no idea what it was like with so many famous people around. I asked this guy with long black hair: ‘What do you do, mate?’ He said he sang. I said: ‘Have you been doing it long, and do youse do well?’. He nodded. When I asked what his group was called, he said Journey. It was Steve Perry, and I’d never fucking heard of him!”

Titled A Bit Of What You Fancy, The Quireboys’ album peaked at No.2 in the UK chart following its release in February 1990, its sales stoked by three Top 40 singles (Seven O’Clock, their signature Hey You, and I Don’t Love You Anymore). However, there remained a certain cynicism in sections of the British music press who weren’t out boozing with the band, with those writers mockingly referring to the group as the Rolling Quirefaces and suchlike.

“It was annoying. We weren’t the only band to have easily identifiable influences,” Mogg complains. “Thunder were Bad Company and Free rolled into one, and they never took the stick we did. Of course we were surprised to have all those hits, but we were on a roll. The shows were great, so were the songs, and we also had the right manager and record company to make them work for us.”

The Quireboys certainly emerged as leading lights of a newly energised UK rock scene, alongside the likes of Dogs D’Amour, The Almighty, FM and Little Angels. “Yeah, but Little Angels were complete shite, weren’t they?” Spike says with a malicious smile. “C’mon, why did Michael Lee [Angels drummer, who eventually played with The Quireboys] leave them? Because they were the worst band I ever saw in my life.”

With ex-Lone Justice man Rudy Rickman completing the touring line-up, The Quireboys’ image became inextricably linked with their love of booze; even their stage set was designed to look like a pub. “We wanted the beer pumps to work, but it was too time-consuming to have set up,” Nigel remembers fondly.

Indeed, most of the horror stories you heard about the band were true. I once spent an evening with them during a road report in 1989, and while checking out of the hotel the following morning found myself saying goodbye to a band member who was being taken to hospital to have his stomach pumped.

“That would probably have been Guy Bailey,” Nigel ponders. “The drinking made him ill twice. He even missed some shows due to dehydration. We all went to visit him in hospital. And he was still wearing his cowboy hat.”

“There were times when Guy wouldn’t even finish the gig,” Spike adds. “You’d come off stage all sweaty and he’d be there in the bar: ‘Good gig, lads’.”

The big time had finally arrived for The Quireboys – who had gone through 10 tour managers in one single trek before hiring Led Zeppelin’s legendary Richard Cole for a whopping £4000 a week. While out supporting Whitesnake on 1990’s Monsters Of Rock circuit (along with Aerosmith, Poison and Thunder), Cole had attempted to impress upon the band the importance of being sober while in the presence of the on-the-wagon Aerosmith. So there was considerable unease when a dishevelled-looking Spike shuffled into the hotel lobby after a night on the tiles and bumped into a breakfast-bound Steven Tyler.

“He asked how we were enjoying the tour, and I said everything was great and that I was really looking forward to Switzerland,” Spike says with a roguish grin. “He replied: ‘Spike, we’ve been in Switzerland for the past two days’. But we had a good laugh about it. In fact the next day we were in Amsterdam and he asked me to buy him some gear – just so he could smell it. I told him to get his own fucking drugs, I don’t smoke dope. What made it funnier still, three girls then came running down the street, blanked Steven and asked for my autograph. Classic!”

The same year, The Quireboys also played Spike’s dream gig, supporting the Rolling Stones at Newcastle United FC’s stadium St James’ Park. There was also another memorable festival spot, in Germany with David Bowie. “We were dying in front of his audience,” Spike recalls. “So I told ’em: ‘It’s not my fault you lost two world wars and one World Cup’. We went down great after that.”

Outside of Europe, the group re-christened themselves the London Quireboys, due to the existence of Australian band The Choirboys. “We offered them £20,000 to change their name,” Spike reveals, “and they turned us down. Then three months later they got dropped. Bet they wished they’d taken our fucking money.”

The London Quireboys gigged hard across America to promote their debut album, playing with LA Guns in the clubs and opening for labelmates Heart in stadiums. Spike recalls one particular female US fan vowing to resist Nigel Mogg’s ardour until she’d heard his band on the radio. Her mood towards him warmed considerably en route to an after-show party when Seven O’Clock blared out of the car radio.

But there was little balance in their lives: in a single week the group headlined a sold-out Budokan in Tokyo, then played to 200 people in fancy dress in a US club. The touring had played havoc with everyone’s personal lives, resulting in both Spike and Bailey splitting up with their long-term girlfriends. It also began to influence the group’s material: “We started writing all these fucking depressing ballads,” Spike recalls. “It was not a good time.”

After Sharon Osbourne dropped The Quireboys in April 1992, the group met several potential new managers before deciding to go with AC/DC’s Steve Barnett. Spike has already expressed his admiration for Sharon, but a knee-jerk bitch-fest at the time left Nigel experiencing her legendary wrath.

“Spike and I went out for a drink after she told us, and some girl that I didn’t know was with us,” Nigel remembers. “Next morning I found out she was the Osbournes’ nanny and had heard all my ranting and raving. Sharon rang, called me a fucking little cunt and threatened to cut off my balls and shove ’em down my throat. We’ve not spoken since.”

By that point the band had already been working on their second album for a year. The headaches they faced up to during sessions for what became the aptly titled Bitter Sweet & Twisted could fill a book on their own. In a nutshell, the band decamped to Ireland and wrote 18 songs, which were to be recorded with Ron Nevison. Then, at Sharon’s suggestion, the producer’s job went to Bob Rock instead. Except that Rock was still beavering away on Metallica’s Black Album.

Seven months later The Quireboys finally began work at Little Mountain Studios in Vancouver. But now the record company wanted Spike to write some new material with Bryan Adams’ songwriting collaborator, Jim Vallance.

Bob Rock then decided he needed a holiday, so Spike and Bailey accompanied him to Hawaii. At George Benson’s studio in Maui, Guy’s amplifier blew up and there was no replacement on the island.

The entire circus moved on to London, where Rock tried unsuccessfully to mix what they’d recorded. Just as everyone decamped back to Vancouver.

Meanwhile, Sharon and EMI’s Nick Gatfield both severed their responsibilities to the band, whose hotel bills alone now amounted at £4000. To cap it all, Rolling Stones producer Chris Kimsey was then brought in to work on some extra tracks.

“We were being whisked all over the world to work on this record,” Griff seethes, “and then they sat on it for a year.”

“In Ireland, at the start, we recorded the album in two days flat,” Spike says. “It was fucking great. I wish I still had a tape of it.”

The group had vehemently opposed working with outside writers such as Vallance, yet Griff shamefully admits that they backed down after EMI offered them an extra $30 per day toward their living expenses.

“Jon Bon Jovi had also sent some songs for The Quireboys to do,” Spike adds candidly. “They were fucking shit. He didn’t have a clue. And I’d tell Jon that to his face. Jim Vallance was a lovely bloke, but he wouldn’t let me smoke. I looked at Guy Bailey and knew we had to get the fuck out of there as quickly as possible, so we wrote the song [The King Of New York] and were gone in two minutes flat. To me it’s shit. I only wrote it to get a fucking cigarette!”

Nigel Mogg reckons the choice of Bob Rock was also completely wrong. “I didn’t like any of the records he’d made,” he says now. “How do Mötley Crüe, The Cult and Metallica relate to us? And waiting around for him for half a year, which then became nine months, was quite ridiculous.”

Preceded by the single Tramps & Thieves, the Bitter Sweet & Twisted album was finally released in March 1993, just as a musical revolution was announcing itself: Nirvana, Alice In Chains, Soundgarden et al were about to wipe the slate clean; even Ginger was starting to do well with his band The Wildhearts.

Bitter Sweet… reached only No.31 in the chart. It spawned another Top 40 single in the shape of Brother Louie, but by then, after all the waiting, the group were just happy to have the damned thing in the racks. EMI felt differently, however, and released The Quireboys from their contract.

“Parts of that album were great,” Mogg considers now, “others were strung out and abysmal. If you wait for something for six months, you end up losing interest in it yourself.”

A temporary form of salvation was at hand. The Quireboys played some more shows with Guns N’ Roses, this time on the Scandinavian and German legs of the latter’s Use Your Illusion stadium tour.

“That band have always been good to us,” Griff acknowledges. “We’d just been dropped by EMI and had no idea what to do next. Then Axl calls to ask if we’ll be their special guest. It turned out that he was a big fan of King Of New York, which was from an album that hadn’t even been released in America. I believe he bought an import copy. We had absolutely no money, so we ended up getting the ferry over.”

Nigel, who lives in Los Angeles these days, still remains friendly with the ex-Guns/current Velvet Revolver duo of Duff McKagan and drummer Matt Sorum, although he says he has “not seen Axl for years, and the others [ex-GN’R members] really don’t like talking about him”.

Bitter Sweet & Twisted went platinum in Canada, where, along with Europe and Japan, The Quireboys toured. But disillusionment set in as attendances at the band’s shows dwindled.

Last seen in his own band Dog Kennel Hill, Guy Bailey left, telling his bandmates, according to Spike: “I can’t tread the boards anymore, dear.”

Griff admits that the group were “getting a bit sick of each other” by this point. And the simmering frustration within the band blew up in everybody’s faces when Spike stormed off the stage at a festival in Belgium, telling his partners: “Fuck the lot of youse. I’m out of here.”

“So many factors were working against us,” Griff muses now. “I was only 22 when we split up, but we’d become as unfashionable as it was possible to get. Music had completely changed, and we weren’t equipped to deal with what was going on.”

“We couldn’t get another record deal, and there seemed little point in flogging a dead horse,” Mogg sums up regretfully. “Stepping down on to an indie label wasn’t for me. There was a tour with Darrell Bath [taking Griff’s place], but Guy Bailey was still there so I wanted nothing to do with it. Towards the end, Guy and I didn’t get on, and I still attribute a lot of our in-fighting to his pessimism and lack of enthusiasm. In fact Guy even failed to turn up for a few of the last shows, so I was proven right.”

Spike went on to form God’s Hotel with ex-Burning Tree drummer Doni Gray, and that band’s album took four years to come out. As well as recording a solo album of R&B and soul songs, Spike also turned down the chance to front Snakepit, the band formed by guitarist Slash after his departure from Guns N’ Roses – understandably a subject he’s now somewhat tired of talking about.

“Let me show you what happened,” he says, thumbing through a wallet that still contains a membership card for Los Angeles ‘hairspray’ hangout The Cathouse, and finally producing a photograph of his son. “Slash is the fucking guy, but I was living in Toronto at the time and the timing wasn’t right.”

In early 1995 Spike reunited The Quireboys for very personal reasons. With his father on his deathbed, Spike assembled a makeshift line-up that included members of The Almighty and Honeycrack to play a one-off concert at Newcastle’s Mayfair.

“My dad had lived for going out on tour with The Quireboys,” he says sadly. “Danny [Bowes] and Luke [Morley] from Thunder also came up and did the show. But the week before it took place he passed away. He’d have loved it.”

Spike also made headlines with his involvement in Michael Schenker’s departure from UFO. The pair had clashed backstage at UFO’s show in Newcastle in November 2000, a violent confrontation that caused guitarist Schenker to hit the bottle all the following day and deliver a quite horrendous and now legendary swansong at Manchester Apollo.

“Schenker had been ranting and raving at me for no reason at all,” Spike says. “He left the dressing room, and then came back in saying he was gonna kill me. He launched himself at me, so I put him on the floor – and I had a broken leg at the time! I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. But the bloke’s absolutely mental. When the police came, one of them was a Quireboys fan. They were still gonna take me away, ’til Phil Mogg said everyone in the room would swear that Schenker attacked me first.”

With The Quireboys just a fading memory and a lingering smell of stale booze, the rest of the band pursued a diverse array of projects. Mogg and Griff had a short-lived Los Angeles band called Blood From A Stone, before Guy formed Glimmer, who in 1999 released an album for Atlantic Records. Nigel formed his self-styled ‘glambient’ group Nancy Boy with vocalist Donovan Leitch (son of 60s star Donovan) and guitarist Jason Nesmith (son of Monkees guitarist Mike). The bassist has also since worked as a model, journalist and photographer, and even had his own jeans company.

When Spike decided to revive The Quireboys in 1999, even Nigel Mogg admits to an uncertainty over whether there would still be an audience. However, the knowledge that his nemesis Bailey would not be involved, and then two sold-out shows at London’s Garage, convinced him to play on the band’s comeback album This Is Rock’N’Roll.

“At first it was gonna be a solo project, but then Nigel came on board, and Sanctuary Records were stupid enough to give us tons of cash,” Spike grins. “So now it’s The Quireboys again. And with bands like Jet around there are a lot of younger people coming along to check us out.”

The reunion was cemented on 2002’s Monsters Of Rock tour (headlined by Alice Cooper), for which they were joined by Jason Bonham on drums. For the enjoyable 2004 Well Oiled album, issued by their new label SPV Records, they were joined by former Red Dogs guitarist Paul Guerin, keyboard player Keith Weir and drummer Pip.

By then Nigel Mogg was keen to dismiss the group’s reputation as flaky piss-heads. Okay, they still enjoyed a drink or 32 on stage, but it was then fairly recently that they were forced to cancel a show, and that was down to the bassist’s visa problems rather than being alcohol-related.

“Give Spike a glass or two of cider and he’ll talk bollocks all day,” says a slightly irritated Mogg. “He’s never pulled a show in his life. If the things they said about us were true we’d either be alcoholics or dead. It’s harder than ever for a band like us to survive. We sort out the record deals and manage ourselves, we also run the merchandising and website [www.quireboys.com]. With six people’s lives to run you’ve gotta be organised. We’re far more together than people think. Plus we’re older now and can’t take the hangovers as well, so we’ve learned to pace ourselves.”

Some 18 years after they first got together, The Quireboys were still regulars on the European touring circuit, and supported Whitesnake on their 2004 UK tour. “To some we’re still a Faces rip-off band, but the fans come to see us,” Mogg shrugs. “People actually thank us for still being around. That’s gratifying, and as long as it continues then we will be.”

But was it realistic for The Quireboys to keep on going even if they were to find themselves still stuck in the clubs, with the larger venues they filled in the past out of their reach? “We play three-chord rock’n’roll,” Spike shrugs. “Do you think we’ve got a fucking plan? But it’d be a crime to stop this band. We’re still packing them in in most places. We’ve blown fortunes, but we’ve done it in style. We’re all about having fun. Man, if you’d have been with us in Milan last week you’d definitely have got a shag.”

Before calling time on our chat, finishing our drinks and going our separate ways, I asked whether the sole reason The Quireboys were still rocking and rolling was because that was all they knew how to do. Spike gazed at me with playful indignity across his glass of cider, before all around the table erupted with one final burst of inebriated laughter when he replied: “Ah, that’s bollocks,” grinning broadly. “If you ever want any crazy paving done, I’m your man.”

This feature was originally published in Classic Rock issue 70 (September 2004). A new Quireboys album, Wardour Street, was released in 2024.

Dave Ling was a co-founder of Classic Rock magazine. His words have appeared in a variety of music publications, including RAW, Kerrang!, Metal Hammer, Prog, Rock Candy, Fireworks and Sounds. Dave’s life was shaped in 1974 through the purchase of a copy of Sweet’s album ‘Sweet Fanny Adams’, along with early gig experiences from Status Quo, Rush, Iron Maiden, AC/DC, Yes and Queen. As a lifelong season ticket holder of Crystal Palace FC, he is completely incapable of uttering the word ‘Br***ton’.