It is fair to say that Rick Parfitt and Francis Rossi of Status Quo are not in their element on horseback. After an hour of trekking through the Fijian jungle on their way to shoot one of the more ambitious scenes in their forthcoming movie, they are beginning to wonder why they agreed to get into the film business at this late stage of their careers.
Suddenly they catch sight of the 150ft waterfall they have been seeking and gratefully dismount. As they survey the location where Parfitt is to tumble, apparently to his doom, into the foaming pool they begin to think that this acting lark might be better than the day job. The feeling is short lived.
Rossi, the impish lead guitarist who chopped off his ponytail two years ago but still sports his characteristic earring, felt the first few spots of rain as the crew unpacked. “I thought, it’ll be over in a minute ... it’ll be over in a minute. It suddenly went from this tropical heaven to being under an umbrella, pissing down, cold, miserable.”
The silvery waterfall Parfitt is to leap into suddenly becomes a coffee-brown torrent, blasting the actors with cold air and swelling the river downstream so much that the local guides urge non-essential crew to return down the mountain or risk being washed away.
So began one of the stranger shoots of a deeply eccentric pop-group caper — a hit-and-miss cinematic sub-genre that encompasses The Beatles’ A Hard Days’ Night and the Spice Girls’ Spice World.
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Bula Quo!, the provisional title for the film meaning “Hello Quo” in Fijian, stars Parfitt and Rossi as themselves in an action comedy in which they invoke the wrath of a gangster (played by Jon Lovitz) by disturbing a game of Russian roulette. Craig Fairbrass, the villainous Dan Sullivan in EastEnders, plays their manager and Laura Aikman (Dr May Phelps in Casualty) is his love interest, but really the film is about the veteran guitarists being chased from one ridiculous incident to the next while leaving a trail of chaos.
When The Times visited them on location in Nadi, on the west coast of Fiji’s main island, it was not immediately obvious why two rockers, who are eligible for free bus passes, should choose suddenly to embark on their acting careers. It is something of a mystery even to them.
The blame ultimately lies with Coronation Street, in which Parfitt and Rossi made guest appearances in 2005. Their scenes were directed by Stuart St Paul, a veteran stunt co-ordinator whose film career includes operating the right-hand side of the alien queen in Aliens, and he ruminated on the idea of casting them in a feature-length film. St Paul gamely prepared a script, but Parfitt was sceptical. “We did some shots at Pinewood with us jumping off a trampoline with an explosion in the background,” he says, sitting in his hotel room facing the beach. “Luckily, that was as far as it got, because it would have been crap.”
Parfitt — shaggy haired, affable and with a face slightly crumpled by life before he decided to be “sensible” — reclines languidly after pouring a couple of glasses of champagne (which, he says, is “bloody hard to get on this island”). “It felt to me like the wrong setting. I’d been talking to some Quo fans and they were saying, ‘It’s lucky you didn’t do that movie.’ Then suddenly, six weeks ago, Stuart got in touch.
“He’s been working on it for all this time to bring it up to speed, to make it ... not Carry On Quo, but to be a lot more amusing. We got the call, ‘The movie’s back on.’ And I thought, ‘Oh God, is it?’”
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This time they loved the script, and were delighted to be going to Fiji. “Look at that,” Parfitt motions with his hand towards the sunset. A turquoise sea is framed by palm trees and skirted by fruit bats.
Luxurious as this sounds, Quo are well out of their comfort zone. The film has a budget of only £1.5 million and there are no trailers in which to rest during the interminable breaks between filming. While on tour Parfitt and Rossi share the top deck of a tour bus fitted with dressing rooms and containing “all the luxuries, you know, champagne, crisps, boxes of Quality Street”. On set, while waiting to shoot a chase sequence in a boatyard, Rossi was lying down on a flattened cardboard box and Parfitt lay next to him on an old stained cushion. “We’re very, very pampered on the road,” Parfitt says, “that’s why it comes as a bit of a shock when you start at the bottom rung of the ladder.”
To make things worse, Parfitt has strained his back while leaping theatrically away from an explosion and made it worse by landing on Rossi’s hip when the baddies kick a door off its hinges. When I call him a few weeks later he tells me about his journey home: “I came back in a wheelchair,” he says. His left leg was “twice the size of his right” after two botched stunts, one involving leaping on to a fruit stall. “At my age I shouldn’t be doing my own stunts, but there you go.”
Rossi — likeable, mischievous and grumbling — greets me during a night shoot by asking about my jet lag. “By the time we got used to it they put us on nights.” He turns to Parfitt. “In the old days we’d have taken drugs, but we can’t now, can we?”
“No,” replies Rick, who in his zenith took so much cocaine that one day his septum fell out while he was having a shower. “They wouldn’t work.”
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Quo have been around so long that it is easy to forget just how successful they have been. In 39 years they have sold 118 million records around the world, opened Live Aid in 1985 and had 64 British hit singles – more than any other band. Their tally of 33 hit albums is surpassed only by the Rolling Stones and they hold the record with 106 appearances on Top of the Pops.
Despite this, the pair, Rossi particularly, feel that they are taking a terrible risk. “This could be the best thing we’ve ever done or the worst thing we’ve ever done. I could end up speaking to you next year saying, ‘Well, that’s my career buggered.’ ” I ask Rossi what is at stake, suggesting that the band is too well-established to suffer from a box-office flop. “No, I don’t think it is like that. There is this separate entity, this thing called Quo, which I’ve protected ever since I can remember. They say Status Quo is huge — five or six million people around the world like you, but the rest don’t give a s*** ... Why isn’t that enough? I don’t know ... It’s like this f***ing carrot and you never get closer. And if you did get it, it would be [he looks crestfallen], ‘Oh’.”
Rossi likes to rant, and lets loose a range of provocative opinions. Amy Winehouse made the mistake of believing her press, he says, when she was merely “flavour of the month”. The X Factor ignores talent at the expense of people who can be manipulated into a product. There are “probably 20 million too many people in England” as a result of immigration prompted by the capitalist pursuit of economic growth.
Parfitt is much more laid-back, both generally and about the film. He has the advantage, when it comes to acting, of having done a year of drama school, where as a 12-year-old boy he learned the Stanislavski Method, the technique used by actors such as Marlon Brando. “The drama teacher would stand up and say, ‘Right! Richard, I want you to be a fried egg.’ I thought, ‘How can I be a fried egg?’” He repeats his impression, jiggling his shoulders in a surprisingly convincing manner. “I didn’t really learn anything from it, although I went for an audition for Oliver! and I went on with my guitar and sang Baby Face. Blue shirt, cravat, hair slicked back. Needless to say, I didn’t get the part.”
He has seen rushes and is relieved. “As an actor — and I use the term loosely — it’s coming across. I’m not saying we’re Michael Caine and Laurence Olivier, but we’re getting there.” Both men admire A Hard Day’s Night, although Parfitt is acutely aware that other show business efforts have flopped. “The Spice Girls film was a little bit ... you know, and Ant and Dec made a film that went down like a pork chop.”
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The rushes from the waterfall scene look glorious despite the trying conditions. John “Rhino” Edwards, the band’s bassist since 1986, shoves Parfitt as they climb the waterfall and the latter disappears into the torrent. “I fall all the way down into this pond and then I leap up and say, ‘Awesome!’” Parfitt says enthusiastically. He smiles. It is the hardest he has ever worked in his life, but, he says, “That was a particularly great day.”
The Bula Quo! film and soundtrack will be released May 2013. Flights provided by Korean Air
Bands on film
The Beatles: A Hard Day’s Night (1964)
The band’s first movie features a typical Fab Four day — escaping screaming fans, losing Ringo and being joined by Paul’s grandfather on stage. The anarchy has stood the test of time.
The Monkees: Head (1968)
A young Jack Nicholson wrote a psychedelic screenplay that defied the band’s cuddly image.
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The Ramones: Rock’n’Roll High School (1979)
The punks play a gig at the school of superfan Riff Randall and then blow it up.
The Spice Girls: Spiceworld (1997)
Often cited as one of the worst movies ever made, this girl power cash-in is actually full of camp charm.
Will Hodgkinson