Stoakes’ Song of the Week
Today marks the 34 year anniversary of Live Aid. A day long music festival unlike any other. Hosted in London and Philadelphia, broadcast to an estimated audience of 1.9 billion, across 150 nations, it featured some of the best music stars of the day.
Status Quo kicked things off in London and given the band are releasing their thirty third album later this year, lets look at the the song that brought that Live set to a close, ‘Don’t Waste My Time’.
Taken from the album Piledriver which was released in 1972, ‘Don’t Waste My Time’, despite being a live staple at Quo shows, was never a single. Piledriver was the first album to be produced by Status Quo themselves and incidentally, the first on the Vertigo Label.
Having been performed over 1900 times, it really is a Quo favourite. The song was written by Francis Rossi and Bob Young in the soon-to-be trademark shuffle style the group would become famous for. The lyrics complain about a girl not being serious about a relationship and messing around. The song frequently got audiences bouncing around at gigs.
The album peaked at Number 5 and spent 37 weeks in the UK charts. In their retrospective review, AllMusic applauded the album as both crowd-pleasing and moderately ambitious, commenting that “Despite the name, most of the music on Piledriver is varied and subtle enough to be interesting.” They particularly praised “A Year” and “Big Fat Mama”. However, Village Voice critic Robert Christgau asserted that the band had no decent singer or guitarist, and criticized their attempts at ballads and blues as “boring”.
Despite Robert Christgau’s negative review, Piledriver is hailed by Quo fans the world over as one of their top albums and I’d have to agree. You could even say it is the birthplace of that modern quo ‘shuffle’. It really is amazing to think that this year, the album is celebrating its 47th birthday and Francis Rossi, Alan Lancaster and John Coghlan are all still performing and are all still at the top of their game!
