Rick Parfitt, left, and Francis Rossi, right, of British Rock group Status Quo performs in the Stravinski Hall stage at the 43rd Montreux Jazz Festival, in Montreux, Switzerland. Photo / AP
Rick Parfitt, left, and Francis Rossi, right, of British Rock group Status Quo performs in the Stravinski Hall stage at the 43rd Montreux Jazz Festival, in Montreux, Switzerland. Photo / AP
A couple of months back, after a heart attack forced him to pull out of Status Quo's forthcoming winter tour, a chirpy-looking Rick Parfitt promised that his trademark blond mop of hair would be banging away on stage again very soon.
"I'm going to give myself time to know that I'm fully healed, both mentally and physically, then I can start again next year, because by Christmas I will be fully better,' the one-time 'wildman of rock' soberly declared, over a glass of iced mineral water.
"If I die doing it, then at least I will die doing something that I've wanted to do."
Rick Parfitt with his wife Lyndsay Whitburn. Photo / Splash News Australia
In the event, that was a final promise that Richard John Parfitt OBE was unable to keep. Yet fans mourning his death on Christmas Eve, at the age of 68, can reflect that - for better or worse (and it quite often was for worse) - this grizzled legend of British pop culture spent almost his entire adult life doing exactly what he wanted to do.
A refreshingly apolitical entertainer, who had none of the pretensions of other chart-topping musicians of his era, he doggedly refused to join fashionable attacks against Margaret Thatcher or, like Bono, champion right-on causes.
Snobbishly ridiculed by some who viewed his stripped down brand of rock music as trite and simplistic, and who sneered at his lack of desire to continually "reinvent" himself, Parfitt nonetheless built a huge following among the rock fans of Middle England, who for decades attended Quo gigs in their tens of thousands.
It was, perhaps, a great irony that while Parfitt's music was the epitome of conservatism, his lifestyle was quite the reverse. For five decades, the Quo frontman, with his shaggy mane, tight jeans, white trainers and rakishly-handled Fender Telecaster guitar, chose to abuse his body on a continuous basis in the name of rock 'n' roll.
At the peak of his musical powers, the then married father-of-two was spending £1,000 (NZ$1782) a week on cocaine, £500 (NZ$891) a week on vodka, and sleeping with so many groupies that he not only forgot their names but those of his wife and children, too.
He quaffed whisky and red wine for breakfast, smoked 30 cigarettes a day, owned ten Porsches (despite an inevitable drink-drive conviction), and during one of the band's 106 appearances on Top Of The Pops was so inebriated he fell off the stage, taking the drummer with him.
"Throughout the 70s and 80s I was a bit of an ogre. I fell into the sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll big time, he once said, telling how he'd often disappear on "benders" that lasted for days.
"It was almost like being out of a movie, where you'd wake up and all the facial hair had gone and the claws had been drawn back, and you're this normal person for a very short space of time until you decide to drink the potion again."
Despite Parfitt's legendary appetite for drink, drugs and women, there was nothing particularly unconventional about his technical appeal. With sidekick Francis Rossi, he was a master at churning out straightforward, no-nonsense, working-class rock music of a variety epitomised by his two greatest hits: the reworked John Fogerty song Rockin' All Over The World and Whatever You Want.
Both records came out in the late Seventies. Apparently indifferent to the changing whims of fashion, Parfitt and the Quo's output never really evolved in the nearly 40 years that followed.
Instead, he continued ploughing this lucrative furrow to the end, figuring there was no reason to change a winning formula.
The band's music, a leading rock critic noted yesterday, was therefore a sort of mirror of Parfitt's life: 'All about beer, birds and the blues. It was about playing rock 'n' roll as if it meant business.'
Rick Parfitt with his wife Patty and son Harrison. Photo / Splash News Australia
Thanks to this, the Quo would sell 118 million records, play 6,000 concerts to 25 million fans, spend 500 weeks in the UK album charts, and release 32 studio albums. Parfitt would also manage, over the years, to clock up three marriages, father five children (one of whom died as an infant), suffer four heart attacks, survive one cancer scare, and spend (he estimated) a total of £1.7 million (NZ$3m) on hard drugs.
Never exactly at the forefront of fashion, his divorces and free-spending lifestyle forced him to take part in regular PR stunts that other, more pretentious, rock stars would run a mile from.
In 1991, for example, Status Quo played four arena concerts in a single day, earning a place in the Guinness Book Of Records. In 2005, Parfitt and Rossi appeared on soap opera Coronation Street (as themselves).
A couple of years ago, they fronted an excruciatingly bad comedy film called Bula Quo! - a murder mystery set in Fiji. The band once even agreed to tour with the Cockney duo Chas & Dave.
While some mocked this occasionally crass commercialism (and others regarded their music as too technically conservative to be all that modish), few who knew them really doubted the pair's worship at the altar of hedonism.
Such excess perhaps reached its acme during the Nineties when, despite being in their 40s, the band were too busy snorting cocaine in the toilets to collect a gong at the Brit Awards.
English pop group The Status Quo, circa 1968. Left to right: Francis Rossi, Rick Parfitt, John Coghlan, Alan Lancaster and keyboard player Roy Lynes. Photo / Getty Images
Around the same time, Rossi revealed that the drug had done so much damage to his nose over the years, that part of his septum had fallen out while he was in the shower.
"I've enjoyed every moment, but I'm pleased that I've come out the other side,' Parfitt reflected, after one of his heart attacks. 'I've had 50 years of smoking and drinking and abusing my body. There comes a time when you have to look at yourself and think: right, that's it, it's time for a change."
But change never quite came. Instead, against doctor's orders, he was drinking red wine and puffing on the occasional cigarette at his holiday home in the hills above Marbella until shortly before his final illness struck this month.
Born and raised in suburban Woking, Surrey, Parfitt (like many of his fans) came from a solidly middle-class stock: his father was an insurance salesman, while his mum worked in cake shops.
Inspired by Cliff Richard and Lonnie Donegan, he began playing the guitar in 1959, aged 11, and by the time he was 15 had dropped out of school to earn a living by playing to crowds at seaside holiday camps.
It was at Butlins in Minehead, Somerset, that he met Rossi in 1965, and the Quo was formed two years later with members of Rossi's previous groups.
Francis Rossi, left, and Rick Parfitt during the launch of a DVD to mark the 40th anniversary of the rock band in London. Photo / AP
Initially a psychedelic rock group, their first single, Pictures Of Matchstick Men, reached No 7 in 1968. But two subsequent albums flopped, prompting them to abandon the genre.
In 1972, a more mainstream record, Piledriver, went to No 5, propelling the Quo to fame. From then on, they churned out an album each year and went on endless tours. "I started around midday, with whisky and wine chasers. I liked to get fairly drunk before I began on the drugs," Parfitt once said.
"There were a lot of hangers-on and I was under the mistaken impression that they were my friends. The Eighties were a complete nightmare."
Things weren't helped when, in 1980, his two-year-old daughter, Heidi, drowned after falling into the swimming pool at his home in Surrey. This led to the breakdown of his first marriage, to Marietta Boeker (mother of both Heidi and his eldest son Rick Jr).
"Life went on and you learn to live with it, but you never get over it," he later recalled.
He then married childhood sweetheart Patty Beedon and the couple had a son, Harry, only to divorce due to his chronic infidelity. She later described Parfitt as 'a selfish child who never grew up'.
Third wife Lyndsay Whitburn, a fitness trainer, is the mother of his two surviving twins, Tommy and Lily, born in 2008, when he was 60.
Inevitably, such hard living would take its toll. Parfitt underwent a quadruple heart bypass in 1997 but was back on stage within three months. After being told that his lifestyle could cost him his life, he defiantly said he'd still be enjoying the 'odd pint' and would not be becoming a "born-again Christian".
Musician Rick Parfitt, of the band 'Status Quo', with his wife Marietta at Stringfellows club in London, November 24th 1982. Photo / Getty Images
In 2005, a throat cancer scare prompted him to temporarily forgo Marlboro Reds, in favour of an e-cigarette, and he also claimed to have begun 'juicing'.
A reporter invited on the tour bus (he doggedly refused to sanction the private jets beloved by other rock stars) even spotted him reading a book about arthritis, while (to the delight of critics who joked that he could only play three chords) he was also forced to abandon one tour after developing repetitive strain injury.
All the while, his cardiac problems continued - suffering heart attacks in 2011 and 2014, when he collapsed at 4.30am on a bus in eastern Europe and was, he later said, "an inch away from dying . . . it felt like an elephant starting to sit on your chest". In June this year, he collapsed in a hotel room after a gig in Turkey. His life was saved by paramedics, though he claimed to have 'died for three minutes' during the incident.
Recovery took longer than expected, forcing Parfitt to pull out of Status Quo's current tour. "You know you live the rock 'n' roll lifestyle and at some stage you've got to pay for it, and now I'm paying for it," he told Sky News reporter Ian Woods in an interview shortly afterwards.
Francis Rossi, right, and Rick Parfitt as they arrive for the screening of the film Promised Land at the 63rd edition of the Berlinale, International Film Festival in Berlin, Germany. Photo / AP
So great was the threat to his health, Parfitt claimed he had finally decided to quit drinking to be sure of recovering for the New Year, when he intended to write an autobiography and return to the recording studio. But it was never to be. "Minutes after we switched off the camera, he was already sipping from a glass of red wine," Woods recalled yesterday.
Ironically, it was an infection caught in hospital in Marbella, where he had been admitted with a shoulder injury, that caused his death on Christmas Eve.
Woods said he was filming with the remaining Quo members about a week ago and they talked about Parfitt's health. "They were amazed he had survived so long. But now they are stunned he has gone."
Maybe so. But given the hedonistic lifestyle he pursued so voraciously for more than half a century, fans of the often underrated Rick Parfitt will surely regard it as equally stunning that he survived for so long.
