Officers of the Order of the British Empire

Let us salute Mr Rick Parfitt and Mr Francis Rossi, aka Status Quo - or at least the original members thereof - who have today had sparkly stuff dangled off them by Her Maj, bless 'em all.

Oh, dearie me. I was listening to these guys before I left primary school. My first encounter with the Quo was on a 'portable gramophone'. (For our younger readers, this was a device which rotated a disk of vinyl on which a sound signal was embedded in a very fine groove on the surface; a needle was gently dropped into this groove and the vibrations thus captured were turned into electrical signals to drive an amplifier. Fantastic stuff, eh?) I spent a fair bit of my youth listening to the Quo in various ways, including live at Sheffield City Hall, after which I was effectively deaf for 24 hours. In the late 1970s some old buddies and I went to a fancy dress party dressed as Quo on the rather sensible basis that this didn't involve doing anything other than dressing the way we always did. I have no idea how many discos and parties were spent headbanging and 'spreading' to those plangent chords - of which, contrary to uninformed received wisdom, there were many more than three. Sometimes.

It was a sad day when the Quo announced that they were packing it all in, certainly as far as touring was concerned. But they'd have one last almighty thrash, they said.

It was the year Mrs QO and I graduated. Milton Keynes Bowl, 1984. We were there.



Of course, that wasn't the End of the Road, despite the billing. And now, all these years on, they're The Establishment. Fantastic. Mind, check out the schmutter they're wearing these days - where did the denim go? Still, I suppose if you're meeting the Queen...