A Night of Boogie Power at Hammersmith Apollo: Status Quo Stretch Out with “Forty Five Hundred Times”
When the veteran British rock band Status Quo stepped onto the stage of the Hammersmith Apollo on 28 and 29 March 2014, the atmosphere carried the weight of decades of rock history. These performances formed part of the group’s widely celebrated Frantic Four reunion tour, a special series of concerts that reunited the classic early 1970s lineup including Francis Rossi, Rick Parfitt, Alan Lancaster, and John Coghlan. For longtime fans of the band’s hard driving boogie rock, these shows represented a rare chance to hear the raw sound that originally defined Status Quo during their most influential era.
Among the highlights of the concert was the extended performance of the song Forty Five Hundred Times, a track first released on the band’s 1973 album Hello. In its studio form the piece already demonstrated the band’s love for improvisational grooves and rhythmic repetition, but on stage it became something far larger. At Hammersmith Apollo the song evolved into a lengthy instrumental journey that captured the essence of the Quo live experience.
The performance opened with the familiar chugging rhythm guitar pattern that has long been a trademark of the group. Francis Rossi and Rick Parfitt locked together in the tight, percussive style that helped define British boogie rock during the early seventies. Behind them Alan Lancaster’s bass lines pushed the music forward with muscular authority, while John Coghlan maintained a relentless driving beat that allowed the song to expand naturally into extended sections of improvisation.
As the piece developed, the band moved seamlessly into passages inspired by Gotta Go Home, another staple of the classic Quo repertoire. These transitions reflected the loose and spontaneous structure that characterized many of the band’s live performances during their peak years. Rather than presenting a fixed arrangement, Status Quo allowed the music to breathe, stretching grooves and riffs into long flowing segments that kept the audience fully engaged.
The 2014 reunion tour held particular emotional significance. Alan Lancaster had not performed regularly with the band for decades, and the Frantic Four lineup represented the sound that many listeners associate with Status Quo’s golden period of albums such as Hello, Quo, and On the Level. Seeing these musicians together again on the Hammersmith stage offered fans a powerful sense of musical continuity.
The circulating video of this performance, later enhanced using Topaz Video Enhance AI technology, combines footage captured by multiple audience members from different vantage points inside the venue. These fan recordings preserve the raw energy of the night and provide a valuable visual document of a lineup that played a central role in shaping the band’s identity.
More than forty years after the original recording of Forty Five Hundred Times, the Hammersmith Apollo performance demonstrated that the spirit of Status Quo’s classic boogie sound remained remarkably intact. For fans in attendance, it was not simply a concert but a living reminder of the enduring power of straightforward, rhythm driven rock music.