Status Quo singer Rick Parfitt says “everybody was groping everybody” at the BBC’s former flagship music show Top Of The Pops – and says his band long felt “suspicious” of former host Jimmy Savile.
Parfitt, who appeared on the long-running TV programme 106 times with his hitmaking band, was asked by The Telegraph if he was surprised by the revelations about the alleged sexual abuses carried out by the late Jimmy Savile.
Parfitt said, “No, because a lot of us, like everybody else, we all kind of knew. We were all kind of suspicious of Jimmy Savile. We all felt, ‘There’s something not right there.’ But we didn’t know what, and it was kind of in the back of our minds. But you could never quite suss him out. We did so many Top of the Pops, so many Jim’ll Fix Its…”
Parfitt says he never saw Savile doing anything untoward, but added that the presenters and the bands at Top Of The Pops were in separate backstage areas. Parfitt did, however, say it was common for girls of 17 or 18 to be hanging around with acts in their dressing rooms.
Parfitt says: “If you watch those early editions of Top of the Pops, all the girls there have got skirts up to their chins. There were a lot of girls knocking around downstairs and people would invite them down to the dressing room. There were loads of little birds about at Top of the Pops, of course there were. What used to happen upstairs in the upper echelons where Savile and the other DJs were – well, I never, ever knew where their dressing rooms were.”
He adds: “I think that anybody would be forgiven around that time if you’ve got a girl in the corner – everybody was doing that. There were loads of girls, and they were willing. They were all coming into the dressing room – you’re walking into a rock band’s dressing room with a skirt up to your chin. Everybody was messing about. Of course we were. Everybody was groping everybody – that was it at Top of the Pops, everybody was at it.”
Having recently premiered documentary Hello Quo, classic British rockers Status Quo have also put together their own James Bond style comedy-rock film. Titled Bula Quo!, the film features a soundtrack of 12 classic Status Quo songs and sees Parfitt in action scenes such as leaping through a glass window, gun in hand.