Status Quo: Accept No Substitute – The Definitive Hits & More!

Promo and live video collection.

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While the recent Aquostic album and tour shone light from a new angle on Quo’s oft-underrated back catalogue, this exhaustive collection of 67 videos and live performances reminds us how the band carved a permanent place in British rock’s affections.

Not through the honking tackiness of their 80s and 90s videos, included here, but with the sheer strength and depth of tunes, especially from the classic line-up. Even lower-profile old hits such as Accident Prone come out well here, and the live cuts, despite mostly coming from more recent performances, really pack a Marshall-stacked punch.

However, the highlight for long-time fans will be the 23-minute jam of Is It Really Me/Gotta Go Home from 1970. The previously unreleased footage shows the Frantic Four on German telly, pounding through a freewheeling heavy blues odyssey from which you can see the genesis of later epics such as Forty-Five Hundred Times.

Johnny Sharp

Johnny is a regular contributor to Prog and Classic Rock magazines, both online and in print. Johnny is a highly experienced and versatile music writer whose tastes range from prog and hard rock to R’n’B, funk, folk and blues. He has written about music professionally for 30 years, surviving the Britpop wars at the NME in the 90s (under the hard-to-shake teenage nickname Johnny Cigarettes) before branching out to newspapers such as The Guardian and The Independent and magazines such as Uncut, Record Collector and, of course, Prog and Classic Rock