There’s a Status Quo exhibition at the Barbican

The gold disc and original lyrics to Status Quo’s Caroline are on display in the Barbican, as part of an exhibition celebrating seven decades of the rock band.

Featuring never-seen-before material, the exhibition is a mix of photos, record covers, ephemera from their shows and quite a few gold records. Likely to be the highlight for many fans, the original handwritten lyrics to ‘Caroline’ and ‘Down Down’ being shown here for the first time. The side cases with the collections from their shows are broken into the eras that the band operated in and reformed with different members.

Some of the more interesting objects in the exhibition are a letter where they realised they had met 25 years earlier – thanks to a paternity lawsuit being filed against one of the members, and some photos showing how the story that the band was originally called The Scorpions is an urban myth.

The toby jugs though – those are just odd.

The free exhibition is a collaboration between Paul and Yvonne Hanvey, who run the band’s Official Fan Club, ‘From The Makers Of…’ (FTMO…), and Status Quo fan and record collector, Andy Campbell.

The Status Quo story starts in 1962 and since then, the band has had over 60 UK chart hits, including ‘Down Down’, ‘Whatever You Want’, and ‘In the Army Now’ and 25 UK top ten albums, most recently, with ‘Backbone’, in 2019.

The exhibition, Celebrating Seven Decades of Quo is in the Barbican Music Library, which is in the main Barbican Library, and then down the stairs next to the rhino.

The exhibition is free to visit and open until 22nd May 2023. The library is open Mon-Sat, and closed on Sundays.