Keyboard player Andy Bown and saxophonists Stewart Blandamer and Steve Farr played on "Blue Eyed Lady". This was Bown's first appearance on a Status Quo album; he guested on several subsequent releases, and became a permanent member of the line-up a few years later. Blandamer and Farr also played on "Forty Five Hundred Times", which featured piano by John Mealing.
It was the first Status Quo album on which drummer John Coghlan was credited with songwriting, although Francis Rossi has said in an interview that the credit was given to Coghlan by himself and his co-writer, Bob Young, at the request of their management to even out songwriting royalty income, with Roll Over Lay Down and Softer Ride both having been in fact been written by Rossi and Young but the credit being shared or given to others.[3]
Background
1973 started for Status Quo with the belated chart success, in January, of the 1972 releases on their new label Vertigo, leading to their first top ten entry on the album charts and a long-awaited return to the top ten of the singles chart. As a result, Status Quo's previous record company Pye decided to release a single from their 1971 album Dog of Two Head. The single, Francis Rossi and Bob Young's "Mean Girl", reached No. 20 upon its release. It was backed by the Rossi/Parfitt composition "Everything", taken from the band's 1970 album Ma Kelly's Greasy Spoon.
In August 1973 the only single from the new album, Rossi and Young's "Caroline", was released, reaching No. 5. It was the group's first single to reach the UK top five. Its B-side was a non-album track titled "Joanne", written by Alan Lancaster and Rick Parfitt.
Hello! was released in September that year, and became the most successful album the band had ever released. Initial copies of the record on vinyl came with a large black and white poster of the group. Of the eight tracks on the album, six were new: the recording of "Caroline" had already been heard by the public as a single release, and "Softer Ride" had served as the B-side to the band's "Paper Plane" single from their previous album Piledriver.
In a retrospective review, AllMusic criticized the over-simplicity of many of the songs and overindulgence of some, while praising the energy. They concluded that the album manages to be effective and enjoyable in spite of its flaws, concluding, "Clearly the product of a band at their commercial and creative peak, Hello! wears its strengths and weaknesses well: not particularly flashy or intelligent, but without exception confident, comfortable and fun."[1]
^ abKent, David (1993). Australian Chart Book 1970–1992 (illustrated ed.). St Ives, N.S.W.: Australian Chart Book. ISBN0-646-11917-6.
^Pennanen, Timo (2006). Sisältää hitin – levyt ja esittäjät Suomen musiikkilistoilla vuodesta 1972 (in Finnish) (1st ed.). Helsinki: Kustannusosakeyhtiö Otava. ISBN978-951-1-21053-5.
