Difficult question...

1. Big Fat Mama
2. Backwater
3. Forty-Five Hundred Times

Bob certainly co-wrote many of their best songs, but this might be my top three Quo songs even including co-written songs by Bob.

So did they in the 90's: Alan was gone; John had left the building (forcefully); Rick wasn't interested any more; Francis had written Modern Romance

Oh! I overlooked Someone's Learning as written solely by Alan! I prefer it over the ones I mentioned. Such a heavy song!

Alan - can't choose between Someone's Learning, Backwater and Who Asked You.

Rick - Mystery Song

Francis - He's written so seldom on his own. But I do really like If You Believe.

So shoot me 

I'm surprised I like it myself. It's got words in it 

An interesting, thinking outside the box, thread rossiswaistcoat. Nice one.

In my youth I used to love dissecting the record sleeve notes etc especially the writer credits so not spoiling the party but just keeping things going in a sense.

In the early years especially, the writing and credits seemed to be on a co-operative basis and Alan has talked about this in the Backwater interviews.

Alan:
You could come up with an idea in Quo and then somebody else did more work on it than the original writer. The writer wasn't the writer, you know, he just came up with an idea. For instance, Rick came up with the idea for 'Rain' and 'Mystery Song', but with 'Mystery Song' I wrote most of the lyrics with Bob and I also wrote the melody for it. It was credited as Parfitt/Young. I wrote part of 'Rain' and then later on Francis wrote part of 'Rain' and I think even Bob wrote a little bit of 'Rain' too but it was listed as Rick Parfitt. Rick didn't write those two songs, he wrote parts of them. Because Francis and I were writing together at the time, we felt like "let Rick have those songs", you know. That's the way it is, so the writing credits do not necessarily portray the writers. John Coghlan is not a writer. He didn't write 'Roll Over Lay Down', 'Break The Rules', 'Lonely Night' or anything like that but they are credited as written by five people.

 ...and more from Alan:
The writer of the song gets a writing royalty but we never used to really think like that. We used to think everyone was going to get money for what they did. We tried to evenly distribute it, you know, because that was really our wage if you like, the writing. That was the only part our management didn't take control of. Except that they took control of the publishing, so really it was the writing royalties that helped us survive. That was why we sort of distributed the writing a bit. 'Roll Over Lay Down' was written by me and Rick first off, Francis came in with the riff and Bob came in with some words. We didn't want to leave John out, so I suggested that he'd be credited as well. Whereas with 'Lonely Night', I wrote that with Francis, but because I was writing with Rick at the time, and Francis was writing with Bob at the time, we decided to put Bob and Rick in. And again, why leave John out? "Let's put John in", you know...



For me, I would say something like 'Mystery Song' should be considered primarily Rick's as he put the hours in on that one! I'm sure nearly everyone on here knows the story! The main riff theme is the song in a nutshell, everything else is secondary.

Another epic from Rick had been 'Take Me Away' though Andy B had some input into the song. Incidently Rick had been keen to re-record that track for his solo project, after he stopped with Quo.


That got me thinking (dangerous), as to Andy B's finest writing contributions.