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(from scrapbook 2, pages 50-51)

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"My nose is wrecked!"

After 25 years of headbangin' all over the world, those gods of soiled denims - STATUS QUO - are still alive and riffin'. NEIL TAYLOR meets up with the jet-settin' FRANCIS ROSSI, a man who's survived an eternity of sex, coke and fireworks.
Picture: A J BARRATT.

Er, Ron, can you come up please? Mr Brown's just thrown the TV set out of the window...

The man coming towards me in the car coat and dripping jewellery is either the manager of Status Quo or he's going to sell me a video... Or he's the manager of Status Quo and he's going to sell me a video...

Affable Alan Crux - boss of the Quo - won't mind if I refer to him as Big Ron. After all, he booked the NME team into the Republic's Holiday Inn under the strange monikers of Mr Brown and Mr Brown, thus forcing us to adopt these names throughout the visit. He also forced us to travel on a coach with Rick Parfitt and listen to his appalling jokes (yeah, 25 years of rockin' all over the world and you'd be bored too). But Ron did come good in the end and managed to lay on a sizzler with Francis Rossi just prior to the final whistle.

I've come not to bury Status Quo but to appraise them, and in particular to appraise Francis Rossi, a man currently enjoying a new lease of life.

"Somebody asked me the other day what it is like being a mid-40s guy playing with a band in their mid-20s. I said where's this guy in his mid-40s, I'm 38. I called in the two new band members and demanded to see their passports. Both of them were 30."

Francis Rossi can look a long way back. With Alan Lancaster, he formed (The) Status Quo back in 1962. In 1967 Rick Parfitt joined and after a few unsuccessful attempts at chart success, in 1968 "Matchstick Men" entered the UK Top Twenty. Since then, on average, Quo have had a Top Twenty hit every year since. In 1984 they stopped performing and in 1986 reformed, with Lancaster out and new band members in.

"There were internal problems in the old Status Quo since 1969. It took us 17 years to sack Alan Lancaster and I suppose the main reasons why we didn't do it earlier were success and money. The whole thing had gone rotten, albums were getting worse, yet we carried on. Everyone had 2.2 tracks on each album and all of us wanted our song to be the single. But the new band is different. Everyone's keen, everyone's enthusiastic. For me this has become a breeze, a doddle... it's great."

It may well be a doddle but Rossi takes his work seriously. He's tense and nervous before a concert and never leaves a venue between the soundcheck and performance. Instead, he'll spend hours tuning and retuning his instruments, ensuring that everything's perfect for the show. He most definitely sees a Quo performance as a "show". I put it to him that Quo could be seen as the result of 25 years of headbanging.

"I resent that. We're not into headbanging. A few years back it was hip to be cool and scarcely move on stage - now everyone's headbanging and doing it seriously too. We take all that side a bit more lightheartedly these days."

Rossi may not have been headbanging for the last quarter of a century but he certainly gives the impression that he's been Jack-The-Lad-ing it. But there's a nervousness beneath his jocularity and, as he puffs on yet another Number 6 ("Well you didn't think I'd smoke Marlboro did you?"), his cockiness seems a trifle fragile.

"People think I'm cocky but that's just a defence mechanism for my shyness. When I grew up I was spotty, skinny, and four-eyed - I couldn't get arrested by women. I also spoke quite poshly but soon learnt to swear and picked up a nice cockney accent in Catford."

Despite his accent I do believe our Francis is soft. Soft living, soft touring, and the result of hit after hit after hit.

"I washed all the bleedin' walls down and painted the lot white. I came back after the week-end and that Debbie had only started going out with Rick Parfitt. Only stuck all his bleedin' gold discs on all the walls I'd decorated, hadn't he? There was bleedin' millions of 'em!"

Clapham decorator to the Ash family

Fifteen minutes through Paris rush hour and the Venice theatre looms, an illuminated dome of delights. Rick has finished his stand-up comic routine and the incredible (by now alcoholic) Brown brothers leave the tour bus.

Tonight is not quite K-Tel night but there are enough hits to keep everyone happy. Clad for the main part in denim, Francis and the boys are looking good. The lads are rockin' up and down in a circle: the make-up's starting to flow and so is the adrenalin. To my immense disappointment Francis does not go up to the mike and say, "Any of you girls out there called Caroline, this one's for you".

It doesn't matter though. Quo have had 20 Top Twenty hits in 20 years. That's some going for a band which has scarcely altered its musical formula throughout its career. Quo have had hits and hits have meant fame (Francis rarely leaves his hotel rooms except to play). The band have also generated Big Bucks. So where has it all gone?

"I've kept mine," says Francis. Maybe this is a subtle dig at Rick. Quo are rumoured to be paid twice a year. It is said that Parfitt receives a cheque for about a trillion pounds and then blows it in about a week. He's then near bankrupt for five months. Then he receives another cheque, etc...

"I used to think it was uncool to be a breadhead then suddenly I woke up and thought, 'No one I know would get out of bed if it wasn't for money'. If you're in a supergroup, when you split up, people judge you by what you make. They have a habit of saying things like, 'He earnt all that money and now he's broke. What an arsehole!' "

Quo rose during the purple period of the pop manager-cum-fleecer the days of Top Ten acts on 40 quid a week wages. Rossi was shrewd: he may have gone in search of that great rock mansion set in its own grounds but unlike your Gary Glitters, Rossi still owns his.

"I went through all that looking at properties - you know 15 bedrooms, staff accommodation, stables, etc. Mine's not that large but it's the private side of me. I've got large grounds and I enjoy my gardens. My mum and my aunt live in an annex and look after my kids. My mum can be a vicious git but she's straight and tells me what she thinks. If it wasn't for my family I'd be Jack the Lad. I'd be Jack all over the world. What's the point in coming home?"

There's something slightly sad about Francis Rossi. Something about spending 25 years on a pedestal. There's nothing Rossi can't have, nothing he can't give to others. I bet you spoilt your kids, Franny?

"I've been through all that. I ruined my eldest son like that, showering him with gifts, blowing lots of dough on him."

These days the closest to being a family man Rossi comes is on bonfire night. He'll blow five grand a night each bonfire night ("This year I only spent £3,500 - I was being sensible!"). But in a history lit up with success there have been other diversions. Francis likes a drink and when he boozes he boozes to get out of it. Last tour he discovered Tequila and hasn't looked back since. And prior to that, of course, there was cocaine.

"My nose is wrecked," he says. "If I had a piece of cotton wool I could show you a trick. At the turn of the '80s I was doing £200 worth of cocaine a day. The money itself was no problem but getting it in cash all the time was. I used to worry that I wouldn't be able to get enough cash each day."

In rock 'n' rock there's drink and drugs but there's also that other great bastion of success, sex. And guess what, Francis has been through that too.

"I remember pulling birds and acting dead macho. You get in a room with a woman, get peeled off... and then get severely embarrassed. I used to think I was on stage again, trying to give a performance, trying to live up to the last fella that had been there."

For a man so obviously soft-hearted the rock'n'roll lifestyle can have disastrous effects. Rossi is now through his second marriage. He's got everything money can buy but he can only windowshop the things it can't buy. There's a sad irony in the fact that the man who'll spend "a grand or whatever it costs" on a decent whistle now derives most of his pleasure from jigsaws and crossword puzzles. He likes Pavarotti and Placido Domingo and will push on 'til he's 42 "because everybody else has... I still believe in marriage. I'd like to share all this with somebody. I don't see the point in me having all this and no one to share it with. But it's really ditticult tinding somebody. I miss being married but I don't think I'll chance it again."

At Paris' Charly de Gaulle airport it's almost time to run the clock backwards but there's a slight delay on take-off. Maybe Ron is still in Duty Free picking up his Eiffel Tower-shaped bottle of liquor.

Eventually the plane takes off and banks over Paris. Next time you hear "Rockin All Over The World" or "Paper Plane" or "In The Army" , think of Francis Rossi - the lonely firework man - sitting doing a jigsaw in a tea room in some Holiday Inn, wondering when that nice interviewer is going to come back.

"I could sit and do this forever," he told me. I fear you will Francis, you will, you will, you will...