Francis Rossi was once a heavy drinking rockstar, but has been sober since 1988 (Image: GETTY)
“I didn’t want to do the book,” he confides. “But then they showed me a piece of paper with some numbers and a few noughts…” He tucks into a king prawn salad and sips mineral water, a far cry from the wild nights of cocaine and tequila excesses. But we address his many drink and drug-fuelled misjudgments. Rossi was at his lowest ebb when he watched his first wife, Jean, walk out, taking their three young sons with her. “It was my fault,” he admits. “When I bought our home in France, I was following my dream. I never asked if that was her dream, to be left in a large house in the middle of somewhere she didn’t know while I was off touring. “Seeing her pack and leave with the kids was the worst thing you can imagine. I still feel the pain. It was horrible but I carried on. The world didn’t stop.” That was in 1979. Five years later, Rossi abandoned his second family – girlfriend Liz Gernon (Quo’s publicist) and baby daughter Bernadette. Furious, Liz moved to Canada and cut him out of their lives.
“I wasn’t proud of that,” he says.
“I was being an ****hole. But I was extremely taken with a beautiful Indian woman called Page… and that went pear-shaped after three years too.”
He stopped drinking in 1988 just before he persuaded second (and current) wife, Irish-American Eileen, to leave her husband, even though she was expecting his child.
“The drugs stopped a little later,” says Francis, who is 70 next month. “I went to Nassau to write an album. Normally the drugs would have come out straight away but I didn’t fancy that feeling the morning after. I decided to wait until I had a day off the next day and instead I realised it was more fun watching Arsenio Hall on TV.
“My only vice now is I smoke one cigarette a day – American Spirit, which have no chemicals added and which burn slower.”
These days Francis is happiest when at home with wife Eileen and four of his eight grown up kids (Image: Lisa Clark)
The new Francis swims every day, solves crosswords, does jigsaw puzzles, potters about in his garden and loves watching old films on Talking Pictures. Rock ‘n’ roll! I ask when he was happiest.
“When I first met Rick [his late bandmate Rick Parfitt], and when he joined the band. And now. I’m really enjoying myself. I enjoy the process, the writing of songs, I really enjoyed recording the new album.”
That’s We Talk Too Much, with violinist Hannah Rickard who played on Quo’s 2014 acoustic album Aquostic – which Parfitt had nothing to do with. Francis is frank about how his friendship with guitarist Rick, who died in 2016, had fractured to the extent that Parfitt didn’t even play on some of their later albums.
“I’m not blaming anyone but it suited our management to have me and Rick at loggerheads,” he says. “When we started, it was us against the world but, by the time we were 20, we’d become completely different people.We still had fun but things were changing.”
Rossi, second from the left, and Parfitt, centre, in the 1960s (Image: Redferns)
They’d met aged 16 when Rossi’s band The Spectres were playing Butlin’s in Minehead and Rick was in a cabaret trio.
As Status Quo, they supported the Small Faces who turned them on to hashish and other bad habits. “Stevie Marriott introduced us to the idea of sharing a bottle of brandy before we went on stage. Until then we were drinking Tizer.”
By the late 1970s he and Rick were “hoovering up huge amounts of coke then drinking to make us sleep.The hash didn’t make me do cocaine, alcohol did. Alcohol is the villain. It held me back. If I’d been sober, I would’ve tried to learn my instrument better. I didn’t practise much when I was younger.”
Cocaine ruined his life, he says.
Rossi and Parfitt playing in Hyde Park, 2001 (Image: Corbis via Getty)
“I was making major decisions while out of my head. Buying houses, making deals… and then forgetting them.”
Quo must have squandered a fortune, I say. Counters Rossi: “We were never as rich as people thought but that didn’t stop people trying to tap into us. Someone in Australia tried to convince me and Rick to give them money to raise the Titanic!
“I always seemed to be the one with the most money. I didn’t indulge like the others. Rick was forever buying cars, a Bentley, a Porsche, Jags, Jeeps, Rollers…”
Francis claims his dumbest investment was his seven-bedroom mansion near Purley in Surrey, 10 miles from his childhood home in Forest Hill, south-east London. “I bought it in October 2008 and the first run on the bank started a day later… I lost a fortune,” he moans, although the house has since regained its value and the Rossis still live there.
Francis was a nervous child, he says, slow to trust others. “I remember going to primary school when I was five and I smiled at some kid, trying to be friendly.The next day he came over and hit me round the face with a plimsoll.
“His dad must have told him that was the way to be. I was crying and he ran away like a shot from a gun.”
He was bullied about his Italian background too. Rock ‘n’ roll was his salvation. Francis formed his first band, The Scorpions, with bassist Alan Lancaster at Sedgehill Comp in Catford.They played their first gig in 1963. Rick joined two years later and by 1967 they had become The Status Quo (ditching that “The” two years later).
Francis famously wrote their first hit, Pictures Of Matchstick Men, in his mother-in-law’s toilet.An incredible 22 Top 10 hits followed with as many hit albums.
Rossi and Parfitt playing in Copenhagen back in the 1970s (Image: Getty )
These days he writes songs in his orangery – “It’s not a conservatory, it’s got a fireplace”.A self-styled “home bird”, he’s happiest here with Eileen, a former teacher, and four of his eight grown-up children.
His face lights up when he talks about having the whole brood to stay every Christmas, along with Bernadette, now 36, and her mother Liz. It was Eileen who encouraged him to heal their rift.
“I can’t remember exactly when Bernadette came over to meet her brothers and sisters but I feel so lucky that they’re now extremely close,” he ponders. “I’ve been blessed, and I know it.”
Francis Rossi’s I Talk Too Much tour (francisrossi.com) runs until May 20. Status Quo (statusquo.co.uk) play UK dates in June.
