‘I’m waiting for death’
Catnaps and crosswords... my life is very different now, Francis Rossi tells More
If you want to know what I really like doing, it’s sitting here at home waiting for death. I’m an old man. I’m nearly 70.’
Status Quo legend Francis Rossi is describing his unorthodox life as an ageing rock star. ‘I love trees. I love jigsaw puzzles and crosswords and shows like
Endeavour and Vera on the telly. And, when you get to my age, I’ll be doing my jigsaw one minute then my head will be hanging and I’ll have drifted off for ten minutes. It’s lovely. Those little catnaps are absolute bliss.’
Sitting in the recording studio at the bottom of his garden at his home in Surrey, Rossi is engaging, self-deprecating and looking sharp in pressed suit trousers and a pale blue shirt he has hand-made in Germany. The cheekbones are still visible but the ponytail has disappeared, along with that excessive lifestyle. He works out regularly and hasn’t touched drink or drugs since 1988.
‘Me and Rick [Parfitt] used to joke about who would die first... He swore it would be him. If we’d ever been successful in America both of us would be long dead because we’d have had even more money to blow on booze and cocaine. But Rick was right in the end. I sobered up and he never did.’ Having read his book I Talk
Too Much, I tell Rossi that in these #MeToo times his attitude to women (he slept with groupies and cheated on his first wife, Jean, and his long-term girlfriend, Elizabeth, the mother of one of his eight children) comes over as staggeringly selfish. ‘I know,’ he says sheepishly. ‘I have no excuse.’
As much as he holds himself responsible for his behaviour, he also cites his addiction to drink and drugs. He will regularly push a cotton bud up one nostril and out of the other to show his kids and their friends the perils of cocaine abuse (he has no septum) but he feels more strongly about the insidious effects of alcohol. ‘What I can’t stand is that it’s OK to talk about having a “good drink”, but drink is not good. It wasn’t weed that led me to cocaine, it was drink – tequila. I can’t stand being around drinkers.’
Rossi is a good advert for redemption. Like his father, who took his ice cream van out rain or shine, Rossi never stops working. He is going on tour again and still loves going out, playing the hits and being Francis Rossi the rock star. ‘True,’ he says. ‘But that’s because everyone who steps out on stage is part “look-at-me-I’m-great”, but an even bigger part an insecure little p **** . Let’s just be honest and call it what it is.’
Yet his closest relationship was with a prodigious drinker, in the form of Parfitt. Much has been made of the fact he did not cry when his musical partner in crime of 50 years died. And there is a palpable anger at times when he talks about Parfitt, whose stubborn refusal to give up drink and drugs made Rossi angry.
More angry because he clearly loved – and still loves – the guy. ‘Even when I was sober and Rick was still at it and people said we hated each other because we had two tour buses, the reality was that it was still me and him on one tour bus and everyone else on the other. I couldn’t give him a slap round the face and tell him to stop doing what he was doing because you have to want to stop.’ He pauses. ‘I didn’t cry when Rick died because to me he was already gone.
‘He died when he had that heart attack in Turkey in the middle of our tour in 2016. I was in the room when the paramedics were shocking him back to life. They brought him back but Ricky was gone.’ He stops to gather his emotions: ‘A few months back I was listening to snatches of sounds and I heard Ricky’s voice... and I just felt the tears coming down my face. I still talk to him. I loved that guy. He just got eaten up by the lifestyle and couldn’t find a way out.’