Status Quo The full Quo-ta

Honestly? I feel the same as everybody else, Surely you´re not going to milk that again?" Yep, it´s time for the Quo to have their back catalogue repackaged, remastered and re-shoved down the throats of their adoring fans, and Francis Rossi, for one, is not too trilled. "The best thing about the box set is they have presented it nicely," claims the ponytailed riffmeister, damning it with faint praise. "I can take the view that they shouldn´t do this because it´ll make the punter feel like, What the fuck do you think you´re doing? Especially when I read our Website and hear the fans saying stuff like that. But when I look around the rest of the industry it´s a norm, so I´m sort of ambivalent. I suppose they´re exploiting the avid collector, but there are only a few of those. I´m more interested in what were doing at the moment, I can´t wait to get this new material out."

So what´s Francis´ favourite period ? I suppose the Hello album period. We were really doing it then, poking people in the eye. So you feel good about that. Would he ever consider trying to recapture the raucous energy of the band´s earlier work? "Oddly enough that energy is still there, the problem has always been getting it on record. After a while, some double tracking came in on the vocals and guitars and it wasn´t until we got our most hate mail, after the Rockin´ All Over The World album, that we started to tidy up a bit. "The problem was that the correct way to record is to have no overspill. Stuff just became more sophisticated, and we lost that edge. With the project we´re on at the moment we´ve found a studio that resembles IBC, where we used to record all those old albums, with an 18 foot ceiling. So you´ve got some room going on, some natural reverberation. And I´ve always liked to hear a record where you can picture a bunch of guys sitting in a room. We never had a problem live, we´ve always had a problem with records.

"Some old recording techniques have been reintroduced to help recapture that old spark. "I´ve been using an AC30 and a Roland Cube, but they´re underneath these stairs so there´s a lot of wood and different shapes and angles going on to give a lot of reverberation. We´ve got a reasonably close mic, a distance mic, plus another ambience mic in the room. And there´s a piano in the middle of the room. We haven´t used a live piano for years.

Sadly, although the band are delighted with the results so far, the album still won´t see the light of day until next summer at the earliest. "We´ve got five or six tracks at the moment and the only pisser is we´ve got to go out on tour for a while and come back to it in February," says a frustrated Rossi.

"I´m writing with Bob Young again. He brings a kind of blues angle, if you like, and suddenly everybody´s started freaking about the material. Even Rick likes it, and for a long time he´s not been keen. "I saw a documentary on the Spice Girls once. They were doing this showcase very early on, and you could see these guys looking at them thinking. There´s nothing going on here. But the girls believed it so bad that eventually we all went, Well yeah. That´s what we were like when we were younger. And that´s what we´re trying to get back now. People say we shouldn´t want that now, we´ve done all this, we´ve done all that. Well you can fuck yourself, I still want it."