Well yeah - whose fuckin' catalogue can we plunder if not our own? It really annoys me. What are we supposed to do?" He mimics a concert reviewer: "'Quo came on and did a pile of shit of somebody else's and all their fans were disgusted'..." He is equally defensive when they are accused of being "three-chord" musicians. It will be followed in September by King of the Doghouse, Rossi's first solo album, whose bouncy title track proclaims the Peckham superstar as the natural successor to Shakin' Stevens. All this is quite a gamble for the 47-year-old Rossi after three decades of spanking the plank in defiance of every changing music fashion, from punk to Britpop, but he is well used to abuse from the snootier critics. "One thing we always get after concerts," says Rossi wearily, "is: 'they plundered their back catalogue'. In a couple of weeks, he will invite readers of Hello! magazine to examine the koi carp and en suite swimming pool of his home in Purley at the more raffish end of Surrey. Next Saturday, he will perform the ultimate naff indignity of pressing the button on the National Lottery show, where he will also perform his debut solo single, 'Give Myself to Love'.

After 30 years of the Status Quo repertoire - a series of pulsing iambic boogie shuffles, driven by Rossi's uninflected nasal drone - the song is quite a departure, a brassy, high-stepping strut with at least an octave of notes. Francis Rossi, ponytailed Status Quo guitarist and singer, one- time aficionado of alfresco sex and nostril-ventilating powders, the living image of denim-clad, blokeish London philistinism, is getting a makeover. No wonder Mick Jagger announced at a press conference that he preferred Mercedes. They were tootling round south London, without a trace of embarrassment, in a Volkswagen "Rolling Stone" limited edition.

Not the most demanding of jobs, you might think, particularly since the device arrived with plug already attached. But, one thing led to another, and after five or six hours of continuous tinkering, I found a couple of mysterious wires in the fuse box which appeared to have no real function. In order to tidy things up a bit, I rolled these two strands together and forgot about them. The result, when I turned the power on again, was jarring to several senses at once: massive blue flash, tremendous bang and a sulphurous pong.