I BLEW €2M ON COKE... NOW IT'S JIGSAWS, CROSSWORDS AND FOYLE'S WAR RE-RUNS

DURING his rock'n'roll years of excess, Francis Rossi, fuelled by prodigious amounts of booze and drugs, would hunker down in the recording studio until dawn.

- BY TOM BRYANT

He famously claimed to have spent nearly €2million on cocaine during the 1980s.

But as he invites me into his recording studio at the bottom of his garden in Surrey, it's an altogether more wholesome scene. And it's clear his vices have been replaced by a series of new addictions.

He's keen to show me his recent labour of love: a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle, depicting the end of the war in 1945 outside Buckingham Palace.

He says: "I find them so therapeutic... I've done about four or five this year, but I'd normally have done about 15 by this time of year." Then there is the daily crosswords and reruns of Foyles War. "It's a very different life but I am f***ing nearly 80."

We're here in the studio in which he has recorded his new solo album The Accidental. Rockers always like to boast it's their best work yet, and Francis is no exception.

But after listening to it, he may be right. At 76, Francis would have been excused for setting off into the sunset - not least as it's increasingly difficult to make money these days.

The Rockin' All Over the World hitmaker says: "A quarter of a penny per download, you can f*** off. Even if they were giving us a pound, it's still robbery. I don't have this massive £100million pot that people think I've got but I'm far from poor."

But he says for the first time in years he felt galvanised creatively, and it beats his Status Quo output.