100 GREATEST COVER VERSIONS

Way back in 1970, during a long night of drinking at a club in the German city of Bielefeld, the two guitarists in British rock band Status Quo heard a song that would change their lives.

Francis Rossi and Rick Parfitt had already begun to reshape Quo's sound, moving away from the psychedelic pop of their hit single Pictures Of Matchstick Mento embrace a harder rock direction on their third album Ma Kelly's Greasy Spoon. But when they heard The Doors' song Roadhouse Blues blasting at high volume in that club, it was a genuine eureka moment.

As Rossi now recalls: "We'd been watching this couple dancing, and when Roadhouse Blues came on they started moving in a totally different way; really sexy. The tempo was like, 'wow!' We were mesmerised by it."

What Rossi and Parfitt heard in Roadhouse Blues was the template for the heavy boogie shuffle that would make Status Quo one of the greatest and biggest selling rock groups of the '70s. The song became fixture in Quo's live set, and was recorded for their definitive 1972 album, Piledriver.

"Fundamentally," Rossi says, "what made it work was Rick playing that rhythm and I played off that. He played very much downstrokes and I had the left swing stroke, and they worked so well together."

For Quo, simplicity was key. As Rossi says with a smile: "Everybody used to say how great Clapton was, but I remember saying to Eric, 'You try playing that one riff for eight f*cking minutes!""

But where Quo stayed faithful to the original Roadhouse Blues, many other artists have taken the opposite approach - by radically reinventing a famous song. And at the top of TG's list of the The 100 Greatest Cover Versions - as voted by our readers - is a perfect example of interpretive genius from a visionary guitarist...

SUPERSTAR SONIC YOUTH