“I’m not a tough guy,” Josh Homme says midway through our interview in a hotel in central London. He could have fooled me. Six feet five inches of lean rock’n’roll beef in leather jacket, red shirt, jeans and boots, topped with a greasy strawberry-blond quiff, Homme radiates retro machismo.

The 44-year-old singer, songwriter and guitarist is the muscular mainstay of three of America’s most swaggering rock bands: Queens of the Stone Age, Them Crooked Vultures and Eagles of Death Metal (although he wasn’t at the Bataclan, more of which below). And in 2015, when Iggy Pop wanted another alpha male to butt heads with and produce what he had decided was his final album, Post Pop Depression, he picked Homme. “I wanted to find