JOSH HOMME shouldn’t be smoking. The 31-year-old leader of Queens of the Stone Age, the heavy rock act that everybody, including the public, other musicians and even critics, agrees to agree on, recently endured a health scare which left him coughing blood and cancelling shows.

“I thought it was my lungs. Blood was dripping into my throat,” he says, displaying the incipient paranoia of the tobacco chugger. So the leader of this famously bibulous outfit wasn’t reaping the rewards of rock’n’roll excess? “Smoking, drinking and getting high? No,” he says, blaming it instead on medication before joking that “healthy people are going to feel really stupid lying in hospitals dying of nothing”.

Homme’s almost conceptualist set-up — not so much a band as individuals deemed worthy of representing the name — release their fourth album, Lullabies to Paralyze, next week. It’s a worthy follow-up to Songs for the Deaf from 2002, the record which featured Dave Grohl drumming with a band for the first time since Nirvana. There are guest appearances from, among others, Shirley Manson of Garbage and Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top, who plays on the delightfully named Burn the Witch and a rowdy version of the Top’s Precious and Grace.

“We definitely approached Gibbons with fanboy intensity,” says Homme, suddenly excitable rather than ineffably cool. “We were lucky that all the people at his office knew us. We got on famously. I am so glad we never did a Pepsi commercial because it felt like this is what you get for loving music. It felt right, like he understood what we’re doing.”

No putative collaborators have yet rejected an invitation from the Queens. Possible future targets include the saucy rock-rapper Peaches. “We’ve toured together so that might happen,” Homme says. Ideally, he’d like David Bowie.

“Bowie would be cool. I have this perception of this sexy vampire who must suck the blood of someone from the next generation. Being immortal he must identify with them,” declaims Homme. “I mean that in a beautiful way,” he adds hastily.

“He’s always had exquisite taste in guitar players,” says the guitarist/keyboardist Troy Van Leeuwen, a touring member of Queens for three years but only now making his recorded debut. “And you and I play guitar,” says Homme knowingly.

Lullabies doesn’t, however, include any contributions from Nick Oliveri. The wild bass player, renowned for his nude stage appearances, had been a regular musical partner of Homme’s since they first teamed up in the influential “desert rock” band Kyuss some 15 years ago. Last year he got the sack. Asked about his departure, Homme is initially flippant: “He’s not in our band any more? No one told me.” But then he offers a considered response: “I’ve taken a lot of rocks in the side of the head over this issue and I doubt that anyone who’s thrown them would have the balls to do what I did to save the friendship and to continue to make music. So what came as a shock to others was the last thing I could do.

“I don’t expect everybody to understand, but then I never do. People think Nick is gone because of too much partying but that’s not the case at all. My judgment is ‘Do I want to hang out with you?’ That’s a call I get to make.”

Even the gravel-voiced Mark Lanegan, a regular member of the extended Queens family and in his time a poster boy for dirty living, recently remarked on Oliveri’s excessive behaviour to a music magazine. Homme would like to make it clear, however, that the song Everybody Knows that You’re Insane does not refer to his old bandmate.

“It’s more about walking by the mirror and jumping at what you see,” explains Van Leeuwen.

“There’s a lot of ‘me me me’ in this environment and that can’t be good for you,” says Homme. He certainly possesses a serious work ethic. When not touring and recording with the Queens he drums with the thrashers Eagles of Death Metal. He also hosts an eclectic selection of musicians in his Desert Sessions, half-formed yet often intriguing jams which have so far produced ten volumes.

Having once toured supporting Metallica in his youth he seems truly comfortable with his own status, respected rather than worshipped.

“The fascinating thing is that we don’t appeal to one group of people. We appeal to ten per cent of each clique,” he says, “So when you have a gay goth kid from New Orleans, a punk rocker from Salt Lake City, a bookworm from Berlin and a model from London all at your show, it’s more like a party that you’d want to go to. I’ve always despised an audience of all boys that want to smash each other. If that was a party I wouldn’t go, and I grew up playing parties.”

Kyuss started out by playing outdoor shows powered by portable generators at home in the Palm Desert region of California, all dust and golf courses. Homme still swears by Louie Louie as a guaranteed crowd-pleaser.

He understands his medium. “As I look at it, on any scene there are originators. They’re following an idea and their band is an example of that idea. The second wave understands and goes for that idea too. The third wave follows the example only, so they have no f****** idea what an idea is anyway. By then it’s just about following rules. Nirvana blew it out the door because they were the first band not to follow the rules in years.

“By the time you join a scene you’re too late. If I drop a stink bomb I don’t stand there. I like to get up on the balcony and watch everyone freak out.” he declares. There’s something of a young Neil Young about Homme, a restless, practical sort who knows what he wants and is happy to let others help him. “To spend time on music you don’t like is a huge mistake,” he says.

“Music is for liking.”

• Lullabies to Paralyze is out on Monday on Interscope

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