Like ageing warriors-turned-men-of-peace, many of those rock stars who once told us to kick back against authority are now themselves part of the cultural establishment.

Far from ‘dying before he got old’, Roger Daltrey joined contemporaries like Bryan Ferry and Eric Clapton in becoming a country gent of sorts, while Johnny Rotten has enjoyed a recent stint advertising English butter.

But for Eric Goulden — better known as Wreckless Eric — life is still much as it was when his career as an artist on label Stiff Records was in its 1970s heyday.

In 1977 he hit fame with his pop-punk classic Whole Wide World, which has since been covered by artists as diverse as The Proclaimers, The Lightning Seeds and Mental As Anything, and even in the hit 2006 movie Stranger Than Fiction, starring Will Ferrell.

Now living in a village in the south of France with his American wife and fellow musician Amy Rigby, the 55-year-old still very much embodies the spirit of that era he embraced — and is not altogether impressed with how technology has changed music.

“I'm about to throw a CD player out of the window,” he informs me in his characteristic English drawl, which sounds not unlike that of the aforementioned Mr Rotten.

“Someone has sent me through the internet some tracks as some peculiar file that doesn't seem to exist in my cosmos. It’s positive proof that technology is not actually much cop. People say I'm a Luddite, although I use any technology that's going. But technology isn't great in itself. It's only as good as the ability of the person who's using it.”

The couple are currently in the process of touring on the back of the eponymous joint album they released in 2008. Although both established artists in their own right, the union between them has produced plenty of new material to fuel their live gigs.

“We were both building on what we had done before, although there were stylistic differences,” says Eric. “Amy didn't have a man she was singing harmony with and vice versa. We write the songs between us — it was just a natural thing to do.”

The origin of the couple’s romance reads like something from a hip modern drama, when Amy was joined on stage by Eric while performing Whole Wide World at the same venue where he had debuted it 25 years before. As Amy tells it, though, the reality was not quite so saccharine.

“I knew he was there — in the movie version he would have joined me spontaneously, but actually I was pleading for him to come up and play with me!” she laughs.

“I felt like I'd been playing with Eric for a while because I had been performing Whole Wide World in my set. I was a fan of him and that song — it was such a magical song”.

The dizzy heights of stadium rock were never really the obvious direction for Eric or Amy, though Eric has no regrets about the path his career has taken.

“I have no interest in playing Wembley Stadium,” he said. “We saw The Who in Paris, but they're born to it. Because every twat in the world has got a band, it kind of decreases the interest in it.

“It used to be you could spot a bad band from a mile off because they sounded crap but now they can have a veneer of gloss because they are able to make professional sounding recordings.”

He is similarly unimpressed with the manufactured pop scene as embodied by ‘talent’ shows such as The X Factor.

“Everyone wants to be famous now and there's this unhealthy obsession with it,” he says.

Eric’s career development was itself not without a helping hand, though, most notably through the late punk pioneer Ian Dury (above), who mentored the young musician through his early days. “It was my band, but Ian was in charge,” he says of the famously prickly character.

“We would go to the sound check — which I hate — and I would be so shy around these roadies and all. He would shout ‘Sing into that microphone, I can’t hear ya!' but I was so scared and shy I couldn't speak. He would shout ‘What's the matter with you — sing, you f**kin’ c**t!’.

“He knew he was unreasonable. He would be playing the bass drum at midnight and the neighbours were complaining — he would say ‘Tell them to f**k off’ and then just carry on.”

The recent screen biopic of Dury’s life, Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll, also brought back memories of those heady days for Eric.

“I haven't seen the film, but I watched the trailer — seeing the actor who played Ian [Andy Serkis] was quite disquieting because it was almost him. It was a bit upsetting, though at the same time it wasn't him.”

He adds: “But I will go and see the movie — I'll have to, I suppose.”

Wreckless Eric and Amy Rigby will play at the Black Box, Belfast, tomorrow night, March 13. For tickets visit www.blackboxbelfast.com