From Highgate to Hollywood, back-combed young turk with the “democratic” Faces to steroid-bloated yacht rocker with the cash-eating grin: the Rod Stewart career arc gets some of his biggest fans hot under the collar. But in 2013, a new album of self-written songs suggested the Rod of old was pulling his finger out at last. “I want to be vibrant and stay vibrant,” he told MOJO’s Mat Snow. As Rod limbers up for the legends slot at Glastonbury this weekend – a set rumoured to include a partial Faces reunion – we’ve revisited the encounter in full. Enjoy!
Rod Stewart’s been having sleepless nights lately. Hardly a wink. No sniggering at the back. It’s not what you think.Rod is moving a few miles down the M11 from the mansion in Epping, Essex, which he’s owned for 26 years, with its full-size football pitch in the grounds. Downsizing now that he’s 68? Dream on. Unlike his current pile, “this house has everything”. Unfortunately, “everything” includes nests of bees, wasps and, to Stewart’s horror, spiders. Nor is infestation the only thing weighing on Rod’s “very stressful life” right now.
“I haven’t been able to sleep for worrying about roofs and lead pipes, Welsh tiles and felt underlay, damp-proofing and rewiring the whole house. But that’s not why my back’s playing up,” Stewart looks pained over lunch of goujons of plaice and chips at Mayfair’s Dorchester Hotel. “That’s because I fell asleep on a flight in an awkward position.” And then there is a ticklish issue with the band which can’t be delegated and he needs to sort out that evening. “So it’s not been easy,” Stewart sighs. “But no one’s got cancer. No one’s died.”
Rod Stewart is not the sort of guy to dwell on the down side. For millions, his irrepressibility is part of his charm. For others, beguiled by the ramshackle charisma of his early-’70s sides but unimpressed by the jetsetting celebrity afterglow, it’s looked more like shamelessness.
But why should Stewart be ashamed? For upgrading from the economy class of John Peel and the inkie press to the private plane of Britt Ekland and Hello? For abandoning the underdog soul-folk sound for crowd-chasing discofied self-celebration? For keeping God Save The Queen by the Sex Pistols – those disenchanted fans of his old band the Faces – off the top of the UK singles chart in the Silver Jubilee summer of ’77 with his version of Crazy Horse’s I Don’t Want To Talk About It? For retooling the exquisite string arrangement of his idol Bobby Womack’s If You Want My Love, Put Something Down On It into the hook of Da Ya Think I’m Sexy? For being blond and ambitious long before Madonna?
Some of these crimes Rod will even admit to in his memoirs. But it’s a charge sheet over which he won’t lose much sleep. After all, you can hardly ask him where it all went wrong.
Today, for instance, he has the 42nd birthday of his third wife, Penny, to celebrate. They’ve been married since 2007 and have two children, the younger, Aiden, having just turned two. Of Stewart’s six other children by four previous relationships, his oldest, Sarah, turns 50 this year. She is back in his life having been given up for adoption at birth by Rod, 18 at the time, and his then girlfriend Susannah Boffey. Stewart’s offspring, therefore, span almost half a century from oldest to youngest.
Stewart looks forwards and back over wives and lovers and children and parents on his first album of entirely original songs (save for one by Tom Waits) not just for many years, but ever. One has to return to the mid-’80s to find anything like as many Stewart songwriting credits on an album, and for the past two decades he has been almost exclusively a covers artist with his multimillion-selling Songbook sequence. Called Time at his record label’s behest (“Time? Time I packed it in. Time I got my coat, haha!”), the new album follows his highly entertaining Rod: The Autobiography, published to great acclaim and sales last year.
“I never thought I’d get close to being this personal,” Stewart stirs three brown sugars into his skinny, single-shot, frothy-topped eye-opener as he considers his new album. “It may never happen again.”
More on Time later. For now, let us feast our minces on the former Rod the Mod. Though perhaps an inch below his official 5ft 11in, Rod cuts a disgustingly healthy and youthful figure, luscious tan enriching his generously prowed boatrace and surprisingly delicate hands, and glowing between his shirt buttons where he’s loosened his repp tie. A far cry from the urchin figure he cut during his mid-’60s apprenticeship as a failed one-off singles solo artist and jobbing singer.
Did you ever think, I’m never going to make it?
Bloody loads of times. Though not particularly after the Decca knock-back or when Joe Meek told me to get out of the studio or the failure of Good Morning Little Schoolgirl. I took it rather well. I thought I was a folk singer. I thought, Fuck you, I don’t really like rock’n’roll anyway – I was into Woody Guthrie and Jack Elliott, the first Bob Dylan album. I think I’m still very much a folkie at heart. There isn’t a week goes by without me picking up an acoustic guitar and tuning up, and with my daughter Ruby we play The Carter Family together, Wildwood Flower. She’s so good, that kid. She plays great guitar, and what a voice. Ten times better with her pitch than I was at 26.
Did recognition in The Jeff Beck Group bring more confidence, more security?
I’m no different from anybody else in any career. The elbow is only just around the corner. That first solo album [1970, titled The Rod Stewart Album in the US and An Old Raincoat Won’t Ever Let You Down in the UK], Woody [Ron Wood] and I called ‘Thin’, because we expected low sales. When it sold 30,000 in the States, that was something to get my teeth into. I was always pretty optimistic, though. I had a cheeky amount of faith in myself, and although I was trying to sound like David Ruffin, Bobby Womack, Sam Cookeand Otis, I knew that no one else sounded like me.
What did you learn from bandleaders Long John Baldry and Jeff Beck?
A lot of positives from John and a few negatives from Jeff, not all of them his fault. Positives from John: his caring about the band members, their welfare, their wages, their health, their family. He worried about everything. When he wanted me to join the band, he came round to my mum and dad’s tiny sweetshop, more than six foot four in a lovely suit and tie, with a bunch of flowers for my mum. Almost like he was asking to marry me! “Elsie, Mrs Stewart, Roddy wanted me to talk to you about him coming out on the road. I want you to be rest assured that he will be looked after and I’ll get him home by 12 o’clock unless we’re out of London.”
Jeff was the opposite. He didn’t really care about me and Ronnie [Wood]. He liked us, but he didn’t have that human touch. Sometimes Ronnie and me wouldn’t get paid for weeks and we’d have to go stealing eggs, poncing breakfast off Jimi Hendrix’s girlfriend. With my band, we have meetings – “Good show, guys; what can we do better?” With Jeff there was none of that. But I cannot overstate how much I learned musically with the minimal line-up of that band – guitar and voice playing off each other.
Joining The Faces, did you worry that Steve Marriott would be a hard act to follow?
No, though we were both trying to be black. I wasn’t joining The Small Faces and I wasn’t going to be singing Itchycoo Park. We were a new band, and Woody and I had some respect because of The Jeff Beck Group. But because we were somewhat nervous about what three old Small Faces and two old Jeff Beck Group members could offer, we’d get pissed as farts and see what happened.
Your solo album deal preceded The Faces’ debut [First Step] by a matter of months. Did you suspect you’d have to favour the former?
No, I was young and full of energy. Two albums a year didn’t worry me at all. I had enough enthusiasm and enough material – stuff was just flowing out of me. We did two albums a year for three or four years. But without a doubt what got in the way was the solo career. The solo career had already started before I got the Faces job, and they knew it, and it was all, “Good luck,” so I wasn’t going behind their backs. But as time went on and it became ‘Rod Stewart and The Faces’ it was embarrassing for me and embarrassing for them. But I would have stayed for the rest of my life. I was happy being one of the guys in the band. I literally loved those guys.
Was there a fault line between ex-Small Faces Ronnie Lane, Ian McLagan and Kenney Jones, and you and Woody from The Jeff Beck Group?
Not at all. Same toilets, financial five-way split, and friendships too. I’m still in touch with Kenney, not so much Mac. We were a truly democratic group. I didn’t have a special dressing room, none of that. Talking of The Faces, I think old ginger Manc, Simply Red [Mick Hucknall], did a bloody good job filling in for me. A pretty good imitation and he was into the spirit. I emailed and told him, and he emailed back saying, “I wish they’d drop the keys, ’cos they still play in the same keys as when you used to sing with them. It’s fucking doing my voice in. After half an hour I’m struggling.”
Will there ever be a proper Faces reunion?
I can’t sing up there anymore so they’d have to drop the keys, and they can. They just get lazy. And Ronnie would have to sit there and swear to me the Stones were finished and no longer doing any business, that’s it, all over. I would say, “Right then, I’ll give it a year.” What happens now is that I wait for him and he says he’s got to do something [with the Stones] and then he waits for me and I say I’ve got to do something. No one’s taking any time out. I’m busy for the rest of this year and into next. I don’t know what the Stones are doing apart from playing Glastonbury.
See any of their 50th anniversary shows?
No, haha. I tell Woody, I seen ’em once – in 1963 at Eel Pie Island – I don’t have to see them again! I’ve got nothing but admiration for them – from a distance.
Would you describe yourself as a team player?
Yes, I think so. Penny’s always said I encourage the band. A good example: five years ago I went to see George Michael, and you couldn’t see the band. Nobody on the stage but him! I don’t like that. I like to bounce off people. I’ve got three girl singers and a brass section, and I like to bounce off them, fucking about. I like being part of a band.
You’ve been singing your life story all along – is it a case of write what you know?
One way or another, yeah. I’ve written what I imagined. A lot of the early Rod songs were the product of a very fertile imagination. Like Mandolin Wind: I’d only been to America once, with The Jeff Beck Group, and hadn’t really seen it. But if you listen to that song you can picture the wind across the plains of Wyoming.
As the father of daughters, what would you say if one of them brought home a young man who wrote and sang songs like Stay With Me and Had Me A Real Good Time?
Haha! I’d be honoured to meet him! I’m a pretty easy-going father, sometimes a little too easy-going, and it really wouldn’t worry me at all. I did warn my daughter when she was going out with a would-be rock star – I won’t say which one, hell of a nice fellow – and she was asked to travel with him. I said, “Whatever you do, before you even get on the plane, a return air-fare, first class, and your own room.” I would always send a return air-fare but never their own room unless it was someone really special. My kids have read the book – they know what I was like.
If back in 1961 Brentford FC had rang back after your trial as a professional footballer, could you have lived without music?
Brentford? Bastards! Let’s get it straight. I was never that keen on being a professional footballer. It was nothing I dreamt about. But I dreamt about singing. That’s what I wanted to do. Being from a huge football family, I went to the trial to keep my dad happy. Whether I would have taken an offer or not, I don’t know. There still would have been room for both careers.
You’ve produced your new record as you did your first five (the first two nominally produced by Lou Reisner), most of which were masterpieces. In between, you’ve passed some artistic decisions to such producers as Tom Dowd and Trevor Horn, managers Billy Gaff and Arnie Stiefel, and label executives Rob Dickins and Clive Davis. Why surrender so much control?
Total laziness. I’d grown somewhat tired of the business. Though I always loved getting up there and singing. Tom Dowd was lovely, like a big school teacher. If I said, “Tom, I’m stuck,” he’d light his pipe and come out and play something on the piano, and say, “How about this, boys?” If you were in the pub too long, he’d get us out and say, “Come on, boys.” He’d make sure we were all keeping time with a stop watch, but otherwise he’d leave it up to me. Tom had me by the reins, because in those days we were like a lot of schoolboys, spending more money in the pub than we did in the studio. It never dawned on me we were paying for the recording costs. Only years later you see it was all taken out of your advance.
In 1976, you supported gay men with The Killing Of Georgie. Was that influenced by your friendships with Baldry and Elton John?
Subconsciously you may be right. It’s wonderfully popular when I do that song, especially in Las Vegas. Did it make me a gay icon? Maybe then. The way I looked, people might have thought, is he or isn’t he? But not now that I’m loaded with children, haha!
Goujons consumed, Stewart has to get back to Penny Lancaster for her birthday and those awkward decisions about felt underlay and Welsh tiles. His Rolls-Royce Ghost awaits, with Gary at the wheel. Stewart sweeps aside the tabloid paper and sales catalogue of the Pre-Raphaelite paintings he collects to make room for MOJO alongside him on the pale tan calfskin before purring east out of Mayfair.
He’s come a long way since 1969 when, in exchange for a set of carpets for his Marcos sports car, Rod sang uncredited on Python Lee Jackson’s In A Broken Dream, a hit three years later: “I get mail saying please, please do it, so we’re going to start rehearsing it,” he promises. Stewart sounds happily at home with his past. He would love to hear from guitarist Martin Quittenton, who co-wrote two of Rod’s greatest songs, Maggie May and You Wear It Well: “He wanted to get as far away from showbiz as he could, so went to Wales. What a gorgeous player, bless him.”
Likewise, Jeff Beck [NB - Beck died ten years after this interview was first published]: “We actually started working on a blues album together. We went away and put some demos together and sent them to each other and I hated his and he hated mine. I emailed him to wish him a Merry Christmas, didn’t get anything back. It would be electric if we got together, but it would need Hillary Clinton to bring it off.”
Some of your post-Atlantic Crossing phases are scorned by fans of “Faces Rod”. Ever feel you’ve let yourself down?
I let myself down on tours [in the late ’80s] when I was addicted to steroids. In those days we didn’t have in-ear monitors, and the band kept getting louder and drunker, and I kept blowing my voice out. The steroids will take down the swelling in any membrane – including your knob – and it’s what you do when you’re in a bit of a pinch and need to do a show and you can’t sing. Steroids make you fat and bloated, you can’t sleep and you get really irritable. It’s the horriblest drug in the world. One night on-stage in Sheffield, I thought I was in the kitchen with my mum because the steroids had eaten a hole in my stomach. I was bleeding internally and hallucinating. What the audience must have thought…
I don’t think there’s one aspect of being me I don’t like. I’ve had a wonderful life...
I will still use them around once a year if I’m really struggling, and it gets you through the show. But you pay for it; you can’t sing for a week. But your voice always comes back. Strange phenomenon, the voice. All the fucking money I’ve made just because of this thing that bashes together (finger-mimes the opening and closing of the vocal folds).
Your recent career has focused on interpretations. What have five Songbook albums of standards by the likes of Irving Berlin and Cole Porter taught you about songwriting?
I don’t think it taught me anything about songwriting. It did teach me how to caress a melody, how to embellish the melody, and how to leave the melody at the right time to make it sound interesting. And who did that the best? Billie Holiday. Sometimes she didn’t give a shit about the melody and just sang it the way she wanted. Before I started doing the American Songbooks is when I had the problem with the thyroid cancer [in 2000 Stewart had a successful operation to remove a growth], so I lowered everything half a key that gave my voice a mellowness that maybe wasn’t there before. I’m sure it made me a better singer. Other than that, they’re just gorgeous songs to sing. They widen your range. You’ve got to be a sentimentalist to sing them.
You’ve an affinity for Tom Waits songs: Downtown Train, Tom Traubert’s Blues. And now Picture In A Frame, from Mule Variations, is the only cover on Time…
Tom manages to do something I never could: he creates imagery. I write in black and white. Imagery is something I’m not really good at. His song, Cold Water, is all about a tramp, a vagabond, spending the night in the nick, and he manages to write 12 verses about it! Absolute genius.
Co-writers have been crucial to your career: Woody; Martin Quittenton; Jim Cregan; Carmine Appice; on the new one, [longtime spar, co-writer of Young Turks] Kevin Savigar…
I couldn’t sit down and write a set of lyrics without a structure first, almost like a canvas to put the paint on. For instance, [Time’s] It’s Over: Kevin sent me over the chord sequence, I put me earphones on, adlibbed the lyrics, and that’s how it was born. I don’t think that’s a universal way of writing songs, but that’s the way I do it. If you have never written a song, people imagine you sit at your desk for hours. It’s nothing like that. It’s like you’ve got an aerial, and either something comes down the aerial, through your heart and onto the page, or else it’s not going to happen. A song is just waiting to come down.
It’s Over is about divorce. Is it hard to write about something so personal?
Rachel [Hunter] was the most recent so obviously there were reflections about that break-up in the song, but I tried to broaden it out for all blokes. So many of my mates have gone through a divorce, and it really hits a nerve with them. We all go through the same emotions, the same traumas; the kids get hurt.
What does Rachel think of the song?
Rachel hasn’t heard it; the kids haven’t heard it. We’ll have to wait and see. It’s true and it’s heartfelt and it doesn’t put anybody down.
Brighton Beach addresses Susannah Boffey, with whom you gave up a daughter, Sarah,
for adoption.
Susannah can’t stand me. Sarah and I have only just started calling each other father and daughter. Quite rightly, she has a chip on her shoulder – “Fuck, just my luck, seven other kids and I’m the one born out of wedlock, so I had no money.” But we e-mail each other and I take her out to dinner. We’re getting there.
What does Penny make of you singing such regretful songs about previous relationships?
She always says, “What’s gone is gone and the future is ours.” I don’t think she’s got anything to worry about, though she was a little concerned when she first heard what I was writing about.
Can we be forgiven for picturing her in “sexy lingerie” when we listen to Make Love To
Me Tonight?
Haha, have any imagery you wish! Originally I sang “sexy underwear”, but the record company said, No, in America underwear is only worn by guys. And over here “underwear” is a bit Marks & Spencer’s, isn’t it?
In writing a song, are there any no-go areas?
I don’t think so. Everything was revealed in the book. I swear there is nothing I’ve done that I’m ashamed of or embarrassed about.
Graham Greene wrote: “There is a splinter of ice in the heart of a writer.” Is that true of you?
Cor, that’s beautiful. It’s far too intellectual for me so I don’t think I can comment, but I love that phrase; there’s a song there.
Can’t Stop Me Now memorialises your father, who died in 1990 while you were living in California. What do you owe him?
I loved my dad dearly, idolised him, but my poor dad did love a bit of a gamble, and it was nearly the downfall of the entire Stewart empire, haha. He’d borrow money from me and my brothers – “I’ve just got to settle up the newspaper bill” – and he’d be down the betting office. I remember as a toddler when my mum had to pawn her wedding ring – it was only a gold band — for a couple of bob because dad had blown all the money down the betting shop; she was all teary-eyed about it. When he won it was fabulous; he won three-and-a-half grand once when I was in my teens, and he treated everybody – boom, wonderfully generous. But he didn’t drink and he was a good dad. It was his only vice, but it’s made me so anti-gambling. I try to instil this in my kids. Sean, my eldest son, loves a gamble, and I tell him, Listen, mate, you can gamble as much as you want, but learn how to walk away.
A first practically self-written album: why now?
It’s not true that I’ve got nothing to prove, nothing to lose. I have got a lot to lose. I want to be vibrant and stay vibrant. I swear to God, when I listen to the lyrics – and I’ve never considered myself a Tom Waits or a Bob Dylan or a Van Morrison – I think, that’s not bad, that’s not bad at all.
Is being Rod Stewart still fun?
Yeah, haha! It certainly is. I must admit I absolutely love it. I don’t think there’s one aspect of being me I don’t like. I’m very proud of the fact that I’ve kept my feet on the ground and I’m very close to family and friends who are not in show business.
Regrets?
Not really. I think about my lovely dad and my mum when I lived in California, though I made considerable efforts to bring them over. But no, no regrets. I’ve had a wonderful life.
This article originally appeared in MOJO 235. Rod Stewart appears at Glastonbury Festival on Sunday 29. Read MOJO’s on-site review of the set, plus all the essential news and reviews from the weekend HERE!
Picture Ronnie Wood and Rod Stewart, The BRIT Awards, February 18, 2020. (Credit: Dave J Hogan/Getty Images)