by Rod Stewart
Equally earnestly, I took part in a couple of Aldermaston marches, in which members of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and other anti-nuclear protestors walked in thousands between the controversial government nuclear research centre at Aldermaston and Trafalgar Square in central London, fifty miles away. Well, I say ‘earnestly’. These marches were kind of like rolling music festivals, with bands and buskers along the way, and could involve a couple of overnight stops. Sympathetic schools beside the route would throw open their gymnasiums, or you might be able to unroll your sleeping bag in a village hall. Now, I definitely had a social conscience. I didn’t approve of nuclear bombs any more than the marcher next to me. When I shouted ‘Polaris – out!’ along with everyone else, I meant it. But at the same time, young people? Overnighting? In sleeping bags? I would be lying if I didn’t admit that as an Aldermaston weekend approached, one of the thoughts at the forefront of my mind was, ‘I might get my leg over here.’
Of course, in practice, sex between two people in sleeping bags is never easy, and the lights in those school halls were only ever dimmed, rather than extinguished, so the sheer number of people around you made extremes of intimacy difficult. But a lot of highly enjoyable fumbling took place.
I took my guitar on those marches – strapped to my back, along with my black roll-bag with the big, home-made CND patch I had drawn for it. It was just what you did, if you had a guitar: you carried it along, and then, almost whenever you were stationary, you sat down and busked, picking away at the scraps of American folk that you knew – the Dylan stuff, some Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, some Woody Guthrie – and you heard other people playing, and added stuff from their repertoires to your own. Those marches were really the beginning, for me, of performing, of taking what I had learned in the backyard when I should have been minding the shop, and making it public. Similarly, at the weekends, I started going to Brighton on the south coast of England – the cool destination for ‘beats’ and wannabe ‘beats’ – catching the train down from Victoria station with my pals, and sitting on the beach in my duffel coat, with my guitar, being very beatnik. And people would say, ‘Rod, play “San Francisco Bay Blues”,’ or ‘Rod, do that Dylan one,’ or ‘Rod, give us “Cocaine Blues”,’ and when that happened, perched on the stones with a small audience gathered around me, I began to realise I had a voice that people would listen to.
In the summer of 1962, a couple of us made a half-hearted effort to see the world in what we took to be the required bohemian manner. It was my first time abroad. In fact I had never been much further afield from London than Brighton. I borrowed some money, took the ferry to France and hitch-hiked to Paris, thumbing a lift down Route Nationale 1. There I busked outside the Café Les Deux Magots, gave them ‘You’re No Good’, ‘It Takes a Worried Man to Sing a Worried Song’ and ‘Rock Island Line’ over and over again, earned a handful of French francs, bought myself some French bread, slept rough under a bridge by the Seine quite near the Eiffel Tower and came home. A second hitch-hiking trip, a while later, took me south to Spain where I slept rough with a group of travelling Brits under the cantilevered stands around Camp Nou, Barcelona’s football ground. For that we were scooped up by the police and dumped on the British consul, who arranged to fly us home in mild disgrace – my first time on an aeroplane.
I cost my parents some anxiety in this period, I belatedly realised. A lot of the time they didn’t know where I was, which worried them. The hair and the smell worried them too, as did my general lack of direction.
But I was only expressing myself – and not very convincingly, as it happened. At Shoreham, near to Brighton, there was a proper beatnik crew who hung out on a houseboat and eventually made the national news by fighting a battle with the police who came to evict them, using hosepipes. The law pitched up and, basically, washed them off. Until then, though, the aspiration for the likes of me and Kenneth, Clive, Kevin, Brian and our little group of London interlopers was acceptance by this beatnik elite. I think I only got onto that boat once – and I can still remember the smell. By the proper hardcore, I was regarded as a bit of a weekend beatnik, a weekend raver, not quite the real deal. I remember going to Brighton once for three days in succession and thinking, ‘This is it. I’ve cracked it – I’m here on a Monday morning, loitering about on the beach.’ Still no hardcore acceptance, though. And fair enough. I was, after all, a rebel with a Post Office savings account – the beatnik who went back to his mum’s.
Back in London I hung out, unbeknown to my parents, with some beatnik squatters at a large, deserted guest house up in Highgate, near Jack Straw’s Castle, a pub now closed. One night we took it into our heads to cook up some baked beans over an open flame and ended up setting fire to the roof. Cue the arrival of the fire brigade and also of a policeman, PC Brown, who – fortunately or unfortunately, it could have gone either way – knew my dad, and dragged me home.
‘I’ve got your Roddy here,’ he said. ‘He just set light to a roof.’ My reward was a wallop round the head – the only one my father ever dealt me. There and then, my mum took my jeans, my roll-neck jumper, my leather waistcoat, and, as she had done with my dad’s football boots, burned them.
It was like the click of a switch. Overnight I smartened myself up and became a mod – or, at least, in so far as the London ‘mod’ scene was interested in sharp fashion and dressing smartly, I became a mod. Other aspects of that burgeoning branch of youth subculture – the interest in ska music, the use of mopeds – passed me by. But I was with them on the value of a neatly pressed shirt and a decent pair of shoes, and I went from being as smelly a human being as there ever was in the civilised world to being this guy you couldn’t get out of the bathroom.
And that’s when the hair started. But the hair deserves its own chapter.
DIGRESSION
In which our hero, sparing no detail, discusses his hair.
It’s what I have in common with the Queen: both of us have had more or less the same hairstyle for the last forty-five years. Well, if you find something that works for you . . .
For Her Majesty: the carefully organised shampoo and set. For me: the tousled mop of spikes – equally carefully organised, I should add. You think this hair of mine just happens? Wrong. It takes work.
But before there was the blonde and spiky look, there was the bouffant. Or, as we called it, ‘the bouff’ – as in ‘Mind the bouff, mate’ or ‘Oi! Get off me bouff.’ (One was very protective of one’s bouff.)
The bouffant was my first major hair development after I dropped the beatnik thing and cleaned myself up. When I had gone to Paris and busked, I had seen these French guys with huge, upwards-pointing hairdos with curtains of hair at the front. I thought they looked great. Now I decided to create my own version. It was all in the back-combing and the blow-drying. The back-combing wasn’t going to be a problem, but the blow-drying was complicated by the fact that my parents’ house entirely lacked a hairdryer. A television, yes – we were a proper family in that respect. But a hairdryer, no. Hairdryers were a relatively rare commodity in the early 1960s. If you wanted to dry your hair, you simply stuck it in front of the fire, or even (and this isn’t particularly recommended in the manuals) put it near and sometimes inside the oven, and sort of baked it dry.
But you can’t bake a bouff. Or not a good one, anyway. Fortunately, my sister did have a hairdryer. Even more fortunately, she was living just up the road. So I would hop out of the bath, dry, dress and leg it round to Mary’s while my hair was still wet. And because I had a lot of hair to work with, the bouffant that I was able to create by back-combing and blow-drying was, quite simply, enormous. It was beehive-scale: a bouffant you could bounce coins off. It made Dusty Springfield look like a rank amateur.
Of course, the problem was not getting the hair to stand up; it was getting it to remain standing. Male grooming products? Forget it. The DIY answer to the problem was to mix a spoonful of sugar into a small quantity of water and apply that to the hair just p
rior to the blow-drying phase. The heat from the hairdryer would then cause the sugar to set and (if you were lucky) your bouff would solidify with it.
This was the perfect solution, in terms of hold. But it had its downside in the long term. When you woke up in the morning, it was as though someone had attacked you in the night with a stick of candyfloss. And, even fortified with sugar, you were still prey to the elements – especially if, like me, you were using London Underground trains to get to your chosen destination in the evenings. Down in the Tube, the network of tunnels and the comings and goings of the trains create their own series of backdraughts. The imminent arrival of your train is often signalled by a serious and prolonged blast of air along the platform. Picture me if you will, then, carefully dressed and styled for the night, accompanied by my mates, and standing down in Archway Station as the train thunders in – and all of us cowering into the wall, with our arms up over our heads, trying to protect our bouffs from getting toppled by the wind.
The bouffant stayed with me and then evolved into the spiked top during the Jeff Beck Group days. I developed this look in tandem with Ronnie Wood, who was also in that band and had the same kind of hair, although his is a bit thicker than mine. Ronnie and I used to do each other’s barnets in that period – in hotel rooms or round at each other’s parents’ houses. And we didn’t go in for some amateur, pudding-bowl set-up, either. We had this method of pulling the hair down between thumb and forefinger and chopping at it with the scissors – very professional. And we’d stop all the time to check it in the mirror. We’d take ages doing it, ages, to get it right for each other. What a wonderful bond that is between two men. Most blokes would have been sabotaging each other’s hair. ‘Yeah, that looks all right, leave it.’ Not us.
The idea with the top bit was to look as though you had just rolled out of bed after a night of enviable debauchery – though, again, the look wasn’t casually achieved. An awful lot of work went into looking that dishevelled. In particular, there was a lot of hanging upside down at the drying stage – or, at least, hanging forward from the hips and letting gravity play its part. This was the technique taught me by a female hairdresser in Chicago in 1968 while I was on tour with Jeff Beck. She told me that bending forward and blowing through from the nape of the neck downwards gives the hair a lot of body and makes use of the natural oils far more efficiently and to far greater effect than back-combing. I said, ‘Fantastic, I’ll try it.’ And then I basically had an exploding head for the next four decades.
It’s not true that my hair hasn’t changed at all through all those years, though. There have been some break-out moments, some experimental phases, some variations on the basic theme. For example, I went red a couple of times. Once was in the mid 1970s, when I was in a relationship with the actress Britt Ekland. We both did it – just for the shock value really, because it wasn’t what people expected from two famously blonde people. Did it shock anyone? I can’t remember. I think it got a few looks, which was probably the point. And then we went back to being blonde.
In London in the 1980s I used to go to Denny, a mad hairdresser at Sweeney Todd’s in Beauchamp Place. I loved that shop. I made sure I got in at about six in the evening, when it was starting to get quiet. And then we’d send out for pints and shorts from the pub opposite and all proceed to get bombed out of our minds. A haircut in those circumstances would take about five hours. But it would be the most convivial haircut you ever had.
Denny, too, persuaded me to go red for a while, towards the end of the decade, going shorter with the hair this time and teaming it with a beard: kind of like an Action Man soldier doll with henna. Looked all right, I thought. My problem with facial hair is that I can only grow it around the mouth and chin and not on the cheeks. (Before anyone raises any questions about machismo, permit me to mention the name of someone else who had this issue: Muhammed Ali.) Again, the red was a brief phase, and then I went back to blonde. If you’re sensible, you always come back to what works best.
The blonde aspect started to come in when I moved to California in 1975 and my hair naturally turned that way in the sun. I then began to accentuate the effect artificially – from the softer shades all the way up to the full-blown near-white peroxide with dark roots of the 1980s. Right now it’s a combination of three colours, mixed together by a girl who comes to the house to do it.
And the length of the hair has also varied somewhat. It probably grew to its record length in the early 1970s, when I was with the Faces. The top was still chopped into spikes but the back got down to shoulder-blade level – which was, of course, a highly popular male approach at the time. If you were doing it properly, and ensured the hair was clean enough and sufficiently blow-dried, it would bounce slightly around the ears as you walked. This was the desired effect, anyway.
The spikes provided something you could pull at with your fingers – very handy during television interviews. There’s some footage on YouTube of an interview I did with Russell Harty on British television in 1973 in which I appear to devote at least as much energy to reorganising my hair as I do to answering his questions. I also appear to be holding a glass of rum and Coke, and, to judge from the state of my eyes, have had several similar glasses behind the scenes. Excellent rock ’n’ roll behaviour – though, of course, founded on the sheer terror of live television as much as anything else.
The hair has shortened considerably at the back since then, but I’ve not had it above collar length since childhood. Above collar length would just seem wrong to me. The idea of exposing the back of my neck . . . no, that would run counter to nature. And the spikes have stayed. Their length has gone up and down a bit, according to my mood, the times, the state of the economy, etc. But the basic principle has remained the same. At Steven Carey’s salon, my hairdresser in Mayfair, I have written on the wall, below the mirror, the length above which my hair must not go: ‘6cm’. In Los Angeles my hairdresser uses a six-centimetre measuring stick.
These days there is no sugar involved in the creation of my hairstyle. I may use a spot of product (I get sent all sorts; my general feeling is that they are all pretty much the same thing). And there is no back-combing either. I still employ the upside-down drying method – although, after years of spiking, it now seems to grow in that direction in any case. Even if I wanted to try another style, the hair wouldn’t let me.
My hair is also a very efficient warning system. Ronnie Wood and I have this in common: if our hair doesn’t want to stand up, after all the tricks, all the product and drying it upside down, then we know we’re sick and it’s time for us to take to our beds. Our hair is our barometer.
Do I still spend a lot of time thinking about and working on my hair? Yes. Am I aware of having good hair days and bad hair days? Definitely. Am I more than averagely relieved to have been unaffected by typical male pattern baldness? You bet. (Had it set in, I would have gone for a weave, like Elton.) Do I consider myself blessed that the barnet hasn’t gone grey beyond a few, easily coloured-in bits at the sides. Indeed I do. (I must be in the right profession, seeing how President Obama has gone grey overnight, along with Kenny Dalglish.) Does any of this interest in my own hair border on narcissism? Well, say so if you must.
But it’s understandable, surely. The hair is part of the job. It’s my signature: a convenient shorthand for me and what I do, and, if you will, a logo for the business. Even now it would be possible to go into any barber’s in Britain, plonk yourself down in the chair and ask for ‘a Rod’, and without further explanation the barber would know what you are talking about.
It announces my presence, and my availability for work, as effectively as the light on the top of a taxi cab. If I want to go unnoticed, a baseball cap or a trilby or any kind of hair-concealing hat will do it, pretty much every time.
The cover of my Out of Order album from 1988 is a photograph of the top of my head. No face visible: just hair. The cover for the Storyteller box set that came out in 1989 – and similarly the posters a
dvertising the residency that I took on at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas in 2011 – show a drawing of the back of my head.
And forgive me, but I take a little bit of pride in that – in being someone who can be recognised by his hair alone, seen from the back, or even from directly above. That means your hairstyle is working for you, doesn’t it? That means the hours with the hairdryer have paid off. That’s doing hair properly.
CHAPTER 3
Events most grave.
IN 1962, AT the age of seventeen, I met a girl called Susannah Boffey at a party in London. She was extremely pretty, of medium height, with brown hair, well spoken, well educated, thoroughly middle class – altogether out of my league. Yet I charmed her and made her laugh and she was my first serious girlfriend. And within a year, to the profound shock of both of us, she was pregnant.
It must have happened in Brighton. Although I had put my beatnik phase aside and smartened up, those weekend trips to the beach with mates and a guitar continued, and Sue was part of them – with me, cuddled up in British Rail train carriages, arm in arm along the promenade. In late March and early April, all of us used to sleep on the Saturday night under the arches beneath the road along the seafront. Or we might use the beach in front of the area called Black Rock, beside the wall of the art deco lido. If the police moved us on, which frequently happened, we would pick up our things and find a spot under Brighton Pier instead. And in one of those locations – and certainly not in a bed – the baby was conceived.
