by Rod Stewart
But when I can’t do that any more, what then? I hate to think of it. Golf? My dad played it, but I don’t think it’s me. I’d enjoy the clothes, probably. There’s a lot of golfing knitwear out there that I’d be quite excited about putting my head through. Plus-fours have a certain vintage appeal, too. But the game? I’m not so sure. I don’t think I have the patience.
I did try it once. The film actor Sean Connery persuaded me to go out with him and give it a go. This was on a course in Spain one time in the 1980s. He taught me the grip and the stance. ‘Feet apart, Rod. Try to keep your shoulders level . . .’
I took a swing, caught the top of the ball and watched it shoot, at roughly rabbit-height, about twenty-five feet off to the right into a nearby clump of grass.
Sean was very patient. He said, ‘What you need to do is loosen your grip. You’re choking down too tightly.’
So I tried again, with looser hands. This time I missed the ball completely. It was still on the tee. The club, on the other hand, flew straight down the fairway, arcing through the air, a distance of many yards. That was it for me. Lesson over. I returned to the clubhouse.
Outside of football, I don’t worry about ageing so much. I look around at people I’ve worked with down the years and I think, relatively speaking, that I’m not doing too bad. Moisturising is the key, ladies and gentlemen: plenty of Oil of Olay. But it’s mostly luck, of course – luck and genes. My brother Don is still refereeing football matches, and he’s in his eighties. But I do work at it – in the gym or out on the pitch every morning in the company of my highly learned personal trainer, Gary O’Connor, whose brief is, essentially, to enable me to become the world’s oldest-playing right back. And I’m sensible in my habits: the right food, a glass of wine or two with dinner, but no more.
And, of course, no drugs. Cocaine ended for me in the early 2000s, by which time I was hardly touching the stuff in any case – just the occasional small line to jolly along a night out in Epping, say. But even in those tiny quantities, I realised it was getting to my voice – drying out the membranes. And then Penny said, ‘Look, you’re not getting any younger. You need to be taking better care of yourself. Also, when you do that stuff, you don’t become fun: you become absorbed in one topic and it’s usually football. So if that’s going to happen, I’m not coming out.’ That was enough for me.
Do I regret those days when I took it? Well, I’m not denying that I had some fabulous times. But I’m not proud of it. And I was one of the lucky ones. I did it when it was new and fun and exciting. I did it on some extremely high-quality stuff. And I got in and got out unscathed. I never reached the stage where my life depended on me having to have cocaine – or anything else. Others weren’t so lucky and suffered badly for it.
And here’s something to confess: I’ve never bought any drugs in my life. Never bought my own cocaine. Wouldn’t really know how to go about it, actually. How bad is that? It was just around. Someone in the band would always have some, so I would say to Boiler, the stage manager, ‘Go and see if any of the boys have got a little bit of movement,’ as we used to call it, or, ‘See if you can find me a little bit of shovel.’
Didn’t have to buy my own coke, can’t buy a drink in my local pub in Essex, the Theydon Oak, even if I want to . . . life’s been kind. (John and Sheila, the landlord and landlady at the Oak, have always looked after me very well.)
I worry about the end of my career far more than I worry about ageing. There is no template for growing old as a rock star. There’s no pattern out there that you can follow. We were the first to come this way, flaunting our youth as we did so, and we’ve got no choice but to be pioneers going out the other end, when youth has ceased to be an option. So we’ve got no choice but to make our own paths and try to do what suits us. What I’m hoping is that I’m going to have the judgement and the foresight to pack it in at the right time instead of hanging around for ages playing smaller and smaller places. I’ve got a lot of pride holding me in check in that respect. But, at the same time, who knows how desperate one could be to keep it going, in some form – or any form? After all, the performing – it’s who I am. It feels like what I was put down here to do. If I go a month without a concert, I get all jittery and miss it. And when that ends, it will be a huge lump out of my life.
The happy thing is, it shows no sign of ending. Business hasn’t plateaued in quite a while – not since the early 1990s, when I really did think I was on my way to the waste-paper basket. But the success of the Songbook albums meant that people started coming out to the shows again. The tour I did in 2004, after the first of the Songbook albums, was one of my favourites of all time. It was titled ‘From Maggie May to The Great American Songbook’ and we played a rock set, then a Songbook set and then finished up with ‘Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?’ and ‘Maggie May’. Despite the signpost in the title, a few older listeners came expecting only to hear the standards. Now, that’s a tour I would love to do one day. But on this occasion, when we came on and blasted into ‘Sweet Little Rock ’N’ Roller’, there were a few startled faces. They seemed to get into it, though. The band was in tuxes, the girls were in long dresses, I was in tails, and we were on this beautifully draped classical set designed by Ian Knight, an absolute genius in this area with whom I collaborated closely on sets for my tours from the mid 1980s onwards. Ian would build these wonderful H0-scale models of the sets, with little figures for the band – which I really related to, as a model railroader – and he came up with some glorious schemes, including an in-the-round set for the 2007 tour which had a 1,500-yard tartan curtain wrapped right around it. Ian died in 2010 and is much missed.
In August 2011, I was fortunate enough to be offered a two-year residency at the Colosseum at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. My brother Don said, ‘You won’t like that, Roddy – all those people eating their dinners and chatting while you’re trying to sing.’ But, of course, that’s old-school. In this case a residency means twenty-six nights a year in a 4,100-seat concert venue which is probably the best room I’ve ever played in: superb acoustics, and a lovely low stage, so you feel really close to the audience. And me and the tightest band I’ve had in all my years on the road turn out some roistering versions of the hits, and I kick a few footballs out at some point and go walkabout among the floor seats if the fancy takes me. It’s a party.
And on it goes. A little while back, Arnold and I sat down with my schedule for 2013 and, after we had ring-fenced the important dates (the Scottish Cup Final, the friendly international between England and Scotland at Wembley in August), we began to outline the touring – and we were putting in runs at the O2 Arena in London, Hampden Park in Scotland, Madison Square Garden in New York. After all this time, it’s just remarkable. I feel extremely grateful.
* * *
If I was staggered to get a Grammy in 2005, I was knocked to the ground to get a CBE in 2006. That’s ‘Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire’, to give it the full title, an honour awarded to British nationals who are deemed to have made an impact on their country. Penny and I were with Alastair in Palm Beach when the news of the award came through, and Arnold flew down and threw me a party with three cakes spelling out CBE. Then, in July 2007, just two weeks after our wedding, Penny and I went to Buckingham Palace for the official ceremony. If you’re a working-class lad from north London, an invitation to be honoured at the palace feels like the stuff of fantasy. Both Penny and I, as kids, had driven past the place, stood outside the railings and sat on the ornamental lions of the Victoria Memorial. Buckingham Palace is part of your lore as a British kid. Now here we were, sweeping in through the gates, driving under the arch into the inner courtyard, walking up the red carpeted steps and going inside, exactly like we had seen people do on the television. I wore a blazer with some white slacks, a white shirt with black stripes and a skull and crossbones tie. I think I was meant to be in morning dress, but never mind – I looked very dashing. We were taken into an anteroom and offered
a glass of wine and then we were ushered carefully into line in the ceremonial room where a small orchestra was playing and where the atmosphere was formal and yet light and jubilant at the same time. At the head of the line, Prince Charles congratulated me and handed me my medal on a silk ribbon in a velvet case.
I’m very proud of my CBE. I stick those letters on the end of my name whenever I can. Some people keep their medals packed away in their cases. Not me. Soon after I got it, I wore it to a café with four of my kids and got snapped by one of the papers, leaning across the table with the medal dangling beside a bottle of HP Sauce – surely the closest a CBE has ever been to a bottle of the legendary brown condiment. I like having my CBE where I can regularly see it. At the moment, it’s hanging around the neck of a statue of Napoleon in my bathroom.
So there were the Songbooks, and there was the Grammy, and there was the CBE, and there was even the musical based around my songs: Ben Elton’s Tonight’s the Night, which ran at the Victoria Palace Theatre in London for a year from October 2003. Penny took a part in that show for the last three weeks of its run, as leader of the Hot Legs Dance Troupe, reprising the role she had played for fun in a one-off charity version of the show earlier in its life.
And the next thing I know I’m being asked to sing in front of Her Majesty the Queen. And I mean right in front of her. She was about ten feet away from me, on a small throne. What an extraordinary honour for a bloke from the Archway Road – and what an utterly nerve-shredding challenge. It seems the stroppy, faux-Marxist teenager who posed with a copy of the Daily Worker was a royalist in the end. This was in the summer of 2007 at St James’s Palace, during an evening on behalf of the Royal National Institute of Blind People. I sang ‘The Way You Look Tonight’ and dedicated it to Penny, a fortnight before our wedding.
These wonderful new experiences and vindications kept coming in the 2000s. But there was still a shadow at the back of my mind, because the thing I knew was gone for good was songwriting. That was all over. It had always been difficult, and then it was so much easier not to bother. I convinced myself that I had made the best of the little bit of talent for songwriting that I had been given. I persuaded myself, indeed, that maybe it wasn’t ever truly a gift that I had had. Don’t get me wrong, I’m proud of the catalogue of songs I’ve written – of ‘Maggie May’ and ‘You Wear It Well’ and ‘Mandolin Wind’ and ‘Forever Young’. But it was almost as if a person I didn’t know used to write those songs.
And then, when I was least expecting it, I bumped into that person again.
Late in 2011, Jim Cregan came for Sunday lunch at the Wood House in Epping, and afterwards we went and sat in the White Room and Jim got his guitar out and started strumming. He wanted to show me something he had written, and then he said, ‘Why don’t we try and come up with something?’ To be perfectly frank, I was rather looking forward to a Sunday afternoon post-lunch snooze. And Jim can be so serious when he picks up a guitar – like he’s saying to you, ‘This is a very important part of my life.’ So the level of my enthusiasm for an impromptu writing session at this time was not high. Still, Jim strummed, and I hummed a bit of a melody over the top of what he was playing, and Jim was recording what we did on his iPhone. And after a very short while, I said, ‘Let’s knock it on the head now, Jim,’ because I thought, ‘This is going nowhere.’
And he took what we had done home, and he worked on the iPhone recording in his studio and replayed the guitar part and smartened it up a bit, and then he sent it back to me. And when I played it back, I found myself thinking, ‘Hang on, this is actually really good.’ And then the title ‘Brighton Beach’ dropped into my head – from nowhere, as titles always used to, and for no reason I could put my finger on – and right then I started writing a lyric: about hobnobbing on the south coast of England as a kid and being a beatnik. And very quickly – much quicker than I was used to – I found myself with a finished song. Better than that: a good finished song, one I could feel proud of.
And that was it: I was away. Suddenly ideas for lyrics were piling up in my head. Next thing I knew, I had a song called ‘It’s Over’, about divorce and separation – something, as we may have discovered in these pages, that I know a bit about. And now I was getting up in the middle of the night to write things down, which has never happened to me: a song of advice for my children, a song of gratitude to my dad. I finished seven or eight songs very quickly and I still wasn’t finished, and it became apparent that I might just have ten original songs to record – a wholly original album, and I’ve never done that. It’s always been about five or six, and the rest cover versions.
I don’t know why it happened. No one pushed me. It was clean out of the blue. It felt like another piece of the pure luck with which I have been blessed in my life. (And trust me, there is not a day goes by that I don’t wake up and think how lucky I am.) But something clicked and I realised that I had things to write about again. A whole life’s worth of topics, in fact. The book you’ve just read.
Taking those new songs into the studio in 2012 and beginning to shape them up for an album release in 2013, I fell back in love with the whole process. I was living and breathing it again. It was like a rebirth, a root right back to the beginning. In fact, I’m not sure I had this much enthusiasm when I made those first albums of mine, in London, back in the early 1970s, as a kid with a rooster haircut, feeling his way forward by instinct and sheer nerve. But what is definitely true is that I haven’t felt so confident about a new set of recordings, as a writer and as a producer, since Gasoline Alley.
Of course, the album will come out, and then we’ll see. But whatever becomes of those recordings, hit or miss, is irrelevant really, beside what I understand to be the true moral of this episode, which is that sometimes when you think you’ve finished, it turns out that you haven’t.
Mind you, I’ll be absolutely gutted if the album is anything less than an international sensation.
This could be a photo of any of my kids when they were the same age. Clacton, circa 1950.
The Stewarts on holiday minus the sun. You will note my father wearing a tweed jacket, sweater, shirt and tie on the beach in June. Bless the British.
The family gathered except for brother Bob and his wife Charlotte, who were probably round the corner up to no good! Please observe a collection of thin ankles. From left to right: my brother Don, Don’s wife Pat, my sister Peggy (who sadly passed away too soon), my mum Elsie, me, my dad Bob, my sister Mary, Mary’s husband Fred.
Archway Road, 1945. The place of my birth.
Me and Dad going into a fifty-fifty. Thanks for the tartan pride, Dad.
My mate Kevin Cronnin, Sue Boffey (Sarah’s mother) and me, posing before boarding a third-class carriage to Brighton. Nice hair all round. Circa early sixties.
I love this picture of me and my two brothers turning out for Highgate Redwing. Please note my attention to fashion: short shorts - Italian style - and a Beatles haircut. The other two couldn’t give a damn.
My pals Kevin Cronnin (left), Clive Amore (right) and me proudly displaying our harmonica. My bouffant appears to have collapsed entirely. Duke of York pub, London, circa mid sixties.
My old pal Ewan Dawson and me outside my parents’ council house, posing with someone else’s car.
Eel Pie Island, where I made one of my first appearances, and where an unfortunate incident occurred with a beer mug.
The Dimensions, looking full of promise.
My hero Long John Baldry. There’s not a day goes by when I don’t think of him. I owe John everything.
On stage with Long John at the Marquee Club, 1964.
My first TV appearance on Ready Steady Go!, before which I deemed it necessary to spend all afternoon in the pub, gathering Dutch courage. My eyes are a dead giveaway.
You can’t stop me now!
Shotgun Express: Beryl Marsden, Peter Bardens and myself.
Me, Ronnie Wood, Micky Waller and Jeff Beck. It was a great honour to play al
ongside such an amazing guitarist, although Jeff looks like he wants to kill the photographer. Micky looks like a librarian. Don’t even mention the stupid hat.
Tony Newman on drums, with the rest of the Jeff Beck Group in the background, at rehearsals.
Attempting to reach a high note, which was unavailable.
Waiting on a luggage trolley in Los Angeles Airport, 1975. Trying .. desperately to look sensible.
Obviously taken after a Faces show. Everybody looking three sheets to the wind. What a band!
The launch of the Ooh La La album at Tramp nightclub, with the obvious decoration of the can-can girls.
Old pals.
Woody and me discussing stage movements for the next song. Santa Barbara, California, early, seventies.
