“I’M JUST AN OLD SOFTIE I SUPPOSE”
Rod Stewart Interview by Jan Moir, The Daily Telegraph (November 15 2002)
He is on good terms with his ex-girlfriends and can be an embarrassing father – but Rod Stewart still knows how to behave like a proper rock star. Jan Moir meets him
We are standing on a balcony of the Dorchester hotel, catching a breath of fresh air and taking in the London skyline. Rod Stewart – Rod! – is a beaky presence at my elbow, his eyes sweeping greedily over the horizon, looking for landmarks he recognises.
“Post Office Tower, Centre Point, Tottenham Court Road,” he says, as if we were gazing upon half of the wonders of the modern world. He points them out with a deeply tanned hand, the mahogany flesh contrasting richly with the icy pelts of diamonds on his fingers and wrists.
Does he miss England? A shrug. “After a couple of months, I have to get back to California,” he says, and shivers a little as the cold wind ruffles his towering, cockatoo hairstyle. Oh yes! It’s still there. And Rod, who used to use sugar and water to make it stick up when he couldn’t afford “lacquer”, has got its maintenance down to a fine art.
“I wake up, wet it down and try to shape it into some sort of position,” he says. “The idea is not to wash your hair too much with shampoo, it takes all the body out of it. Just leave all the gunk in there.”
We go back in to the suite, with its carmine silk curtains, its arbour of mirrors and its fireplace designed like a pagan altar. “Nice, innit,” rasps Stewart, whose own appearance can compete with the campest of backgrounds and still come out ahead.
Today, he is wearing the tightest pair of trousers I have ever seen in my life – they cling to his little legs the way a coat of paint clings to a wall. He looks like. . . he looks like. . . Rod, what the hell do you look like? “It’s my sort of little schoolboy number,” he says proudly, of his black Prada trousers, Versace blazer, Ralph Lauren sweater, Dolce & Gabbana shirt and striped tie. “Yeah! I have always enjoyed clothes. Even before I had any money, I always looked good ‘cos I would do a bit of shoplifting, heh heh heh.”
He sits down on the chair opposite, unbuttons his blazer and then cups a considerate hand in front of his genitals. So sweet! And, give or take a few terrifying moments when he reaches over for his glass of water, it stays there for most of the interview. Say what you like about him, you can’t say that he isn’t a gentleman.
These are fairly turbulent times for Rod Stewart, whose complicated life is split between his home in Los Angeles and his house in Essex. He has been married twice, he has five children by three different mothers, he recently had a health scare when cancer was discovered in his thyroid gland, and his eldest son Sean, who has had drink and drug addiction problems, is serving a three-month jail sentence in California, after being found guilty of assault.
On top of all this, his ex-wife Rachel, who left him in 1999, is now dating heart-throb rock star Robbie Williams. And to add insult to injury, his current girlfriend, Penny Lancaster, apparently told British newspapers in July that she needed more sex than creaky old Rod could deliver.
“Absolute rubbish and so unfair! Oh, that caused so much upset because my family thought that Penny really had said it and they took umbrage. It took a long time for it all to settle down,” says Stewart, who was playing concerts in Britain at the time and seems genuinely anguished that the tabloids took some of her remarks out of context.
“What she actually said, I believe, is that sometimes I play football in the morning and I had just done this tour. So I go off and do a two-and-a-half-hour concert in the evening and, naturally, I would be knackered when I came home. Sometimes I could manage sex, sometimes I couldn’t. But that schedule would take it out of a 19-year-old.”
So what is he saying?
“That I am extremely romantic and I love the whole idea of romance. I like candlelit dinners, I like foreplay a great deal, and I like to take my time with sex. That wasn’t always the case, but the older you get, the better you become at it. Oh yes! You definitely do.
“Now it’s quality as opposed to quantity. A dozen times a week or five, six, seven times a week – that is much better than doing it two or three times a day. With the older man, certainly.”
Stewart cackles happily, winks extravagantly and leans back in his seat again. He has always seemed at ease with himself – can you think of a celebrity who has enjoyed being a celebrity as much as Rod? – and is held in much affection on both sides of the Atlantic, despite the fact that he is not quite the star attraction he once was.
He has a bracing attitude towards his changing fortune: “They don’t play so much of me on the radio any more. I’m not worried, I’ve had a fair crack of the whip. Anyone who complains about it, like Status Quo and all them – pah, moaning on about it – that’s just greedy. They should do something different. Like me.”
His new album is a surprising change of pace. It Had To Be You is a collection of classic American songs, a concept strangely like Robbie Williams’s own Sinatra-inspired Swing When You’re Winning set, which was released last year. Stewart says, a little wearily, “I don’t want to talk about Robbie. I don’t want to talk about Rachel”, but we have to know if he has, at least, listened to Williams’s album.
“I have heard bits and pieces. But Robbie went more for the big band stuff, whereas we stayed away from that. He did things like Mr Bojangles, but we didn’t veer off track. We stuck to an era. Most of these songs were written between the wars.
“Now, come on. Who else has done one of these albums? George Michael?” he says, perhaps just a little desperately.
Anyway, Stewart’s album is intimate and tender, his raspy vocals riding clean and clear above They Can’t Take That Away From Me, These Foolish Things and Moonglow. There are moments when his mid-Atlantic pronunciation and our knowledge of his torrid romantic history might overwhelm the sweet innocence of the sentiments expressed, but he still has a beautiful way with a lyric. Who is going to buy it, I wonder?
“Fuck knows,” says Stewart, scratching his head. “I have got no idea. It might go down the toilet.” He is equally forthright on the overwrought theory that artists – and bluesy singer/songwriters like himself, in particular – must have suffered emotionally in some way to produce the goods.
“Thassa loada bollocks,” he shrieks. “I wrote some of my best love songs ever when I was unhappy and my saddest love songs when I was very much in love. When I wrote You’re in My Heart, which is an uplifting song, I had just broken up with. . . now who had I just broken up with? Oh, somebody you have never heard of, anyway. Someone I had to let go because it wasn’t going anywhere. So I was out of a situation and a little heartbroken and that song came out of it.
“And Tonight’s the Night is very romantic, but I had just finished with Britt Ekland. So when I am out of a relationship is probably when I am better at writing songs.”
He thinks about this for a second.
“No. Hang on. When I am not in love I am better at writing songs. I am always in a relationship, aren’t I? Heh heh.”
The funny thing about dear old Rod Stewart is that he could easily be a monster, but he is not. His eyes are warm, amused, shrewd and he talks of all the women in his life with affection. Well, most of them, at any rate. He had two children with wife Alana Hamilton, one with girlfriend Kelly Emberg and two with Rachel Hunter. He has remained friends with all of them and he is happy to tell me that they will all be spending Christmas Eve together at his house.
“To be honest, with the mothers of all my children, two of whom I have married, we have never had a real bitter word that lasted, an argument where we haven’t spoken for more than a week. Rachel and I speak every day because of the kids. Kelly works in my house – she is my interior decorator, can you believe that? And Alana lives around the corner from me, so they are all within spitting distance.”
What does that say about him?
“That I am an old softie, I suppose. That I give them everything they want! To be honest, I don’t know that it says a great deal about me, but it does say a great deal about us. We have children, so we are always going to have to talk. We can’t war and feud because it is going to reflect on the kids.”
He is a devoted dad, fretting about censorship, about being strict, about bringing them up properly. In the cinema he has installed in his Beverly Hills home, he frantically runs around “throwing cushions” on the younger ones’ faces if there is an unexpected “big sex scene in a PG13 film”. He frets when his 15-year-old daughter is in the cinema with her boyfriend.
“So every now and then, I creep in and shout, ‘Keep your hands to yourself! No fiddling about!’ “
It is comforting to know that even rock star dads can be embarrassing – and, of course, even rock star dads have their problems. Stewart visits 22-year-old Sean in prison every Wednesday. They communicate by phone, separated by thick glass. It must be painful, but Stewart first of all makes a joke. He says that every time he visits, he picks up his phone and says: “Dead man walking!” Sean, apparently, sees the funny side.
“He’s got a good sense of humour,” says his father. “He is doing good. He has got another three weeks to go and he is serving his time like a man. I think it has definitely frightened him – and if it doesn’t do him some good, then he is going to be in big trouble.
“When I go to see him, I say, ‘You are missing your freedom, aren’t you?’ And he says, ‘Oh God, Dad, you have got no idea.’ And every time I tell him, ‘Son, if you haven’t got your freedom and your health, then you haven’t got anything’.”
Stewart’s cancer was caught early – he has a full body scan once a year – and he appears to have made a full recovery. However, I do notice he mentions God quite a few times – his voice is a gift from God, etc – but as he also regularly mentions that it cost him $4,000 to have his diamond watch repaired when he fell off his bike recently, perhaps we can conclude that a full religious conversion is still some way off.
For this small mercy, we should be grateful, because it is too late for Rod Stewart to change now. For many decades, he has been a particularly brilliant thread in the tapestry of British pop music and he has undeniably brought pleasure to thousands – and I’m not just talking about the girls.
Generations of us stomped our stack heels to Maggie May, sang You Wear It Well in the bath, screamed with laughter when Rod went all glam and minced about in pixie boots, wondering if we found him sexy.
Now, in these strange times, he meets princes (“William told me he preferred my version of Handbags and Gladrags to the Stereophonics cover version”) and prime ministers (“Tony wants to be a rock star and a footballer”) but, despite the diamonds, a big part of him remains the unreconstructed, salty old rocker of yesteryear, one who despairs of the calculated tactics of today’s stars.
“When I was in the Faces and we had an album coming out, we wouldn’t go and break up hotel rooms or go out with tarts to get ourselves in the papers. We broke up hotel rooms and went out with tarts because we bloody felt like it.
“Now it all feels so contrived. Get yourself drunk outside a nightclub, bomf! You must have an album coming out. Shoot a fellow rapper? Bomf! You must have an album coming out,” he says. He shakes his head in sorrow. “I find it very depressing.”