Rod Stewart interview: ‘If I had my way I would definitely have a second Brexit referendum’
Unlike some of his contemporaries, the ‘Maggie May’ star has no intention of coming off the road. He speaks with Chris Harvey about everything from sex to Donald Trump and his 30th album ‘Blood Red Roses’
“Oh what are you talking about?” says Rod Stewart, vehemently. I’ve just suggested that the owner of one of the great voices has gone a bit Sinatra, with his eight-year residency at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. He’s not having it. “In the Sinatra and Presley days, it was all people having dinner and the sound of cutlery and waiters walking about. It’s not like that any more – you’ve got to come out there and see it.”
Stewart is, of course, entitled to do a Sinatra. He’s 73 years old. Picture your favourite Rod and it’s a fair bet that it’s one from a long time ago. Rod in satin, leaning back and letting out that throaty roar; Rod in wide lapels and neck scarf, saucy grin stealing over his features as he sings; Rod in leopard-print lycra and the LA big-hair version of his classic feather cut in the “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?” era. Well, da ya? Because he definitely was.
The voice is still there, though, and that fantastic back catalogue: "Maggie May," "You Wear It Well", "Sailing", "Young Turks". (His own favourites, he says, are "Baby Jane", "Mandolin Wind" and "I Was Only Joking".) He’s just finished his morning workout – “Gotta be done, mate, gotta be done” – and is purring about the new indoor pool he’s had built at his Grade II listed mansion in Essex.
Unlike his contemporaries Paul Simon and Elton John, Rod has zero intention of coming off the road. He still sounds incredulous at Elton’s plan, which he earlier described as a money-grabbing way of selling tickets – “to have a retirement tour for three years? I’ve never heard of that” – but he’s certain about his own future: “I would have to be nearly in a bloody wheelchair to retire.”
He’s just released a new album, Blood Red Roses, which after two and a half decades of working his way through other people’s rock classics, soul classics and the great American songbook is his third slate of original songs in five years, after Time (2013) and Another Country (2015). Both were platinum sellers.
“I thought the credibility of me writing songs had disappeared,” he says. “It was one of those things that I lost a bit of interest in, and got a little lazy, but when I finished writing my book [Rod: The Autobiography, published in 2012], all the stories came flooding back. I had meetings with families and friends in the old bands and they gave me lots of things to write about.”
Musically it raids his entire past, from Celtic-influenced folk to Seventies funk disco to those slick Eighties pop ballads, but don’t expect a return to some of his more eye-catching early lyrics. I mention the one-night stand in the 1971 Faces song "Stay with Me", with its references to bodily smells and a blunt transaction (“In the morning, don’t say you love me, ’cause I’ll only kick you out of the door.”) “Oh dear, terrible, yeah I know, it’s a different time, mate, it’s all gone #MeToo now.”
He says this in a slightly camped-up way. I mention Lily Allen’s recent comments about the music industry being rife with abuse of women. Has that been his experience of it? “No, listen, I’ve got to try and remember, let me think, I’ve been on tour with Stevie Nicks and Cyndi Lauper but I haven’t really been around enough women. I’ve got six women in my band and I look after them like they’re all princesses, but I can’t answer your question. I wasn’t around, I didn’t see it, let me put it down to that.”
Does he think things that were OK then are not OK now? “Oh absolutely, I couldn’t write a song like ‘Tonight’s the Night’ now even if I wanted to,” he says. (The lyrics are not subtle: “Don't say a word my virgin child, Just let your inhibitions run wild… C'mon angel… Spread your wings and let me come inside.”) “But you know ‘Hot Legs’ is even worse – everything was different then, the clothes, the attitude, even recording was different.”
Stewart seems to have embraced a new sexual politics on the album’s opening track, “Look in Her Eyes”, which he says is a warning to young men not to push it with women. “It’s saying come on guys, back off, you don’t have to get drunk and throw her over the park bench to try and get your way.”
I don’t think the generations now are as much interested in sex as me and my comrades were back in the day
Does he think the Tinder generation are hung up on casual sex? “I don’t think the generations now are as much interested in sex as me and my comrades were back in the day,” he says.
Rod and women. They’re inseparable. Look at Stewart’s career through time, and it’s hard not to associate its phases with the (invariably blonde) model or actress he was dating at the time. Even the most stick-to-what's-in-the-grooves muso will have an image of the singer with Swedish actress Britt Ekland that links to 1977’s Footloose and Fancy Free (and the songs that are written about her on it), or with model Dee Harrington in the years between Every Picture Tells a Story (1971) and Atlantic Crossing (1975). “Rod was peeling women off him,” Harrington said of the night they met. “He was wearing a white suit and girls were hurling themselves in his direction.”
In the early days, Stewart’s relationships always seemed to end when he was seen out with a new flame. In 2010, he said that he couldn’t remember how many women he’d slept with. On the new album, he sings about the time before he was famous: “Making out we were millionaires, Anything to get the girl upstairs.” Does he think a lot of sex leads to happiness? “Of course it doesn’t. It leads to being experienced, it leads to ‘control’, for want of a better word. Listen, here’s a guy who got fed up with sex, you know. Before I met Rachel [Hunter, who became his second wife, in 1990], me and my mates were down in the south of France and flying ’em in and out. One would walk out and the other one would be coming in at the airport. But it was empty, it was lonely, it wasn’t fulfilling, and this is what you find.
“The song "Cold Old London" [on the new album], that’s what that’s all about – when you’re getting a little older and you’ve done it all, the girls are getting younger, but you’re getting no satisfaction from it, and you’ve lost the girl you really love because you were looking at another woman.”
We were down in the south of France and flying ’em in and out. One would walk out and the other one would be coming in at the airport. But it was empty, it was lonely
Lost love is something of a theme on the album. “Honey Gold” is a paean to a mystery woman, with clues such as “I remember you at a rally for peace in the summer of 95”, “You even partied with the Faces” and “You’re just a country girl”.
“It’s a song about a girl that I looked up to, beautiful dresser, beautiful girl,” Stewart says. “This was in the Seventies and I haven’t seen her for a while, but the last time I did see her, she looked just as gorgeous.”
Stewart’s not planning to give it away, but when I wonder if it might be Joanna Lumley, whom Rod briefly dated in 1973, when he was still a member of the Faces, he laughs. (Lumley is a well-known activist, and once said that Stewart dedicated his cover of Bob Dylan’s “Girl from the North Country” to her.) “Well, you might say so, haha! Let me look into that one, I’m not saying it is and I’m not saying it’s not.”
One song includes the line: “Humour before looks, works every time”. Given his own track record, does he think looks are more important for men? “[That line] works both ways round,” he says. “I mean, I’ve dated some beautiful women, I’ve had Playboy centre-spreads, and you go and talk to ’em, and I’ve had better conversations with dining tables. Give me a woman who’s not so good looking and can make fun, talk about politics, talk about football even, over looks any day.”
Stewart didn’t write his current single, “Grace”, a cover of an Irish ballad about the real-life Grace Gifford, who married her fiancé just hours before he was executed for his part in the 1916 Easter Rising. That’s a rebel song, isn’t it? “If you mean it’s an IRA song, it isn’t,” he says. “They were the Irish freedom fighters then, but more importantly it’s a great love song.”
“Farewell” is about the death of a close friend, Ewan Dawson, and the lyrics trace a path all the way back to the Sixties, when they were still paying to get into the Flamingo club in Soho (The Beatles hung out there, didn’t they? “I never saw ’em – they were Northerners”).
“This was our time, our space, our songs and our generation,” Stewart sings. Is he proud of what his generation achieved? “Absolutely,” he says. “Everything was new… there’s a lot of crap on the radio nowadays – maybe I’m old fashioned but it’s very difficult to hear any good stuff. Whereas when we started in the Sixties, what we were doing, what the Stones were doing and the Yardbirds and the Animals, everything was new, ‘listen to this!’, you know.”
Stewart was there at the start of the blues boom (although he wouldn’t break through until the Seventies with "Maggie May" – “I was offering gravel and a big nose to a marketplace that wanted smooth and pretty,” he wrote in his memoir). He cut his first solo single in 1964, a cover of Sonny Boy Williamson’s innuendo-laden "Good Morning Little Schoolgirl", which didn’t sell at all, then, at 19, he got a job touring with British blues pioneer Long John Baldry, and later, singing (alongside Ronnie Wood) in the Jeff Beck Group.
There’s a line in the song about how “white boys can’t sing the blues”, I’m guessing it’s tongue in cheek? “Yeah, thought I’d just throw that one in there, there was some debate back in those days with Long John – he was adamant that us white boys could sing the blues as good as them what come out the cotton field.”
Stewart came out of Archway, north London, and the inflections are still there in his voice. He was the youngest of five children, a much-loved, late-life baby, conceived towards the end of the Second World War.
For a time in the Seventies, he was in the position of having a successful solo career, while still being lead singer of a great rock band. The Faces were formed out of the ashes of Sixties mod band the Small Faces (of “Lazy Sunday” and “Itchycoo Park” fame), with the addition of Stewart and his friend Ronnie Wood. The band produced some classic rock songs, such as "Stay with Me", "Cindy Incidentally" and "Pool Hall Richard", but tensions around Rod’s solo success meant they fell apart – with bassist Ronnie Lane walking out, then Stewart announcing to the NME that he was leaving the band. Wood, of course, subsequently joined the Rolling Stones.
"Vegas Shuffle" on the new album is a rocker that attempts to “out-Face the Faces”, Stewart claims. Is there a part of him that wishes he’d been able to keep the Faces together, and be doing big Rolling Stones-style tours to this day?
I’d have stayed with the Faces as long as they wanted me to. We better hurry and do this reunion tour
“Well, yeah, of course, I was always about the band. You’ve got to remember Woody was the one who left first – he confided in me that Mick Jagger had nicked him. I knew it was coming, and, you know, once Woody had left there was no point in me staying, but I swear to god I’d have stayed with the Faces as long as they wanted me to.”
The band had a reputation for hard-drinking and boisterous sometimes ramshackle live performances. Does he miss the camaraderie? “Yeah, I love Woody but I have the same thing with the guys in my band now… having a drink, having a laugh, you know, but nothing will ever replace the Faces, they were absolutely unique and we’ve only got three of us left now (Lane, who suffered from multiple sclerosis, died from pneumonia in 1997; keyboardist Ian McLagan, from a stroke, in 2014) so we better hurry and do this reunion tour.”
When are they going to do it? “Dunno. When Woody stops working, I start, and when I stop, he starts, but hopefully we’ll get it together.”
Did his relationship with booze improve after he left the band? “No, it continued on,” he laughs. “I don’t drink as much as I did back then for obvious reasons. I’m getting older and I want to look after my health, but I certainly love two glasses of wine, three at the most, every night of the week. I have two glasses of white and a small glass of red… that is over the limit and I don’t give a f***. I deserve it.”
“Rest of My Life” on the album is an upbeat song that seems to represent a man pleased with his lot. Would Stewart describe himself as a happy person? “Yeah, I really believe I am, I went through my darkest period in the early Eighties, when I didn’t know whether I was coming or going, [I was] doing a little bit of drugs, which certainly did not agree with me. Now, what else could I want? I’ve got two great kids, six other children and a gorgeous wife.”
Since 2007, Stewart has been married to former model turned television presenter Penny Lancaster, and the couple have two children, Alastair, 12, and Aiden, seven. As a father, Rod started young: his oldest child is Sarah Streeter, 56, who was given up for adoption after Stewart’s art student girlfriend Suzanne Boffey got pregnant when Rod was just 17. She only learned about her famous father when she was 18. Daughter Kimberly, 39, and son, Sean, 38, are both from Rod’s five-year marriage to American model and actress Alana Hamilton at the start of the Eighties; Ruby, 31, who is a singer like her father, is from Stewart's seven-year relationship with US model Kelly Emberg; Renee, 26, and Liam, 24, from his marriage to New Zealand model and actress Rachel Hunter, whom he proposed to in 1990 at the end of a whirlwind three-week romance, after becoming obsessed with her in a Sports Illustrated fitness video.
The mood on “Rest of My Life” is in marked contrast to his state of mind after the breakdown of his marriage to Hunter. He was 45 when they wed; she was 21. She left him in 1999 – sending him into what he described as a misery that was so all-consuming that for months he would lie on the sofa all day with a blanket over him and a hot-water bottle against his chest. “I was distracted almost to the point of madness,” he wrote. Do you ever get over a break-up like that? “Well, you know, my daughter’s going through the same thing right now, and I said [to her], listen there’s no way round it, you’ve got to live through it and almost embrace it and it will go away, all things will pass, so that’s all you can do. It hasn’t left a scar on me, certainly not.”
Does one big marriage break-up ensure you are never complacent again? “Yeah, I’m not saying I was complacent in my marriage to Rachel, far from it, I was loyal and I loved her dearly but as my sister said at the wedding, ‘Roddy, she’s far too young’ … [I said] ‘Oh no she’s not, it’ll be all right!’” He snorts, “But of course that’s what happened, and I should have known. I was a silly old bugger.”
He splits his time these days between palatial homes in the UK and US. Isn’t he a personal friend of the American president?
“Let me just clear up the situation,” he says. “I’ve known Trump for a long time. I’ve done concerts for him in his casinos. I live probably three-quarters of a mile down the road from him on the beach in Florida. He’s always been extremely nice to me. He’s let my friends use his golf course for nothing, and I’ve had no problems with him at all. Is he a great president? Nah. I think his moral compass is way off. But on the other hand the country’s doing extremely well, although I believe part of that was down to President Obama – the country was starting to do great anyway, he’s just carrying it on. But we’ll see with the mid-term elections. It does seem like the walls are closing in on my dear friend” – whoops, he corrects himself – “I won’t say dear friend, he’s just a friend.”
What about Brexit, does he have an opinion? “Listen, mate, if I had my way I would definitely have a second referendum – I think the people have been fooled, I think they’ve been lied to. I think whether we drop out of the customs union or whatever I think it all needs to be rescheduled and we should have a new referendum because people are fed up with it. I think there are too many doubts now in everybody’s minds. I agree with the Mayor of London, there should be a second referendum. I might be putting my foot in it there but I do live here quite a bit.”
In fact, he’s just announced a 2019 UK tour, which will start in Southampton in May, where the old favourites will surely get an airing. “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?” for instance. “That was a like pink toilet seat around my neck for a long time,” Stewart says. “People didn’t want me to do anything outside of what I’d been doing since "Maggie May", but I’d always liked dancing and the Bee Gees had just released some great stuff in my opinion, I jumped on the bandwagon. Now it makes everybody happy.”
One of the accusations that’s been lobbed at him over the years is that he does it for the money rather than the love. “Oh that’s ridiculous, mate,” he says. “The love of it is what’s kept me going, the love of putting my heart and soul into an album like Blood Red Roses, of getting up and giving the best shows, I certainly don’t think I just roll it out at concerts… I love what I do. Would I do it for nothing? No, but it’s certainly not the first thing that drives me. This is what I’ve always wanted to do since I was 16, and I’m doing it, living the life, it’s brilliant.”
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