Rod: The Autobiography Read online

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Digression

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Digression

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Digression

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Digression

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Digression

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Digression

  Chapter 14

  Digression

  Chapter 15

  Digression

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Digression

  Chapter 19

  Conclusion

  Picture Section

  Discography

  Acknowledgements

  Photographic Acknowledgements

  Index

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Rod Stewart was born the working-class son of a Scottish plumber in North London. Despite some early close shaves with a number of diverse career paths, ranging from gravedigging to professional football, it was music that truly captured his heart – and he never looked back

  Rod started out in the early 1960s, playing the clubs on London’s R&B scene, before his distinctively raspy voice caught the ear of the iconic front man Long John Baldry, who approached him while busking one night on a railway platform. Stints with pioneering acts like the Hoochie Coochie Men, Steampacket, and the Jeff Beck Group soon followed, paving the way into a raucous five years with the Faces, the rock star’s rock band, whose offstage antics with alcohol, wrecked hotel rooms and groupies have become the stuff of legend. And during all this, he found a spare moment to write ‘Maggie May’, among a few others, and launch a solo career that has seen him sell an estimated 200 million records, be inducted into the Hall of Fame twice, and play the world’s largest ever concert. Not bad, as he says, for a guy with a frog in his throat.

  And then, there is his not-so-private life: marriages, divorces and affairs with some of the world’s most beautiful women – Bond girls, movie stars and supermodels – and a brush with cancer which very nearly saw it all slip away.

  Rod’s is an incredible life, and here, for the first time, he tells the whole thing, leaving no knickers under the bed. A rollicking rock ’n’ roll adventure that is at times deeply moving, this is the remarkable journey of a guy with one hell of a voice – and one hell of a head of hair.

  About the Author

  Rod Stewart was born in 1945 in North London. He is a two-time Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, Grammy Living Legend, and in 2007 was bestowed the prestigious CBE (Commander of the British Empire). He has garnered an estimated 200 million in album and single sales with hit songs including: ‘Maggie May’, ‘Tonight’s the Night’, ‘Sailing’, ‘Baby Jane’, ‘Hot Legs’, ‘Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?’, ‘Young Turks’, ‘Rhythm of My Heart’, ‘Stay With Me’, ‘Mandolin Wind’, ‘You Wear It Well’, and many more.

  He lives with his wife, Penny Lancaster, and their children in Beverly Hills, California and Epping, Essex.

  Rod: The Autobiography

  Rod Stewart

  INTRODUCTION

  In which the high-flying hero of our story gets goosed.

  WE CALL IT ‘doing a runner,’ and it’s the best way on earth to beat the traffic after a show. At the end of the last encore, drenched with sweat, I make my final bow to the whooping, applauding crowd, then jog from the stage – and keep on jogging, into the wings, where someone drapes a towel round me as I pass. In the hall, the lights stay down and the crowd continues to call for a third encore. But I’m off down the fluorescent-lit backstage corridors, where the air is suddenly cool after the heat of the stage, and out through the service doors at the back of the arena, into a waiting car, the noise of the clapping and stamping receding behind me, until the clunk of the limo door seals it out completely and the car sweeps me away.

  Away, on this one night in particular, in July 1995, to an airstrip near Gothenburg, and a waiting private plane. A change of clothes is ready for me in the limo and I wriggle into them as we drive. Behind me, 30,000 hollering Swedish fans. Ahead of me, a short flight to London, in the company of a few members of my team who were also primed to ‘do a runner’ at the show’s end. The Spanner in the Works tour kicked off in June and is scheduled to run until May the following year, but there is a window in the schedule and I’m heading home.

  And this is always the moment, with my feet outstretched as the plane picks up speed and lifts off the runway, when I finally relax, allow the adrenalin of the previous two hours to settle, enjoy the prospect of a night in my own bed, and anticipate the meal that the cabin crew will soon prepare, the glass of cold white wine that will go with it and the satisfaction at the end of a day’s work.

  Except that this time . . .

  Thump!

  ‘What the hell was that?’

  We are hardly into our ascent when there is an almighty wallop on the left-hand side.

  ‘Was that the wing?’

  The plane banks sharply, then gradually levels.

  ‘What’s happening?’

  Startled rigid in my seat, I look around the cabin at the faces of the people with me, seeking comfort. Next to me, my great mate Alan Sewell – solid, dependable Big Al, a second-hand car dealer by trade and a gentleman of ample proportions, often mistaken for a bodyguard at my side – has turned white and is about to begin shaking like a jelly.

  Opposite, Annie Challis, part of my manager’s team, gives me a reassuring look and says, ‘I’m certain it’s nothing, darling.’ But that reassuring look seems to be costing her some effort, which kind of removes the reassurance from it.

  Meanwhile, near Annie sits my beloved and all-knowing manager, Arnold Stiefel, engrossed in the latest issue of Architectural Digest. As he continues to turn the pages, Arnold alone seems unperturbed, although I notice he is sniffing the air rather quizzically. Seconds later he blithely declares, ‘It smells just like Thanksgiving.’

  It’s true. A strangely wholesome smell of roasting fowl has begun to pervade the cabin. Odd time to start heating up my meal, surely.

  No time to worry about that. The pilot speaks to us from the deck. We’re going back to the airport. He sounds relaxed enough. But they always do, don’t they? That’s what they’re paid for.

  The minutes that follow, in which the plane haltingly turns and readies itself to descend, hang heavily. Big Al continues to tremble. Annie continues to look unreassuringly reassuring. Arnold has discarded both his magazine and his confident demeanour and is intensely studying the in-case-of-emergency, laminated card, as if in preparation.

  Now, in a flood of cold fear, I begin to wonder: is this it? Is this where my number finally comes up? True, my life has been a full one – more spectacular and privileged and colourful than I would have dared even dream, with adventures and wealth and love beyond my share. But even so, is this how it all ends – in the arms of Big Al, in a field in Sweden?

  Through the window of the plunging plane, I notice that the runway has been covered in foam and the perimeter of the airfield is alive with the blinking lights of emergency vehicles.

  But I somehow keep it together. I rein it in and remain calm and in control. If it must be, then so it must be. ‘It’s all right,’ I say, in a quiet voice. Then, slightly louder, ‘It’s all right.’ Then in a kind of half-shout, ‘It’s all right!’ Then, finally, in a shrill and rising scream, ‘It’s all right!’

&nbs
p; * * *

  It was all right. A bird strike, apparently. One unlucky member of a passing flock of geese, sucked into the engine. The bird was ruined, and so too was the engine. Good job the plane had another one and was able to land. It wouldn’t have been the first time in my long and distinguished career that I had handed the tabloids a gift-wrapped headline: ‘Rod Cooks His Goose’.

  And luck within luck. After we had driven back to the hotel where the band were staying, and joined them in the bar for several stiff drinks and some dramatic re-enactments of the incident, I learn that, only the previous day, our pilot had attended a refresher course on controlling a plane in the event of an engine loss.

  Kind of sums up my life, really. An awful lot of the way, it’s been a long, luxury aircraft ride. But just occasionally the plane flies into a goose.

  And somehow, every time it does, I get lucky and live to tell the tale.

  CHAPTER 1

  In which our hero is born, just over six years of global conflict ending shortly thereafter; and in which he goes to school and develops, peculiarly enough, an intense loathing for singing in public.

  OBVIOUSLY I WAS a mistake. Definitely some kind of oversight in the family planning department. An ‘unforced error’, they might call it in tennis. Otherwise, explain why Bob and Elsie Stewart, at forty-two and thirty-nine, with four children to feed, the youngest of them already ten, would suddenly take it into their heads to produce another baby. Furthermore, explain why they would do this in the middle of the Second World War.

  Hence, eventually, the family joke: ‘Roddy was Dad’s slip-up. But, as Dad’s slip-ups go, a fairly lucrative one.’

  I can’t say I was ever made to feel like a mistake, though. On the contrary, despite my late arrival (or perhaps because of it) I seemed to be welcomed very warmly – by the six members of my immediate family, at any rate. Less so by Hitler. My point of entry into the world, on the evening of 10 January 1945, was a small bedroom on the top floor of a terraced house on the Archway Road in north London, whose windows had been blown out so many times by the aftershock of exploding bombs from Germany that my dad had cut his losses and boarded them up.

  The worst of the Blitz was almost over by then, and, indeed, the war in Europe would end altogether nearly four months later. But, with no regard for my best interests, the Germans had bombed London throughout my mum’s pregnancy: first with V1 flying bombs, known cheerfully as ‘doodlebugs’, and less cheerfully as ‘buzzbombs’ on account of the noise they made before they killed you; and then, in the later stages of her term and in the first swaddled days of my life, with the even more vicious V2 rockets, launched across the Channel from the French coast.

  Those bastards tended to leave a 25-foot-deep crater where your house used to be. You didn’t want to be under a V2 when it landed – pregnant, swaddled or otherwise.

  There’s a widely told story that, within an hour of my arrival, a rocket unceremoniously took out Highgate police station, a mere three-quarters of a mile away – slightly pooping the party atmosphere at my birth scene, while at the same time impressing on all of us, in a meaningful way, important and lasting lessons about fortune and the uncertainty of our lease upon this world, etc. It’s a good little parable, but alas, completely untrue – just one of those legends, fables and downright lies told in the name of publicity that we will have cause to unpick as this story goes along. Some weeks separated my birth and the bombing of the cop shop.

  Life in London in those days was one long close shave, however, and many Londoners shared that ‘lucky to make it’ feeling, not least if their house overlooked railway yards, as ours did, thereby inadvertently becoming a magnet for bombers with poor aim. While my mum was pregnant with me, the air raid siren would usually sound at around 1.30 a.m. and Mary, the eldest child at seventeen, would get my brother Bob, who was ten, and sister Peggy, nine, out of their beds and into their coats and lead them, each carrying their pillow, into the garden in the pitch black and down into the family Anderson shelter – six sheets of government-issue corrugated iron, formed into a shed and half sunk into the ground, with earth and sandbags thrown on top for extra blast-proofing. Then they would all crawl into the narrow, metal bunk beds and try to sleep through the noise and the fear until the morning. My brother Don, who was fifteen at this point, preferred to stay in the comfort of his bed in the house – unless something dropped close by and he felt the walls shake, at which point the appeal of a metal bunk in the garden would suddenly become irresistible.

  Of course, thousands of other London families were out of harm’s way – the children evacuated to the country, temporarily adopted by kindly rural folk in houses that were less likely to get a rocket through their ceilings. But my family had talked about it and decided that they couldn’t bear to separate – neither the children from the parents, nor the parents from the children. The Stewart attitude was ‘If we go, we go together.’ We were very clan-like in that way. We still are.

  Still, that didn’t mean that information necessarily flowed freely between the family members. It will tell you something about how little sex and its consequences were mentioned in those days that Don had no idea our mum was pregnant. He was slightly mystified by the amount of knitting his elder sister was doing (especially in the bomb shelter, where it passed the time). And if you had pressed him, he might have admitted that he was puzzled, too, that his mum seemed to be getting larger. Otherwise, the first thing he knew about it was that Wednesday evening, when he was asked if he wanted to go upstairs and see the new baby.

  My sister Mary was in on it, though – excited about this baby as if it were her own, and coming home from work in an increasing hurry as the due date neared. Wednesday was her roller-skating night. ‘It won’t come today,’ Mum told her. So off Mary went. But Mum must have been in labour already, because in the time it took Mary to get back, put her skates down and run upstairs, she had acquired another brother, Roderick David Stewart. My sister was struck, not so much by the sight of me, in all my radiant, newborn glory, as by the sight of Mum, who looked shattered and as white as the sheets. It was at that point she realised what Mum had been through, and also why Mum had sent her out that night: to spare her the details.

  Dad seemed to take these latest developments equably enough, though he must have wondered how he would cope. He was a Scotsman, from Leith, north of Edinburgh, with a spell in the merchant navy behind him, who had followed his brothers to London for work. He had met my mum, who was a Londoner, at a dance in Tufnell Park. When I came along, Dad was doing twelve-hour days as a plumber, returning home at seven in the evening, where he would peel off his boots and put his damp feet up by the fire, causing his slowly warming socks to give off the most shocking stink. Dad never drank. Someone had got him drunk once on a building site somewhere, and he had sworn off it there and then. But he smoked and he gambled (on the horses in particular), and a fifth child was unlikely to ease his occasional problems with cash flow. Our house at 507 Archway Road was rented from Grattage the landlord. Even now, for me, the name ‘Grattage’ carries a cold wind of fear and loathing. ‘Here comes Grattage! Hide!’

  Archway Road was a noisy, traffic-filled thoroughfare, dotted with small shops, in a mostly working-class area, with the far posher residences of Highgate away to the north. There was a trolleybus stop right outside our front door, and the wind forever blew discarded bus tickets into the gulley in front of our basement, to the irritation of my dad, who was constantly out there picking them up. Much later, after we had moved, the house was demolished so that the road could be widened, the local council finally achieving what Hitler had failed to pull off. But, while it stood, it was handsome enough – a pretty big house, actually, for a jobbing plumber’s family. Three bedrooms on the top floor, two more on the floor below that, and on the ground floor, along with the kitchen and the bathroom, the tall-ceilinged dining room, which contained a baby grand piano that my mum and occasionally my brother Don played, and that once, year
s later, would provide me with a convenient shelter for some experimental fumbling with a member of the opposite sex.

  Our house’s other luxury item was a telephone – an almost unparalleled technological wonder in those days. It had a coin-box attached to it and you needed a threepenny bit to phone out. Hard to account for the mystery and awe that would descend whenever it rang, which wasn’t often. Who could it be? Who could it possibly be? And who would answer it? That could take a while to sort out. Whoever was chosen had to use their best voice: ‘Mount View, six-one-five-seven.’ You had to talk posh on the telephone in the 1940s and 1950s. The telephone demanded that.

  My dad needed the phone to organise the football club that he ran as a hobby: Highgate Redwing, a weekend club with a first team, a reserve side and even a youth team for a while. My brothers Bob and Don played for them, and I would too, eventually, but while I was small I could only look up to these men who filled our house, and marvel at them. They were my first sporting heroes. The meeting point before games on a Saturday morning was our house, so there would be a couple of dozen footballers milling in the kitchen and the hall and spilling out onto the pavement. And, beforehand, for me, this excited anticipation: the guys were coming round. For a penny a shirt from club funds, my mum washed the kit each week, heaving these muddy clothes into a giant boiler and stirring them all round. And afterwards a line of black and white shirts would hang, gleaming, the length of our garden. It was a heavenly sight to me.

  I remember family holidays at Ramsgate on the Kent coast – all of us Stewarts stuck on the beach in the freezing cold in the traditional British way – but not nearly as strongly as I recall the annual football club outings: two ‘charabancs’, or motor coaches, full of the players and their wives and kids, leaving the Archway Road at eight in the morning, my mother and sisters making dozens and dozens of sandwiches for the day out at Clacton-on-Sea. Just wonderful.