‘I’ve already got Penny’s present, she’ll love it. Last year I gave her a white Bentley’
to her for advice — especially the girls. She doesn’t beat about the bush. She’ll tell them what she thinks and they’ll listen. And her judgment’s always spot on. She’s the glue in the Stewart family.’
He’s extremely proud of the stint Penny did as a special police constable for a TV reality show earlier this year. She found the experience so rewarding she’s now in talks to take on the job part-time for real, with the prospect of six months of training before she’s accepted. What does Rod think about it? ‘No one’s ever been able to stop Penny if she’s decided she wants to do something. And I’m always behind her all the way. But am I scared for her? Yes, a little. Did you see that drug addict who threatened to stab her with a needle on the TV show?’ He’s suddenly very serious. ‘As long as she’s accompanied at all times by another constable, she’ll be OK.’
Not everyone could have entered Rod’s complex life and not only coped with it, but taken charge the way Penny has. A good example is the way she juggles the former wives and girlfriends, not to mention the children, and sometimes all under one roof at the same time. ‘I don’t know how she does it. I get on well with all of them, although it can be a bit awkward if Alana and Kelly [Emberg, mother of Rod’s daughter Ruby] and Rachel [Hunter] are all in the same room. But Penny keeps all the plates spinning.’
It’s all very different from a couple of decades ago when in 1999, after two children together, Renee and Liam, his second wife Rachel Hunter told him she wanted out. ‘I couldn’t believe it,’ he tells me now. ‘I was a rock star. You don’t dump a rock star! It knocked me for six. It was a huge shock. But she was just 21 when we married and a mum a year later. My sister Mary told me she was too young for me as we were walking down the aisle. And she was right.’
It made him far more cautious when he met Penny, who’s 26 years his junior, shortly after Rachel left him. They dated for eight years before they married in 2007, and when they had their two sons he approached fatherhood very differently too. ‘With Kimberly and Sean, I was deeply in debt to the US taxman. So I was away a lot on tour to earn much-needed money. Did the kids suffer? Yeah, they must have done. Their dad wasn’t there. But I didn’t have much choice.’
These days he plans his schedule around Alastair and Aiden’s holidays from school. ‘They’ve given me a new lease of life. And they’re mad on football too. We play on the astroturf pitch I’ve had built in the grounds.’
Recently there’s been a new addition to the household — a rescue dog from Battersea. She’s a Labradoodle originally called Blondie, though she’s been renamed Lily by Aiden, who says she responds better to that.
Rod’s busy home life is counterbalanced by the demands of his career, and there’s plenty coming up in the run-up to Christmas with his new album just out. He’s hugely enjoying his current tour which comes to Belfast tomorrow and Dublin on Wednesday and Thursdday.
There was a report recently that he was going to drop some of his raunchier songs — Hot Legs, Da Ya Think I’m Sexy? and so on — from
‘Penny’s great, she’s the glue in the Stewart family’
his live shows because they were no longer age-appropriate. Rod snorts. ‘Nah! Where did that come from? Of course I’m going to keep singing them. Anyway, they were appropriate when I first sang them. It was a different time. You could smack a girl on the bum then and it wasn’t the end of the world.’ He does approve of the #MeToo movement, though. ‘Course I do. Not that I’ve ever had to throw myself at a woman. It’s always been the other way around,’ he chuckles.
The only track on the new album that doesn’t involve the Royal Philharmonic is a duet with Robbie Williams on the Marvin Gaye/Kim Weston Motown hit It Takes Two. ‘I know Robbie through football, and his wife Ayda is on Loose Women and so is Penny. Also, my chef is married to his housekeeper. He emailed me and said he’d got a Christmas song, Fairytales, and he’d be honoured if I sang it with him. It’s on his new album. Once we’d recorded it, I told him he owed me a favour. He’d have to duet with me on It Takes Two, so that’s what we did. But we’ve never sung it
‘I still rub Oil of Olay into my face every morning after I shave’
together.’ That’s because they both recorded their vocals at separate times. They were due to perform the song together at this year’s Royal Variety Performance, but Rod had to pull out with a throat infection.
The lifelong footballer is having his right knee replaced in January, before a string of dates in Las Vegas in March. There’s never any shortage of new projects, but how would he feel about a film of his life following the recent Bohemian Rhapsody, about Freddie Mercury, and Rocketman, about Elton John? ‘No one’s asked me yet,’ he says. ‘But would I be interested? You betcha. And my youngest, Aiden, who’s the spitting image of me at that age, could play the young me. I don’t know who they’d get for the adult version, but that’s not my problem.’
He thought the Queen film was ‘just brilliant’, but he had one or two misgivings about Rocketman. ‘The chronology wasn’t always right. When they showed Elton singing at the Troubadour he was performing songs that were released 20 years later. And it was a bit too Mamma
Mia! for me,’ he says, waving jazz hands.
The recent pictures of Rod’s astonishing model railroad (you call it a train set at your peril) attest that he’s clearly got a forensic eye for detail. ‘To me, making it was more fun than running it,’ he says. ‘I can only explain my love for it by saying the sense of fulfilment it gives me comes from the fact I created it with my own hands.’
Yet until now he’s always been rather shy about discussing it. Might that be because he felt it was a bit geeky — not very rock’n’roll? ‘Absolutely. I thought it was a bit dodgy. I didn’t want anybody to know about it. But it’s incredibly absorbing. I’ve lost more hours than I could count constructing it in my attic in LA. Penny would stand at the bottom of the stairs. “Rod,” she’d shout. “There are children down here, growing up.” But she knows what it means to me.’
Gary, his personal trainer, keeps him in trim, though Rod’s not a man who puts on weight. ‘But I did because of the prostate cancer,’ he says. Earlier this year he revealed he’d been having treatment for a couple of years. ‘I’m the right side of that now, but it was caught early. Look at this, though...’ He lifts his T-shirt and pinches a modest roll of midriff, which he says is disappearing. ‘As part of the treatment you’re given a female hormone which makes all the fat go to your tummy. Apart from that, I’m in full working order.’
For a man his age he’s remarkably unlined. Yet there’s no evidence he’s a fan of Botox. ‘No, but I’ll tell you a secret. Every morning, after I shave, I rub Oil of Olay into my face. Ronnie Wood and I used to do that when we were 19 and I never stopped.’
Penny walks in and Rod jumps to his feet to gives her a hug. ‘Ah, the love of my life,’ he says. ‘Listen,’ he chuckles. ‘I’ve got such a ridiculously great life. I must be the luckiest man alive.’