Keep it in your trousers, son — wise words from Rod Stewart’s dad

SHAKESPEARE wrote: ‘It is a wise child that knows his own father.’ ‘And an unusual one that unreservedly approves of him,’ added Mark Twain.

It’s the open acknowledgement of dads as flawed — but still loved and mostly admired — that makes this collection of short tales of fathers so moving.

The book began as a blog in 2013, when former NME editor Ted Kessler found himself ruminating on his own father’s looming 80th birthday dinner. He knew that time was running out.

On his way to the restaurant, he remembered ‘the intense, pensive man I mainly saw only in charismatic glimpses growing up: head wrapped in bandages after a car crash in Egypt; standing knee-deep in seawater, one hand behind his back reading for hours; breaking 100mph in the driving seat during explosive in-car rows with my mother. I contrasted that man with the gently eccentric old moose of today. . . tending his yard in Florida in winter.’

At the birthday party, he attempted to have a meaningful conversation with Felix Kessler but failed to ‘unlock anything’ in him.

So he wrote about him on the internet instead. Then he began collecting paternal sketches from friends, mostly musicians and music journalists. The children of Leonard Cohen, Ian Dury and Johnny Ball give personal insights into their famous fathers, while Paul Weller, Florence Welch and Coldplay’s Chris Martin lift their own fathers from obscurity.

Umberto Eco believed that ‘what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren’t trying to teach us’.

Many of the contributors to this book prove him right. Sometimes dads are silent. Tilda Swinton and her brothers dreaded nothing so much as a solo drive with their father: ‘His ability to say precisely not one word to us during an entire journey of several hours was breathtaking.’

Even when dads do engage with us, we don’t always listen. Paul Weller’s father told him he was an idiot to disband The Jam at the height of his fame. Rob Stewart advised his son, Rod, (pictured together above) to: ‘Keep it in your trousers!’

At other times, our fathers don’t listen to us. When the Happy Mondays’ frontman Shaun Ryder shouted at his roadie dad to fix the monitors during a gig, his dad strode on stage and punched him in the face.

Elsewhere, booze and drugs leave a more traumatic legacy. Ian Dury’s daughter recalls the New Year’s Eve on which her dad invited her out with him. The teenager dressed up in her best frock only to find there was no party. He just wanted to score some marijuana from her.

Desperately seeking his approval, she was proud to have some and pathetically grateful that he didn’t embarrass her over its poor quality.

Many of Kessler’s contributors are writing after their fathers have died. Some waited decades for apologies that never came. Others had tender, doting fathers snatched away too soon. Many feel the big questions are left unanswered and it’s the little things that stick: the smell of Brylcreem, a knack for paper folding or the pilfering of other people’s cigarette lighters.

Whatever their qualities, concludes novelist John Niven, our dads run ‘through us, unceasingly, like blood. . . like thoughts.’