The former ladies man on turning his roving eye to fine art
Ahead of his 30th album, Rod Stewart tells Craig Mclean about loving the Pre-raphaelites, eating well and being mocked by his offspring
Sir Rod Stewart, still damp from the shower, sits under a tree in the grounds of his Essex mansion, next to his floodlit five-a-side pitch and within cooing distance of his blood-red Ferrari. Life is good for the 73-year-old: a new album, another tour, an imminent trip to Glasgow for a night of football, food and fine wine.
As he sips his afternoon tea, our conversation naturally turns to sex. Despite not having played the field for a long time, Stewart will forever be known as one of rock’s consummate ladies’ men. As he once put it: “There was a period in my life where it was a bit ‘one in, one out’.”
Stewart, who first found fame in the Seventies with R&B group The Faces, is now a septuagenarian father of eight children by four women, including two sons aged seven and 12 with his wife Penny Lancaster. In his heyday, he tells me, “It wasn’t difficult for us in The Faces to have women about. But I can’t remember ever pushing myself on someone. I used to enjoy the chase… the hunt… the romance of it all… and then,” he grins in his endlessly matey throaty rasp, “the shag.”
We’ve been discussing the opening track on Blood Red Roses, Stewart’s rollicking new album – his 30th. Called
Look In Her Eyes, it sees this former “a-------” (his word) offering cautionary advice to men coming of age in the #Metoo era, “the younger generation of blokes queuing up outside the club”. Does he think it’s more difficult to be a young man today?
“Well, there are no written rules or regulations, it’s just common decency,” he begins. “That’s what Look
In Her Eyes is all about. They have one bevy and try get it on straight away. It just doesn’t work like that.
“Yeah, I imagine it may be difficult for guys now, but it’s hard for me to comment on that one. I know that my two sons, who are wonderfully heterosexual, do enjoy the company of women a little bit more than they do men now.” (Presumably he’s referring to his eldest boys Sean, 38 and Liam, 24, rather than the youngsters Alastair and Aiden. But who knows?) “And my daughters have male friends they don’t have sex with,” Stewart ploughs on, “and my sons have female friends they don’t have sex with. Never happened in my day, oh-ho no!” He chuckles lasciviously. “Oh never never never… If it was a girl, it was… shaggable.”
Here Stewart sounds like the wonderfully heterosexual love child of Harry H Corbett and/or Sid James. As such he can come across as a charming relic of a bygone era, unapologetic about enjoying the good times.
He’s upfront and up for it, too, ready to acknowledge past misdeeds (mainly a fondness for, shall we say, blondehopping) as readily as the triumphs. He’s a cheerful open book, which is as infectious as it is disarming. It’s a beautiful early autumn day in this luxe corner of London’s commuter belt, and the house is busy. An employee is setting up a microphone and speaker in the capacious gym, which is festooned with 50 years’ worth of Celtic memorabilia.
Team Rod are finessing this weekend’s travel to Bucharest, for another long-range warm-up concert ahead of a typically busy 2019 of arena and stadium shows, not to mention another run of his on/off Las Vegas residency. Stewart and his 12-piece band – “Six gorgeous women – three beautiful blondes – they’re all fabulous musicians. But they are gorgeous, too. And six guys” – will perform in front of some 80,000 Romanians. Stewart decides they should fly the day before because “we lose three hours” on the flight, which isn’t good for the voice on a show day.
Fresh from one of his thrice-weekly workouts (“I’m somewhat obsessed”), he wears black velvet slippers with silver piping, thin black jeans and a flouncy white shirt. It’s open to the tanned sternum, displaying a range of glittering medallions and necklaces, one spelling out the word “Celtic”. The damp hair, if not quite at peak cockatoo, is almost there. Cockatiel, let’s say. Stewart occasionally takes his boys on tour, but they’re now back at school and subject to dad’s rules.
“Do your boys watch [sic] Fortnite?” he asks me of the computer game scourge of the Western world. “Oh my God! Headphones on, shouting, terrible! We’ve now decided we’re gonna cut all communications off, cut the Wi-fi at nine o’clock. We’ve got to, otherwise I feel like I’m losing my sons.
“But I make sure I get ’em out here every night, even in winter, there’s snow on the pitch, I make ’em clear it off round the penalty area. Get ’em out every night, we’ve got the floodlights.” Are they impressed by his fame? “Yeah, yeah, they are. Aiden, one time I was away, I was speaking to him on the phone. ‘You OK, son?’ ‘Yeah, dad, fine.’ ‘Can I talk to mum?’ ‘Yeah, OK… MUM! ROD STEWART’S ON THE PHONE!’ Brilliant,” he grins with a clap of his hands.
Rod Stewart has sold over 200million records and is worth £160million. His last tour was the second highest grossing of 2017, just after Bruce Springsteen’s. Stephen Hawking named his version of Have I Told You Lately as his favourite song of all time. You could say he’s earned the right to be difficult, or guarded. Yet he radiates a boyish enthusiasm, and is full of couldn’t-givea-monkey’s candour and bonhomie.
Everyone in his orbit gets a gleeful ribbing: his sons, himself, his peers. Has he, for example, apologised yet to his apparently peeved old pal Elton John, with whom he’s been playfully jousting since the Seventies? Stewart called his recently launched goodbye tour “dishonest”, saying it “stinks of selling tickets”.
“OK, let me throw it right back at you,” he replies. “What was your first thought?”
Well, more than 300 shows over two years – it might be the longest farewell in music history…
“Yeah! And he hasn’t actually said it’s a farewell yet! He said: ‘Well, I might still do the odd show here and there…’ But, no, he’s really got the hump with me. ’Cause when he did announce it, I sent him a text: ‘What, again dear?’ And I got nothing back! Tumbleweed!” Stewart cackles. “Penny says I’ve got to phone him up. I will. I will get round to it.
“He’s got two kids so I can understand why he wants to pack it in,” Stewart continues. “’Cause he’s always worked harder than me. Wow, does he work hard. Really does. But he only sings for 30 minutes,” he says with another playful poke at the singer he calls Sharon (and who calls him Phyllis in return).
Stewart keeps up his own stamina up with clean living. He’s never smoked anything in his life, he says, “but I’ve done cocaine. We all know that. The difference is, in the old days, the cocaine was amazing.”
Today he eats healthily “most of the time. All I’ve had to today is cornflakes, because I’ve been so busy. But I like fasting. Not the whole day, ’cause I’m gonna have dinner tonight, but it won’t be a heavy dinner.
“But I do like a drink. That is my downfall. I drink three glasses of wine per day, every day. Not big ones, only little tiny ones. But I cannot have a decent meal and have a glass of water. I just can’t do it, mate.”
His routine is to have two glasses of white, then one red. But the key to his good health is no gluten, which means no beer. “Trust me: get rid of the beer, and start eating gluten-free bread,” he advises. “F---, it don’t half make a difference to that bloated feeling. Are you married? Tell the missus to get gluten-free bread just for you.”
Filing a mental note to make my other half customise the weekly shop (and have my dinner on the table when I get back from Essex), I ask Stewart about his recent clear-out of antiques from his house. Well, of some of his antiques from one of his four houses (here, south of France, Beverly Hills and Florida, “down the road from Donald Trump”). The auction raised £90,000 for charity, more than double the estimate, and this self-diagnosed “hoarder” says none of it was hard to part with. What, not even the frankly hideous “gold painted spelter figure” of a banjo player that sold for £2,900?
“Oh that? I’ve had that since the late Seventies. F--- knows where I got that from. Are you kidding, I can’t remember! I’ve got three houses full of antiques.”
And there’s plenty of good stuff left. Stewart collects everything from Roman busts and model trains to Regency furniture, and once said that he’d “give anything” to work at Sotheby’s. His favourite way to unwind is to read auction catalogues in bed. Does he have a good eye for the inanimate as well as the animate?
“I think I have. I’ve been collecting paintings since the early Seventies. I’ve always collected Pre-raphaelite stuff, and it’s gone up and up and up in price. But I don’t collect it for that reason. I just adore it. I put it on the walls, look at it and go: ‘That painting – that’s what I’ve worked for.’”
And with that, Rod Stewart jumps out of his chair. He wants to show me a video on his laptop: footage of his hand-built model railway set, which he completed in the loft of his Beverly Hills home last year. It only took him 23 years. “That was a big part of my life. That’s probably why I’ve returned to songwriting, the more I think of it,” he says, looking at train set. “There’s a big void where that used to be.”
I collect Pre-raphaelite stuff because I just adore it. I look at it and go: ‘That’s what I’ve worked for’
‘Elton’s always worked harder than me. Wow, does he work hard. But he only sings for 30 minutes’