Rod sticks to the oldies (and 20,000 oldies sing along!)
This ought to be absurd. A 77-yearold man in a zebra-print jacket is pretending to be a teenager in love with an older woman. ‘It’s late September,’ he warbles, ‘and I really should be back at school.’ Thankfully there’s a knowing smile on Rod Stewart’s face as he sings Maggie May, the song that made him a superstar in 1971. Soon he’s joined by about 20,000 backing vocalists, mostly women much older than Maggie. It’s a touching moment that transforms the evening.
For 40 minutes it had all been rather tepid. The design was an expensive mess and Rod’s band kept switching from Celtic folk to 1980s synth-rock – not the subtle kind that is back in fashion now, but its blowhard sibling.
They had opened with Addicted To Love, by the late Robert
Palmer. Stewart channelled him with some success on Some Guys Have All The Luck, but here he offered only a limp photocopy. Its purpose seemed to be to recreate the famous video with a male singer surrounded by glamorous women – as if Rod needs an excuse for that.
‘We’ll be here for two hours,’ he tells a packed O2, ‘24 songs, four costume changes…’ He sounds like a student who has been told to start his essay by saying what he’s going to say.
The costume changes may be a ploy to give him a breather. Three years on from his last British tour, Rod is almost looking his age. His cheeks are leaner, bringing a resemblance to his old mate Ron Wood (a pair of lived-in Faces). Fans have been hoping for a reunion for ages, but they might not be so keen if they heard Rod’s vanilla version of Ooh La La.
Looking his age is one thing, acting it another. He says he no longer kicks footballs into the crowd ‘as I can’t get the insurance’ – then kicks one anyway. His voice, while naturally fading, retains its signature blend of the rough and the smooth. And he lets his gifted backing singers do two tracks without him, one of them a rip-roaring Lady Marmalade.
Rod is a crowd-pleaser, quite prepared to ignore his latest album (a dud) plus everything else he has recorded since 1988. And it works. The greatest hits do their stuff, from a dignified Sailing to a deliciously cheesy Da Ya Think I’m Sexy? Rod, like his hair, has managed to defy gravity.
Four nights earlier, at the same address, Florence Welch gave a masterclass. Promoting her fine album Dance Fever, she dresses up (a ruffled ballgown) and also down (bare feet). Statuesque one minute, dynamic the next, she’s halfway from a pre-Raphaelite portrait to a personal trainer.
After singing effortlessly for an hour, she goes off for treatment on her foot, saying there’s blood on stage. She soon reappears, announces ‘No broken bones’, and races around the stalls. The next day it emerges that her foot is indeed broken. The tour is now on hold, but it will be worth the wait.
On Friday, Stormzy released his third album. He’s too grand now to let critics listen in advance, as everyone from Paul McCartney to Adele does, so I’ve heard it only twice. But it makes a strong first and second impression.
There’s less rap, more soul, and more heart. Lockdown, which made Florence long to dance, led Stormzy to stop and think. He shuts up about his career and ponders his bruising break-up with Maya Jama. ‘We didn’t even grow apart,’ he murmurs. ‘We fell apart, that’s the saddest part.’
At 29, Stormzy is slowing down and growing up. He’s even growing out of showing off, happy to let others do the talking for him, from his pal Sampha to a beautifully sombre pianist. This album may well be his best.