Over a Starbucks coffee in a suite at the Langham hotel in London, Rod Stewart is describing his latest travails.
“I’m moving house and you know what that’s like,” sighs Stewart, referring to the 18th-century Essex mansion he bought in 2013 but which has, with the Stewart clan busy filling up houses in Palm Beach, Beverly Hills and France, remained empty until now. “We’ve moved out, the builders have moved in, and it’s chaos. Apart from that” — he breaks out the smile that has worked its magic on leggy blondes since the mid-Sixties — “everything is marvellous.”
In fact, I don’t know what it’s like to move into a £5 million country pile. I certainly don’t know what it’s like to have a model railway bigger than a tennis court in your Beverly Hills home, or to have a separate hotel room for your model trains when you go on tour, as lifelong railway enthusiast Stewart does. But Stewart has the common touch. He’s a guy you can imagine going to the pub with, even as he lives the rock-star life.
“It all depends on what you call the rock-star life,” says Stewart, 70, whose last tour alone netted £20 million. “I live in a big house and I have nice cars, but I like to think I’m still pretty grounded.”
For a while, it looked like Stewart was slipping into the retirement-friendly life of the crooner. In 2002 he gave up the challenge of writing songs to record albums of standards from the Great American Songbook. It was a creative trough for the writer of Maggie May and You Wear It Well, reaching a nadir with 2012’s peerlessly cheesy Merry Christmas Baby, but a commercial triumph nonetheless with 30 million albums sold.
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Now Stewart has returned to songwriting. After 2013’s Time he has just completed Another Country, which covers familiar Rod subjects — the value of family, romantic nights in, the joys of getting drunk — with the touches of Gaelic folk, emotional pop and reggae-tinged yacht rock you might expect of him, but this time informed by the wisdom of age.
“Confidence, that’s all it is,” says Stewart, who still has his blond mane, and who has eschewed the fleece-cardigan combination popular with British men of his age for a white shirt and a leather jacket. “In the old days songwriting was not something I was running towards because there was too much shagging and drinking to do, which is why You Wear It Well took me three years to write. When Ron [Wood, Stewart’s great friend in the Jeff Beck Group and the Faces] and I would try and write songs at his mum’s house, we’d sit there with a blank page and look at each other. Then the wine would come out. Then we’d fall down on the floor drunk and that would be the end of the day.”
Through the alcoholic haze of the Faces Stewart and Wood did manage to concoct Stay With Me, a rambunctious ode to a one-night stand with a girl called Rita, who is told not to tell the singer she loves him because he’ll “only kick you out of the door”. Another Country features Please, which covers the same subject in a rather more chivalrous way.
“Please is a pulling song for the 60-year-old,” says Stewart. “Stay With Me is devil-may-care and Please is the grown-up version. This time I won’t kick you out of bed. Now I’ll cook you breakfast, take care of you . . .” He mimes sticking a finger down his throat.
Rather than a Bob Dylan-like unknowable figure of mercurial talent and tortured genius, Stewart seems like a regular guy who got lucky. “Lucky, lucky, lucky,” he says at the suggestion, a little wearily. “Of course there’s a lot of luck involved. God gave me this voice, I worked on it and worked on it and took it as far as I possibly could. I do have my down days, I’m not always 100 per cent happy and we’re not put on this earth to be happy all the time, but it’s a position of honour to get up and sing for people and be paid for it. I take it very seriously. Well, not that seriously.”
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Stewart’s first concerted effort to make the most of the rise in his fortunes, which began in 1965 when he joined Long John Baldry and Julie Driscoll in a soul revue called Steampacket, was to buy a Triumph Spitfire. “I got it to pull the birds but it was falling apart, so to make the inside look deluxe I cut up an old fur coat and made it into rugs on the floor. It worked, too. I did OK from then on.”
Then there is the hair. “It started when I was a long-haired beatnik on Brighton beach,” says Stewart on the evolution of a modern icon in men’s grooming. “There followed a mod period, when I was knocking about the Duke Of York on Goodge Street and there were guys with a bouffant look: high hair and short jackets. I copied them, it progressed over the years, and it got absolutely massive around ’72, ’73. Thankfully, it’s still up there.”
Stewart defines a difference between his career as a singer and the modern approach: he never did it for wealth and fame. Not entirely, at least.
“I was totally unknown before Maggie May came out in 1971 and there lies the difference,” says Stewart. “I was earning £35 a week with Steampacket, and it felt like a lot because I was being paid to do what I wanted to do. Now fame comes first. Ronnie [Wood] said he felt sorry for X Factor kids and I agree with him, because they get kicked off and have to start all over again. And they don’t get paid much, do they? Simon Cowell nicks it all.”
When Maggie May did break, its story inspired by Stewart losing his virginity to an older woman in 1961, “old enough that she was highly disappointed by the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it brevity of the experience”, it changed everything. It turned Stewart into a bona fide megastar, complete with a pin-up girlfriend in the form of Bond girl and Swedish sex symbol Britt Ekland.
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“Maggie May hit and, much to my anger, it became Rod Stewart and the Faces, which caused friction,” he explains. “At the same time I had signed a deal with Mercury Records to make solo records, but I swear to God, I would have stayed with that band as long as they wanted me. It was a fellowship in the deepest sense of the word.”
The Faces’ late keyboard player Ian McLagan thought otherwise, claiming Stewart tried to scupper the fortunes of the Faces once his own career took off. Perhaps Ekland had something to do with it. I tell Stewart how Ronnie Wood told me in an interview that troubles start for a band when there are girlfriends in the dressing room, whispering in their boyfriends’ ears.
“Britt was that woman in the dressing room,” Stewart confirms. “Have you seen Still Crazy [the 1998 film about a rock band who get back together after 20 years apart]? I’m sure they based the Swedish woman in that film on Britt. The girlfriend in Spinal Tap [astrology-loving Jeanine Pettibone] too. But you can’t beat the camaraderie of five guys on the road together. Every day was hilarious.”
In 1975 Stewart, as the music papers put it with more than a touch of disdain at the time, went Hollywood. “Yes, I went to Hollywood and I was shagging a very famous film star,” he confirms. “What 28-year-old wouldn’t have done the same?”
How come he has been such a big hit with the girls? “When I was younger a sense of humour helped me get between the sheets. Now it’s compassion, understanding and communication, in that order. The main thing is seeing a person there.”
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As all rock stars who stay alive tend to do, Stewart has mellowed. In 2000 he was diagnosed with thyroid cancer, although he underplays it. “I did not have a big fight with cancer. I didn’t battle it bravely. I was diagnosed on Thursday, had the operation on Friday, and was out by Sunday. The problem was the next six months of not knowing whether I could ever sing again or not.”
The only centrefolds Stewart sneaks into his hotel room these days are the ones found in the pages of Model Railroader magazine. He says he has a good relationship with his two ex-wives and all eight of his children, who span the ages of four to 52. And he spends much of his time with the two boys, Alastair, ten, and Aiden, four, he has with his third wife, the model Penny Lancaster.
“Alastair is a great athlete, plays rugby, good footballer,” says Stewart, “but he’s getting a bit mouthy with his mother. Yesterday he got Fifa 16 [a football video game] and he asked Penny to get it working. She plugged it in and blew the whole bloody thing up, the sound system and everything. That’s unforgiveable, apparently. If she hadn’t tried, it would have been OK, but because she did and blew up the house in the process she’s in trouble now. The mums always get it, don’t they?”
Our time is up. Stewart has spent the last hour describing what sounds for the most part like a charmed life, which recently involved hanging out with the rapper A$AP Rocky in Los Angeles after he sampled the 1970 single In a Broken Dream by Python Lee Jackson, for which Stewart was hired as a session singer. Still, he’s not averse to the odd age-appropriate grumble.
“When I was a kid, music was like secret knowledge,” says Stewart. “I’d find a Howlin’ Wolf record, put the needle down, and think, wow, this is another world. Now anyone can hear anything and it’s become disposable. There are so many television series, so much music out there, I end up thinking f*** it, I won’t do anything.”
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Then, on a note that will please readers of Model Railroader, a magazine to which Stewart subscribes, he concludes: “I’d rather play with me trains.”
Another Country by Rod Stewart (Capitol) is out on Oct 30