by Rod Stewart
So, I was dedicated to the Scottish national side from very early on. But affiliation to a particular club came much later. I had an attachment to Manchester United in the 1970s – but that was because they had so many great Scottish players in that period, including Denis Law, who was my first professional football hero. It was in imitation of Law that I would take to the pitch myself in a shirt with the sleeves pulled right down and the cuffs grasped with the fingers. I still do it.
There was a Faces show at Manchester Free Trade Hall in 1973 during which Law, his United team-mate Paddy Crerand, and Mike Summerbee of Manchester City, came on stage and presented the band with a gold disc. Directly after that, Denis’s agent invited me to watch United play Leeds at Old Trafford, a fractious match in which Denis received a serious kicking and Billy Bremner of Leeds got sent off. Denis was eventually substituted, at which point his agent nudged me and said, ‘Let’s go and see him.’
So, with the match still going on, we went down the back stairs and along the corridors into the United dressing room, tapped on the door and walked in. And there was Denis, completely naked, chatting amicably to Bremner, who was smoking a cigarette. I was enormously excited about it all when I joined up with the band again later that day. ‘You’ll never guess what I saw this afternoon: Denis Law’s pump and tool bag.’
When I did eventually click with a team, it was Celtic. And, again, it all came out of being in the Faces. Kenny Dalglish, Jimmy ‘Jinky’ Johnstone, ‘Dixie’ Deans and George McCluskey – all Celtic players – came to a gig in Glasgow in 1974 and Kenny, who became a friend, said afterwards, ‘Do you want to come to training tomorrow?’
In those days, Celtic used to train at the stadium, so the next morning I drove out to Parkhead, in the tough East End of Glasgow, to watch. And there, beside the pitch, in a thick, zipped-up tracksuit was the manager, Jock Stein – seemingly carved from granite, one of the most magnificent football managers who ever lived and a truly intimidating presence. As Kenny introduced me, and I nervously held out my hand, I noticed Stein looking with amused contempt at my feet. I was wearing a highly foppish pair of white shoes. Poor wardrobe choice for the occasion.
Still, once you had met Jock Stein, you were a Celtic supporter. And once you had seen Jinky Johnstone, you were a Celtic supporter forever. Jinky was the greatest player to wear the hooped shirt, a wee man who ran big defenders ragged and put them on their backsides, and I consider myself privileged to have known him. He could sing, as well. In 2004, Jimmy recorded a version of Ewan MacColl’s ‘Dirty Old Town’ – something he and I had in common. In 2006, two weeks before motor neurone disease took his life at the age of sixty-one, I dropped in to see Jimmy at his house outside Glasgow. We knew how ill he was at that point, so my brothers, Bob and Don, and my friends Big Al and Al the Tout, waited outside in the car. Jimmy’s wife, Agnes, showed me through to the room where Jimmy was laid out flat on a bed, cruelly reduced by his illness at this point – and yet with the biggest smile on his face to see me. He called straight away for a bottle of champagne. And then through the window he noticed the car.
‘Who’s out there?’ he said.
I said, ‘My brothers and a couple of pals.’
He said, ‘Well, what are they doing out there? Bring ’em in.’
The life that was still in the man, even then. And I had spent the morning complaining of a cold. Some people humble you for ever.
Music and touring dominated my life for the 1970s and beyond, and I wasn’t in a position to start going to watch Celtic regularly until the late 1980s. Shortly after that, there nearly wasn’t a club to support. Celtic got into financial difficulties, culminating in 1994 when the business was within five hours of being liquidated. Enter, blessedly, Fergus McCann, a Scottish-born Canadian entrepreneur, who injected money and built a new ground on the site of the club’s battered old home, Parkhead. I was invited to make the ceremonial declaration at the opening of the North Stand and McCann gave me the honour of a seat at Celtic Park for life: the very best kind of lifetime award.
My attachment grew still firmer in the club’s four years under the management of Gordon Strachan. One of the great gritty Scots players in his own time, Strach used to bring his battered legs to play football on the pitch at my current home at Epping in our over-forties games, and Penny and I became good friends with him and his wife, Lesley. I inevitably became very excited in 2005 when Strach told me he might be up for the job of taking over Celtic after Martin O’Neill left. When Strach came down to Epping for a match on the Sunday after his appointment had been announced, he found me on my knees on the path, bowing to him.
One morning in July 2005, Strach phoned me and said, ‘Is your pitch ready?’
I said, ‘Well, it’s cut. It may not be marked out. Why?’
Strach said, ‘I want to bring the lads down for training.’
I said, ‘Which lads?’
He said, ‘Celtic, of course.’
I almost fell over. They were playing Fulham in a pre-season friendly. All the local clubs were already using their own facilities. The last time Celtic had been in London, they had ended up using a municipal pitch for training, and found it covered in dog shit.
Strach said, ‘I thought it might be a nice buzz for the lads to come to your place.’
A buzz for them? A bigger buzz for me, more likely.
The day before they came, the gardeners worked on the pitch until after sundown, making it perfect. Next morning, two huge luxury coaches came rolling through the gates and around the drive and came to a halt with a hiss. One brought the players, the other brought the coaching staff and the gear and the food which they would later eat, sat around the pool. Around my pool!
I watched them arrive from an upstairs window, hidden by a curtain – watched them step off the bus, one by one: Aiden McGeady, Bobo Baldé, Kenny Miller, Neil Lennon, Artur Boruc, Gary Caldwell . . . the players from my team, on my drive. I had gone all shaky, like a teenage girl with a crush. I didn’t want to come out of the house, didn’t even want to meet them.
It took my wife to get my act together. Once they had changed in my tiny dressing room (now relocated and enlarged) and gone down to the pitch, I followed them with Penny, who was heavily pregnant with Alastair, our first-born. We shook some hands and stood on the touchline. The staff had put out cones and the players were playing a game of one-touch, at amazing speed it seemed to me – and on my pitch, which had never looked so beautiful. Gordon had told the team there was to be no swearing, but something went wrong for McGeady, who shouted ‘Fuck!’, then immediately turned to Penny: ‘Sorry, ma’am.’ Good as gold.
Who else in the world has had his favourite football team train in his garden? What kind of schoolboy dream is that?
Here’s an old joke: a wife says to her husband, ‘Sometimes I think you love the Celtic more than you love me.’ The husband says, ‘Dear, I love the Rangers more than I love you.’ For how much longer, though, will cracks like that be funny, or even possible? Rangers, Celtic’s fierce cross-city rivals, went into liquidation in 2012 and now play in Scotland’s lowest professional league. I was trying to explain to my young son Alastair – who seems to have caught the Celtic bug from somewhere – that there wouldn’t be any Old Firm derbies for the time being and he was genuinely saddened. I feel for the Rangers fans, especially the young ones. But there is loss for supporters on both sides of the divide: a century and a quarter of fervent, life-enhancing rivalry thrown into jeopardy. And Scottish football in general is such a frail and impoverished thing by comparison with the English version. At a match in 2008, I found myself sitting next to the Dundee United chairman Eddie Thompson, a lovely man who, sadly, has since passed away, and who once sent me a recipe, written in his own hand, for the club’s meat pies. I asked Eddie how much Dundee hoped to profit by finishing fourth in the league at the end of the season. He said, ‘One hundred and sixty-five thousand pounds.’ Al the Tout immediately said, ‘That’s Frank Lampard’s w
ages for a week.’
All you can do, though, is fly the flag and keep it flying. If I’m in England and Celtic are at home, we’ll take the plane up: me, Big Al, Al the Tout, and Ricky Simpson, if he’s around. We’ll go to Rogano in the middle of Glasgow and order the cod and chips. Then we’ll drive out east to the ground, see the streets grow busier the closer we get, see the green-and-white hooped shirts thickening in number. And then we’ll pass the big brooding bronze statue of Jock Stein holding the European Cup and head inside. I sometimes think I would go for the singing alone: the passionate, inventive, non-stop chanting of the Green Brigade, those great terrace originals who create the songs the rest of the world sings. My seat for life is in the directors’ box, with a brass plate bearing my name, next to one for Billy Connolly. In front of me and just to the right sits Billy McNeill and, alongside him, Bertie Auld – two of the legendary ‘Lisbon Lions’ side of 1967 – and to sit there, as a fan, and be in the presence of the club’s history in that way is an immense privilege and makes me a very happy man.
I was a Lisbon Lion myself once, you know. OK, only in a charity match in 1994. Still, what a thrill, to sit in a dressing room alongside Billy McNeill and Ronnie Simpson and John Clark and be told by Bertie Auld, in full Scots brogue, before we ran out, ‘Rod, ah want ma passes crusp.’ (Translation: ‘Rod, I want my passes delivered crisply.’) Our opponents were a Celtic XI, and Lou Macari, with no love lost, kicked me right up in the air from behind. I still owe him for that.
Even when I can’t go, I’m still watching. In January 2012, I had to fly from London to Jakarta for a show. But I was hardly going to miss the Scottish League Cup semi-final against Falkirk, was I? So I went online and found a Celtic Supporters Club, the SingTims, in Singapore, and I arranged to break the journey there. And thus I found myself, approaching midnight, packed into a tiny bar, the best part of 7,000 miles from Glasgow, surrounded by Scots, all wearing their hooped shirts, and all shouting and singing at the television set, the picture on which kept freezing because it was being downloaded from the Internet.
Celtic, incidentally, won 3–1, with two goals from Anthony Stokes and a penalty by the captain, Scott Brown. Not that we saw any of them. The television chose those moments to freeze.
It’s all-consuming and, by any logical analysis, mad, and it has the power to change my mood, for better and worse, and I spend too much time thinking about it and I attach far too much importance to it. But what can you do? It’s football. One time, at 4 a.m. in Vancouver, Canada, I was heading to a bar where I knew I would be able to watch the broadcast of a lunchtime kick-off, and the sun was just coming up, and I saw this bloke on his bicycle, with his cycle clips on, in his hooped Celtic shirt, pedalling determinedly through the empty streets, on his way to the game. And I thought, ‘Me and you both, pal.’
Come on, you bhoys in green.
CHAPTER 10
In which our hero commences an affair with a wing commander’s daughter, acquires a stupidly large house and falls into fellowship with Elton John.
IN JULY 1971, the record company throws a party for the Faces at a nightclub called Bumbles in Los Angeles. It’s the usual scene: loud music, a foaming ocean of free drink, a number of record company types in various stages of nervousness and inebriation, and a horde of women in luscious night attire who are here with the sole aim of flinging themselves at the band, which they duly do with cheerful immodesty.
In these circumstances, I am learning, it is impossible, as a member of the group, to maintain a position in the middle of the room. You can start out there and cling on to the carpet with your toes as hard as you like, but you will eventually be forced outwards by the waves of people coming at you, until you are backed up against the wall, literally peeling people – mostly women – off yourself. That said, on this occasion I can hardly be accused of hiding from the attention: I have chosen for the night a white velvet suit bright enough to light up an ice hockey arena.
The girl I eventually notice, however, through the throng, is not flinging herself at me, nor pressing me up against the furniture while barking into my ear a startlingly frank proposal regarding the rest of the evening. On the contrary, she is sitting at a table to one side, in a blue and white dress and a pair of clogs. And she is observing the scene, including my suit, with an air of detached bemusement. I introduce myself – and the introduction is necessary because Dee Harrington from England is here with a friend and is no particular fan of the Faces, or indeed of rock music in general, and has very little idea who I am. She prefers soul music, as it turns out, but then soul is a passion of mine, too, so that’s a point of connection straight away. When Aretha Franklin’s ‘Spanish Harlem’ comes on, I ask her to dance. Then we sit down and talk some more. And then we leave the club and live together for four years.
Instant mutual attraction. Immediate comfort in another person’s company. It’s hard to unpack the chemistry of these things, but there it was, plain enough. Dee was twenty-one years old, a well-brought-up, southern counties English girl, the daughter of a Royal Air Force pilot – Wing Commander Harrington, no less. She had been a secretary at a record company in London and was in LA looking for work and not quite finding it. And she was attractive in that appealing way that seems not to know exactly how attractive. A few days before I met her she had been sitting in reception at a photography studio, waiting for a friend of hers who was a model to come out, and a photographer had walked past and offered her a Playboy shoot on the spot. She had a plan to save some money, maybe move on to Japan. She ended up with me instead.
The urge to be alone, just the two of us – that was instant, too. We left the party and walked and talked, not really knowing where we were. A police car pulled up and checked us over at one point – were we all right? Nobody really walked around like this in LA. We were fine; never better. Eventually we found Sunset Boulevard and the Whisky a Go Go club, but we couldn’t get in because Dee didn’t look twenty-one and had nothing with her to prove that she was. So we walked back to the Beverly Hills Hotel, where the band was billeted, and Dee said she couldn’t stay because that just wasn’t the kind of thing she did – just hook up with some rock singer in a night club and go back to his room . . . but maybe she could if we just slept. So we did.
But not before I had produced from my bag, for her approval, the model I carried with me of a Lamborghini Miura. ‘This is the car I’ve got back in England,’ I said. Am I the only person to have attempted to seduce a woman with a toy sports car? She said, ‘Oh yeah, I’ve been in one of those.’ She hadn’t, though. She was just determined not to seem even slightly impressed.
The next day she came to see the Faces in Long Beach, travelling in the limo with me and through the back door and up to the side of the stage just before the show, so that when the lights went on she saw the crowd for the first time, this sea of people, and realised something about the scale of this thing. And backstage afterwards we got separated – at opposite ends of a long, packed corridor, me semaphoring madly to security to bring her through the press of groupies and hangers-on. Her second glimpse of the madness, which she never liked, or wanted any part of, although for a long time that didn’t matter because our relationship took place in total and blissful isolation from it.
Back in London, I rang her and arranged a date at a pub in Lancaster Gate, where I pulled up outside in the yellow Lamborghini, to demonstrate that I hadn’t made it all up. (And I think she secretly rather liked it: the two-seater aspect of it, the fact it went fast and that everybody looked at it. And why not? We were young and that kind of thing was compelling.) Within three months I had proposed to her, in a hotel in New York, slightly surprising her with the speed of the offer, and also perhaps the ‘squareness’ of it, because getting hitched wasn’t exactly a hip thing to be doing in those days – at least, she certainly didn’t think so. (And, indeed, we never did get round to the wedding bit – just drifted along in a state of engagement.) And within three months of that, w
e would be shacked up in a rambling mansion in the English countryside.
Quite suddenly, and for the first time in my life, I had a lot of money coming in – an awful lot of money, to the point where my accountant was telling me to spend more. Specifically, he was telling me that it might be a smart idea to get rid of £100,000 or so on a property of some kind, to avoid having to pay the same sum in tax.
Well, if he absolutely insisted . . .
Except that, in 1971, finding a property that was worth as much as £100,000, and which wasn’t Buckingham Palace or the Houses of Parliament, was quite a challenge. As close as I could get to the target was £89,000: the price on a stucco-faced Georgian mansion named Cranbourne Court, near one of the Queen’s other places at Windsor, in the countryside not far west of London. Apparently Bob Hope had lived in this house at one time, which I rather liked the thought of, and also, while it was the home of an antique dealer, Sophia Loren used to drop by on browsing expeditions.
Its owner, Lord Bethell, however, was an English aristocrat fallen on hard times. As he showed Dee and me over the property one afternoon, Dee nudged me and pointed out quietly that his trousers had worn so thin that you could make out his striped underpants through the material. If His Lordship had any dark feelings about flogging off the family heritage to some nouveau riche, long-haired rock star and his blonde bird, he didn’t share them. He was probably simply relieved that he had found a buyer.
So, on 1 January 1972, just six months after first meeting, Dee and I moved out of my four-bedroom mock-Tudor house in Winchmore Hill and into a gigantic country pile with stone eagles on the pillars at the gateway, a sweeping drive through rhododendron bushes masking about seventeen acres of assorted gardens and paddocks, and with an entrance hall with a forty-foot ceiling and a giant staircase climbing out of it. I was very proud when I first showed it all to my mum, but she looked worried more than anything else.