Rod: The Autobiography

by Rod Stewart

  ‘Ooh, Roddy, how much did all this cost?’

  ‘You don’t wanna know, Mum.’

  But then I don’t think she or my dad ever really got their heads around how much money I was earning. In fact, many years later I would ask my mum what she wanted for Christmas.

  ‘Go on,’ I said. ‘Let me treat you to something.’

  After a lot of thought, she said she wanted a new bread bin.

  The problem wasn’t going to be paying for Cranbourne Court – the problem was going to be filling it. When it was unpacked, the furniture from the old house took up less than one room in the new one, which left thirty-five more rooms in need of furnishing. Decorating the house was to become the project of the next two and a half years, the main thing to which Dee and I devoted our time.

  We found a chandelier the size of a Morris Minor to hang in the hall. We hunted down leather Chesterfields and velvet sofas in antiques shops in the King’s Road. We bought eight tall wicker butterfly-backed chairs to go around the dining table. My brother Bob, who was a carpenter, came to help sort a few things out and was still there two years later.

  We set aside two of the bedrooms for my model railroad, knocking a pair of holes in the partition wall so that the lines could run from room to room. The coach house was pulled down to make room for a tennis court. I decorated the billiard room with pictures of Denis Law. I had an indoor swimming pool added on, converted the dingy old staff kitchen into something a bit more welcoming, and stuck in a Wurlitzer jukebox so we could listen to music while we ate. I made sure Aretha’s ‘Spanish Harlem’ was on there. It was our theme song.

  The kitchen was where we hung out mostly. Dee cooked for us, standing at the counter, frequently in a tartan miniskirt, working up some extremely serious brunches: sausage, bacon, black pudding, beans and mushrooms. Or on Sunday mornings, while I was up in north London playing football and dropping in on my parents, she would make a Sunday roast, and start serving up when she heard the sound of the Lamborghini’s engine as I came off the roundabout at the bottom of the drive.

  We had a cat called Pussy Galore, two collie dogs, an Alsatian (Carlo, named in honour of the house’s Sophia Loren connection, after Loren’s husband, Carlo Ponti) and a lorikeet, who liked Dee but hated me with a passion – mostly, perhaps, because when I got fed up with its screeching, I would shove its cage in the larder, turn out the light and shut the door. Outside there were four bullocks, specifically employed to keep the grass down, and a stable-block with three horses, Cheval, Cara Mia and Spotty, who later produced Little Spotty.

  Dee (and definitely not me) rode the horses, I had my trains and we seemed to be sharing a kind of domestic heaven into which the world could not intrude; a blissful place to return to, a refuge we had created from the tomfoolery outside. We threw one proper party the whole time we were there – the night, aforementioned, when Gary Glitter’s wig floated off in the swimming pool. (I believe it was my brother-in-law who pushed him in, but frankly, in those days, if you wanted to push Gary Glitter in a pool you had to join the queue. Gary, incidentally, joined up with the Faces on tour at one point, as a support act in Paris, and got some of the worst dog’s abuse I have ever seen from an audience. Beer cans were bouncing off his chest. But he carried on regardless. Whatever else you want to say about him, he was a trouper.)

  Otherwise we just had people to dinner or for Sunday lunch. John Peel, the Radio 1 DJ, came over one day and Dee served him the full roast with trimmings, which he might have greeted more enthusiastically if he hadn’t been a vegetarian. An artichoke was hastily boiled. It may have been the most miserable lunch he ever ate, but he was very polite about it.

  Drugs, meanwhile, were banned. They had no place in this country idyll. Dee had no interest in them and I was more than a little paranoid about the police coming in and turning the place over, which seemed to be happening with increasing frequency to poor old Keith Richards. So I implemented a leave-them-at-the-door policy. If you turned up with drugs, you were politely but firmly requested to return them to your car for safekeeping.

  But mostly it was just the two of us anyway. With each other’s undivided attention, we could talk for hours about anything on the planet. Dee called it ‘the mansion in the sky’ because it was invisible from the road and nobody knew we were there. And we were very much in love and somehow, in this opulent and madly extravagant setting, very down to earth, ordinary at heart, and almost bohemian in the way we lived, slopping about in jumpers with holes in the elbows, shoes with old bits of ribbon for laces, and a pair of Afghan coats that the dogs liked to pull on, and sharing a solitary pair of pyjamas – her the top, me the bottoms. The old-fashioned English phrases that I liked to use made her laugh: ‘Well, I’ll go to the bottom of our stairs’ (as an expression of surprise); ‘You’re up and down like a pair of trousers, you are’ (when someone can’t sit still). Sometimes we just ran around the place like children, shouting and playing hide-and-seek, the house being the perfect venue for that game, apart from the risk of hiding and never being found. No diamonds, no glamour. Our idea of a night out was to walk down to the local pub, the Crispin, in our slippers: mine granddad-style tartan numbers, hers with pink pom-poms and a wedged heel.

  Cute, wholesome and not destined to last.

  * * *

  The madness, of course, went on in other places. This was a period of extraordinary professional success for me. The years that I was with Dee, from 1971 to 1975, with the success of the Every Picture Tells a Story album, and the big hits with ‘Maggie May’ and ‘You Wear It Well’, and then the Smiler album, were the years of my breakthrough as a singer, my arrival at a whole new level of fame. ‘Maggie May’ was a hit just three months after Dee and I met. After all those years on the periphery, I was suddenly a star and the centre of a lot of attention. I wanted to enjoy it. It would have seemed a bit perverse not to. It was what I had been working for.

  The nightclub Tramp had opened on Jermyn Street, just below Piccadilly in London. It was set in a gorgeous room – like something off an ocean liner – clad with sumptuous wooden panelling and hung with chandeliers. And, most important of all, it was in the building’s basement, which is where a nightclub always ought to be, in my considered opinion. (Going upstairs into a nightclub just feels wrong to me. History is littered with the corpses of clubs that closed because they didn’t take the precaution of locating themselves in a cellar, as God intended.)

  Tramp’s cachet was that it attracted the famous: musicians, footballers, actors and actresses. In those early years, for instance, the chances of running into George Best were extremely high. Indeed, there was a period when he seemed to be as much a part of the place as the wood panelling. We always had time for each other, and also for the waiters, who were mostly Italian and Spanish and wanted to talk about football. The Faces had a couple of parties down there, and it became a port of call for me and remained so for many years.

  Meanwhile, the house Elton John shared with John Reid was just a conveniently short drive from Cranbourne Court, and the parties there were long and legendary. Elton and I had known each other, on and off, since the Long John Baldry days. Bluesology, Elton’s first proper band, played the blues clubs that I frequented in the early 1960s, and Long John joined and became their vocalist after the demise of Steampacket. But it was in the early 1970s that Elton and I drew especially close; the best of mates for a while. Just as Long John had christened me ‘Phyllis’, he had christened Elton ‘Sharon’, and that’s what we were to each other: Phyllis and Sharon. Or just ‘dear’.

  ‘Hello, dear. How are you, dear? Really, dear?’

  I loved his sense of humour, loved the fact that he was the kind of bloke who could see the comedy value in driving thirty times around the roundabout that surrounds the Marble Arch monument in the middle of London. (Sounds bloody stupid now, I suppose, but it was funny at the time.) We had football in common, obviously. And I respected his opinions about music. He had a proper understandi
ng of blues and soul, and if he liked something I had done, it meant a lot to me, coming from him. I quietly envied the way that gigantic-selling popular melodies seemed to come to him in such a constant flow.

  I also had to be in awe of the fact that, whether it was drink or cocaine, he could see me right under the table every time. One night at his house, we were applying ourselves to the medicinal powders and it got to six in the morning, at which point I tendered a short letter of resignation (‘Fuck it, I surrender’) and went upstairs to find a bed to sleep in. Four hours later, Elton woke me by thumping on the door.

  ‘Come on, dear. We’ve got a football match to go to.’

  I looked, and felt, as if I had been run over from a number of different directions by a number of different traction engines. Elton, by contrast, standing in the doorway, was bright of cheek and white of smile, immaculate in a morning suit with a jaunty top hat and holding a gold-tipped walking cane. A night like we had just been through would take me weeks to get over. On Elton it would barely register, and he would be ready four hours later to watch Watford play Sheffield Wednesday.

  But then I was always something of an amateur in this particular arena, and, in truth, not especially concerned to be anything else. When it came to the consumption of drugs, I like to think I took a fairly gentlemanly approach. If it was something to brighten the evening, then fine. But I was never some mad, rampant oblivion-seeker. Total loss of control didn’t really appeal to me. ‘Social use’ would be the technical term, I suppose – though with the proviso that, during certain periods, I was doing a lot of socialising.

  Of course, the Faces drank heavily and proudly, and indeed made an occupation out of it. But even in that context I wasn’t in the habit of taking it to the point where I was legless or face down and comatose. As for drugs, anything that had to be smoked was out of the question because I wanted to protect my voice. And any enthusiasm I might have grown to have for anything psychedelic was terminated by the fate of my aforementioned friend Clive Amore, who, in the sixties, was the first among my group of friends to take acid – and then, in the belief that he could fly, threw himself naked from a top floor window and died. That stuff struck me as a bad idea from then on.

  Also, to be perfectly frank, on any given night out, I was likely to be far more interested in chatting to women than I was in getting smashed, and after a certain point those interests become mutually exclusive. And I was permanently concerned about being in sound enough condition to play a game of football on a Sunday. Football may have saved me from a lot of excess, in this sense. All in all, consume as I did, I was a mere dabbler, relatively speaking, in a scene which included one or two major Olympians.

  Some people have the brass-built constitution for the consumption of stimulants in thunderous quantities, and I – perhaps to my long-term advantage – possibly didn’t. A case in point would be the night in Tramp, around 1977, when I unwisely volunteered for a session of excess with Keith Moon, the Who’s famously unstable drummer. Moon always was dangerous – not in the way that you felt bodily threatened, because he was quite short and stubby and not physically intimidating. It was more the sense he gave off that he could erupt at any time and you wouldn’t know why, or in which direction the smoke was going to carry.

  Moon was a notorious presence in Tramp, and had been since the time he went on the dance floor completely naked. On this particular occasion, with his clothes in place, he abruptly declared to the assembled company, ‘Right, I’m staying up until the pubs reopen at eleven in the morning, and anyone who doesn’t is a fucking wanker.’

  Something competitive in me was triggered. Instead of walking away then and there from this thrown-down gauntlet, I foolishly decided to pick it up. Cocaine and alcohol were duly abused in reckless quantities, at a succession of locations, including, unless I am mistaken, a) Ronnie Wood’s house, b) a party somewhere in the West End of London to which none of us had been invited, and c) Moon’s strange, modern white house in Chertsey, with its five pyramid-shaped roofs, where there was a bar decorated with enormous and slightly disturbing paintings of cartoon superheroes. It was here, eventually, under pictures of Thor and the Incredible Hulk, that dawn broke and I realised my race was run.

  ‘I can’t do this, Keith,’ I whispered, and began to creep away home.

  He absolutely killed me.

  ‘You fucking ponce, Stewart. Come back here and finish what you started.’

  Moon, of course, was to pay the steepest price for his appetites, dying in 1978 from an overdose of sedatives. Indeed, ‘you fucking ponce’ must have been pretty much the last words he ever said to me. I strongly suspect that Elton, too, would have been dead by now if he hadn’t eventually taken the decision to give it all up. There is a limit, surely, to how much abuse a single man’s constitution can take – even Elton John’s.

  I knew I couldn’t compete with Elton in that area, but in music we had a proper rivalry going on for a while. We vamped it up for all it was worth, and made a joke out of it, but it definitely grew from a little seed of genuine competitiveness – wanting to outdo each other in sales and success. And it’s still like that: we both had albums out at the same time in 2011 and there was considerable chafing (on my part) and gloating (on his) that Elton’s reached number three in the chart while mine reached number four. (It’s my contention – admittedly not supported by any statistical evidence so far – that a few hundred sales were somehow ‘found’ somewhere.) Also we both have residencies at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas and, again, there’s a bit of jostling over who sells more tickets. (Answer: I do, whatever Elton may tell his audiences from the stage.)

  From time to time this rivalry has driven Elton to pull off some beautifully organised stunts. In 1985 I had a bunch of massive footballs, the size of blimps, tethered above Earls Court to mark the fact that I was doing concerts there. Elton hired a sniper to shoot them down with an air rifle. Or like the time the banner for my Blondes Have More Fun tour, outside the same venue, was matched by one that Elton put up on an opposite building, which read, ‘But Brunettes Make More Money’.

  The competitive spirit reached a height one night in a hotel in Paris when the pair of us managed to sustain a coke-enhanced dialogue until ten the following morning. The sole topic of this august debate: which of us had the most money in his bank account. The people who were with us had drifted away to bed and come down again for breakfast, only to find us still locked in the same discussion. Result of the debate: inconclusive, as (children be warned) cocaine-fuelled debates very often are.

  There is no more generous person on this earth, though, than Elton – just incredibly generous. I have watches he has given me for birthdays: lavish, thickly jewelled pieces engraved ‘From Elt’. He gave my first wife, Alana, with whom he remained good friends after she and I separated, a Steinway piano. Those don’t come cheap.

  And then there was the Christmas where I thought long and hard about the present I was going to give him. That’s always a tough one: what do you get the man who has bought himself everything? Eventually, though, after a bit of scouring around the shops, I lit upon the solution: a novelty portable fridge. Brilliant. You plugged it in and pressed a button and its door opened automatically, and it lit up and a bottle rose out of it in a cloud of vapour. It seemed to me to offer the required ‘wow’ factor. And it cost me about £300, which I thought was enough.

  Elton’s present to me that year: a Rembrandt.

  A drawing – The Adoration of the Shepherds.

  A fucking Rembrandt! I felt pretty small – although not as small as Elton presumably wanted me to feel when he later referred tartly to my present as ‘an ice bucket’. It was not an ice bucket. It was a novelty portable fridge.

  Anyway, I played it a bit better on his fiftieth birthday in 1997. I bought him a full-size, sit-under hairdryer like the ones you see in women’s hairdressers. Two years later, he marked my marriage to Rachel with a £10 voucher from Boots. On the card he wrote, ‘Get
yourself something nice for the house.’

  We travelled together a bit, too, or sought each other out when we were abroad. The band Queen rented a house in Bel Air, Los Angeles, for a while, and Elton and I spent a long evening there with Freddie Mercury, a sweet and funny man whom I really adored, discussing the possibility of the three of us forming a supergroup. The name we had in mind was Nose, Teeth & Hair, a tribute to each of our most remarked-upon physical attributes. The general idea was that we could appear dressed like the Beverley Sisters. Somehow this project never came to anything, which is contemporary music’s deep and abiding loss.

  In 1985, Elton and I were even together on a short holiday in Africa, a wildlife safari, driving out into the bush to spot the fabled ‘big five’: the elephant, the rhino, the buffalo, the lion and the leopard. The best time to do this, of course, is at an unearthly hour of the morning, which was never my best time of day back then. But there would be Elton, rattling away at the tent-flap: ‘Come on, dear.’ We shared a Land Rover and appointed ourselves ‘poopologists’: experts in the detection of animals by their poop. In the evening, back at the camp, we dressed up regally in bow ties and dark jackets for dinner round the fire.

  Even on safari, Elton insisted on bringing his diamonds with him. He had a black box with various pieces of Cartier jewellery in it, worth God only knows how much, entrusted to his assistant Bob – a bit like the way the US president has someone with him with a briefcase containing the nuclear codes. One night in Africa, as we were having dinner, members of the party decided to sneak this precious box away from Bob and hide it, just to get a reaction. But Elton is a very difficult person to faze. Bob began to panic, but Elton simply said, ‘Don’t worry, darling, it’s only the daytime stuff.’