Rod: The Autobiography

by Rod Stewart

  After my experience with Tom, I was in a fever to record again. Even while promoting Atlantic Crossing I was carrying bits of paper in my pockets with possible song titles scribbled on them for the next album. In early 1976, we were back together in the studio, in Los Angeles this time, making A Night on the Town, which yielded the cover image I so hated: the photograph of me in the straw boater, holding the crystal champagne glass. People blamed Britt for that, but they were wrong. Britt might have been responsible for buying me the hat, and I’ve no doubt, when I wore it, she said what she always said: ‘You look luverly darklink.’ But she wasn’t responsible for me posing in it like a ponce for an album cover, and approving it all the way down the line. At any point, I could have said, ‘You know what? This is the worst album cover I’ve ever seen. Let’s do something else.’ But I didn’t. I don’t know how I got through that and came out the other end. I cringe now every time someone offers me that album cover to sign. I turn it over to the mock Renoir painting on the other side, which has at least got a splash of humour about it.

  Still, I would say in my defence that I regretted it pretty quickly. When we toured the album, I insisted that the artwork on the advertising posters and on all the backstage passes for the band and crew featured a picture of a fist coming through a straw boater. It was an expression of disgust at what I’d allowed to happen; an attempt to say, ‘I didn’t mean it, honest. I’m still in here somewhere.’

  Good album, though, embarrassing sleeve notwithstanding. And this despite the fact that my voice had decided to pack up during the LA sessions. I had been trying to sing and there was nothing there: the edge had gone right out of it. Very alarming. We wondered whether it was something to do with the LA smog, which would have been a nice comeuppance for my exile. ‘Rod’s gone all Hollywood – and Hollywood’s done his voice in.’ The sessions were moved from Cherokee Studios in Hollywood to Caribou Ranch in Colorado. Elton had recorded there, and the Beach Boys, and it was a beautiful rural setting, in a converted barn, high in the Rockies – too high, in fact: 7,000 feet above sea level. It felt airless to me and, if anything, my voice was worse. By now I was beginning to get desperate. But Tom kept calm and we moved again, this time to Miami, where finally my voice reappeared. This was by no means the last of the struggles that would go on between me and my throat.

  ‘The Killing of Georgie (Parts I and II)’ is on the album, probably the most ambitious song I have ever written in terms of narrative construction, and certainly one of the longest. The verses for it were coming to me in the middle of the night for what seemed like days on end. Every night I would have to get up and write another one down. I started to wonder whether maybe I wasn’t writing a song at all, but a novel. It appeared to reach a conclusion eventually, though, and was just about short enough for a single. There were people at Warner Bros. who were medieval enough to fear that a pro-gay message would alienate my heterosexual following. Stuff ’em, I felt. It’s one of the songs that I’m proudest of. (And was a big hit, so no one particularly got alienated.)

  There’s also the Cat Stevens’ song ‘The First Cut Is the Deepest’, which was actually held over from the Atlantic Crossing sessions, and has been enormously good to me down the years. And there’s ‘Tonight’s the Night (Gonna Be Alright)’, the tale of a slightly raunchy seduction in possibly virginal circumstances, at which a number of radio stations nervously baulked – again, with no lasting damage from a commercial point of view – and where Britt does some rather exciting talking in French over the outro. She was as nervous as a kitten in the studio, but a little pinch of cocaine helped.

  Tom Dowd worshipped her, by the way. Everybody did. Everybody except me.

  * * *

  New home, new record label, new music; same old problem with commitment. I was still very far from wanting to settle down. I was with Britt, yet I always had my eye on other women. Terrible. And eventually I started wandering off, as was my wont. I had a fling with the actress Susan George – to whom Britt had introduced me, so that was especially shameless. We had been to see Queen in concert and gone out for dinner in LA afterwards, and Britt had seen that Susan was on her own and invited her to our table. I talked to her for the rest of the evening, while Britt talked to Freddie Mercury. Eventually Britt drove home alone and left me and Susan still talking.

  And I had another, and longer, affair with the actress Liz Treadwell, who was blonde, tall, very beautiful, bright and witty, and whom I liked enormously. And that one blew up in my face spectacularly.

  Britt thought she and I were heading for marriage. We had Victoria and Nikolaj, her children, whom I adored, around us, and it was like a ready-made family. And we had decorated the house at Carolwood Drive, building ourselves this very wonderful nest. Yet it was sad because I knew all along, deep down, that I wasn’t going to marry her, that I wasn’t anywhere near wanting to settle. And when that became apparent, it really hurt her. She must have felt so deceived.

  Which I suppose serves to illustrate that you can be with one of the most beautiful women in the world and still behave like an arse. Not only that, but you can be with one of the most beautiful women in the world and still be unhappy.

  As with Dee, the way I handled the break-up was less than gentlemanly. In the summer of 1977, Britt took the children off to Sweden for a holiday in the beach house she owned there, which used to belong to her grandfather. I flew to New York with Gaff for a meeting with Elton John to discuss some totally barking idea Elton had for a film. After the dinner, we adjourned to a nightclub where I met up with Liz. Our exit from the club was recorded for posterity by a photographer from the New York Post and commemorated on the following day’s front page. This, I quickly realised, was unlikely to pan out well.

  On her return from holiday, Britt went to a party in Hollywood thrown by the film producer Allan Carr. I didn’t go because I was working in the studio. At the party, Britt ran into George Hamilton, a former lover of hers, who asked anxiously after the state of her relationship with me – and after the state of mine with Liz Treadwell. It was the first Britt knew of it. She confronted me in the garden at Carolwood and I admitted that I had been unfaithful to her. Britt got her coat, and all other items belonging to her.

  I have never separated from a woman the way I should have done. I have always been a coward in that department – an absolute coward. I was intent on avoiding the confrontation, because I just didn’t know how to handle it, didn’t know how to say I was no longer in love, that I was restless, feeling trapped and that I wanted to end it. It was about not wanting to hurt Britt – and yet, of course, I was hurting her in the long run. And that was to become typical, I’m afraid. I just drifted off to another woman: just started disappearing and not coming home, only to find Britt waiting up and asking, ‘Where have you been?’ – stuff that you see in the movies. And inevitably you get found out sooner or later, and that causes such tears and ugliness and shouting and heartbreak. Why didn’t I learn my lesson? I didn’t, and it went on that way for a long time.

  ‘Palimony’ was a bit of a buzz word at the time. A couple of years earlier, Lee Marvin’s girlfriend Michelle Triola had attempted to sue him for half the money he had earned during the years that they were living together: the original ‘palimony’ case. Triola was unsuccessful, the judge deciding that she had no rights to Marvin’s property in the absence of a formal marriage. But that didn’t stop other people having a bash, and Britt duly took some legal advice from smart lawyers in LA and waded in with a claim for the tidy old sum of $12.5 million.

  What a withering moment that was. I was coming out of the door of a recording studio and suddenly there was a bloke in a dark suit pressing an envelope into my hand. You’re served, pal. That was something else that I thought only happened in movies. When I saw what was being asked for in the envelope, I was not best pleased. I thought it was greedy of Britt and plain unfair. I also thought it was wildly out of character. Billy Gaff, who was very close to Britt and remai
ns so today, went to Miami, where she was filming a television programme, and persuaded her, thankfully, to drop the lawyers. We settled privately.

  * * *

  A week after Britt and I separated, I slipped on a flower lobbed by a fan onto the stage of the Cow Palace in San Francisco, fell arse over tit and smacked my face on the drum riser, breaking a tooth and requiring seven stitches. It seemed like a comment from the gods, although let the record show that I was drunk.

  It also seemed a bit rich. Twenty years of competitive football without a serious facial injury beyond the knock, at the age of twenty-six, that slightly offset my nose. And then I go and get well and truly clattered by a flower. Funny old game, football.

  DIGRESSION

  In which our hero finds himself spurned by punk rockers.

  In 1977, Johnny Rotten called me an old fart. Not to my face: on a British television show. I was thirty-two – not that old, really. And not really a fart either, to my mind, although people will always be entitled to a view. The point was, in London, punk rock had arrived in a storm of spit, and I seemed to be one of the people getting spat at. For a new, young, angry generation, I was suddenly representative of a breed of musicians who were rich, out of touch, complacent and (perhaps worst of all) given to singing ballads. The decision had been taken to give my gilded cage a good old rattling and it all turned a bit confrontational, at least in Britain. Ranged aggressively against the old guard, and looking to sweep them away, were the likes of the Sex Pistols and the Clash, who sang, ‘No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones in 1977’. And no me either, apparently.

  I didn’t help myself when I gave an interview to the New Musical Express into which I dropped a line that would follow me around for a while: ‘There are no fucking safety pins falling off me.’ Which sounded reactionary and sneering – and was almost certainly intended to do so. But it was also true. While punks were dressing in ripped T-shirts and bondage trousers patched with beer towels, you would have found me in my Rudolf Nureyev phase: harem pants, silk slippers, silver clips around the ankles, bit of a sash going on at the waist. Looking back, I can see how that would have got right up the nose of a young whippersnapper with an electric guitar and some attitude. Comfy, though – I’ll say that much for it. Every man should have a brief Rudolf Nureyev phase, if the option is there.

  But there was a sense, too, of betrayal. Apparently the Sex Pistols had been big fans of the Faces. They used to play ‘Three Button Hand Me Down’ when they were rehearsing, a song written by this old fart and Ian McLagan. The Pistols liked the connection the band had with its audience, the sense that a show was a big party and that everyone was in it together – not like the Stones, say, who from very early on were a remote act who kept their audience at a distance. You might have felt you loved the Stones, but you never felt you knew them. And then the Pistols resented what happened to the Faces in the end and the way that I went on from there to become a star. John Peel, the DJ, had the same difficulty. He came out and said he was disappointed when I became a celebrity. He felt he had lost me to fame – our paths stopped crossing after I moved to LA – and that I had lost myself to fame, too.

  But it gets bigger. It grows in ways that you aren’t always in control of. The shows get larger – and, as everyone tells you, that’s a sign that you’re getting it right. And, as the shows get larger, it’s a constant battle to maintain that connection with the audience, a battle which I’ve fought pretty well, I would say, by and large. I think my audience does feel it knows me, and I think my audience is right.

  But it’s also a battle to stop the scale of your success messing with your head. Every successful person in music loses that battle from time to time. I lost it in the mid 1970s, the photograph of me in the boater on the sleeve of A Night on the Town being a prime piece of evidence. But it even got to the Faces in the end. The Faces may have larked about like a bunch of blokes from the pub, but, trust me, the bickering that eventually went on in that band about limos and hotel rooms would probably have shamed the Eagles. If the promoter didn’t provide Ian McLagan with a Steinway-built piano, as specified in the contractual agreement, Mac would wait until the show was finished and demolish the piano that had been provided. Does that sound like any down-to-earth bloke in the pub that you know?

  So, in a sense, punk gave people like me and Elton what we deserved: a kick in the pants. A kick in the harem pants, in my case. I’m not saying I learned anything from punk, musically. I gained very little from what I saw and heard. I liked the attitude, the ‘just get up and do it’ approach. It was very like the Faces in a way. But the music? Less so. The music I loved was still the music I had always loved: soul, rhythm and blues, folk, with a bit of rock ’n’ roll thrown in for good measure. At the same time, punk was a little reminder, a reality check. Suddenly there was a pocket of resistance. Suddenly there was a challenge: a very public and very loud one.

  I took a policy decision. I didn’t go away and hide. In June 1977, I had a double-A-sided single out: ‘I Don’t Want to Talk About It’ along with ‘The First Cut Is the Deepest’. Two ballads, if you please. The single went to number one in Britain for the whole of June 1977. And the single it held in the number two spot was ‘God Save the Queen’ by the Sex Pistols. Touché.

  Malcolm McLaren, of course, the Sex Pistols’ manager, claimed skulduggery and dark fixings behind the scenes. It was the year of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, and McLaren’s theory was that the authorities simply couldn’t allow an anti-monarchist song to be number one while the rest of the nation was celebrating twenty-five years of the Queen’s reign. Certainly the BBC refused to play the Pistols’ record, although whether that hindered its commercial performance or helped it, we shall never know. (There’s nothing like a ban for igniting a bit of extra interest, as I discovered with ‘Tonight’s the Night’.) In any case, some thirty years later, Richard Branson, who had been the boss of Virgin Records, the Pistols’ label, told a television programme that the battle between the singles had been a fair fight, with nothing untoward, so I’m claiming a clean victory.

  What was abundantly clear at the time, though, was that even in the brave new dawn of punk, an old fart could still have hits with the right songs. What I had to do was believe he could carry on having them. Joe Smith, the great head of Warner Bros., told me when I signed my solo deal with that record company, ‘If you can last ten years in this business, you’ll last for ever.’ Maybe. All I know is, that was nearly forty years ago now, and I’ve seen a lot of people come and go.

  Of course, time tends to change us all. There was a Faces reunion tour in 2010, with Mick Hucknall of Simply Red on vocals (I was busy and couldn’t take part), and the bassist was Glen Matlock, formerly of the Sex Pistols. Woody told me about it on the phone. ‘Glen’s a bit broad in the beam these days,’ Woody said. ‘And he likes to wear a cravat.’

  So there we are.

  CHAPTER 12

  In which are exposed the workings and motives of the Sex Police, circa 1976–86. Plus some embarrassment in Arrivals at Heathrow and the perils of going on stage with a lamp post.

  THE NIGHT WHEN I opened the door to my hotel suite and found a bass player stark naked and gaffer-taped to the bed was . . . well, it was pretty typical of the sort of things that used to happen on tour with the band in the 1970s and 1980s. I simply gave Charlie Harrison a nod, went to the adjoining bedroom and got into bed, knowing that the situation would doubtless resolve itself eventually, and thankful at least that no live chickens were involved this time.

  Charlie was just another victim of the Sex Police. And the thing about the Sex Police was, they could strike at any time. Who were the Sex Police? They were a loose affiliation of band members and tour crew, first assembled under the leadership of the tour manager, Pete ‘Gruppenführer’ Buckland. Their founding intention was to stamp out sex on the road – to identify, within the touring party, the likely practitioners of sex, locate the places in which sex might take place, and prevent
sex from happening. And there was a lot of sex on tour, what with one thing and another, so they were quite busy. Their remit quickly expanded, too, to include the arranging of pranks on the road in general. And let’s be clear: just because you were a member of the Sex Police – and I confess that I was – it didn’t mean that you couldn’t be a victim of the Sex Police. Even the Sex Police feared the knock on the door from the Sex Police.

  Not that the Sex Police would necessarily knock. To say they were exceptionally well organised is to put it mildly. The Sex Police had tool kits, walkie-talkies, cameras and, best of all, skeleton keys, meaning that they could be on the scene (your hotel room, for instance) before you or (sometimes worse) after you. They had screwdrivers for the removal of door hinges. (You and your date for the night would go to push your key into the lock and the door would simply fall into the room.) They had lengths of nylon rope for suspending people’s luggage down the hotel’s outside wall from their window. (Difficult to find your suitcase in this circumstance. And equally difficult, once you had found it, ten storeys below, to reel that suitcase back in.) Eventually, they had uniforms: a white boiler suit, with ‘Sex Police’ written on the reverse and bearing, on its chest, the Sex Police insignia: two penises rampant and the Latin motto cruella sed justa, ‘harsh but fair’. And they had chickens.

  I believe the first recorded use of live chickens by the Sex Police was in a hotel in Dallas in 1985, and I was its victim. I was in a suite, filming an interview with the late, great Dick Clark, the legendary presenter of American Bandstand. The conversation was coming to an end when the door burst open, there was a chorused shout from the corridor of ‘Room service!’ and, for one surreal moment, the room became a blizzard of feathers and chicken shit. Clark, a consummate pro, seemed to find the whole thing rather amusing.