Rod: The Autobiography

by Rod Stewart

  And I nearly didn’t see them. Her friend drove up and down, failing to find the house. She was about to give up when they spotted it. A few of my friends had come back from the Roxbury for a few more drinks, including my pal Ricky Simpson and Teri Copley, the television actress and Playboy model, with whom I had spent the evening chatting warmly but whom I now, rather shamefully, dropped like a hot brick. Coming through the front door, Rachel tripped and went sliding across the slippery hall floor – her grand entrance. So now at least we had both embarrassed ourselves.

  There was a connection straight away. She was extremely beautiful, it goes without saying, but there was something very no-nonsense about her as well. It was there in her New Zealand accent, but also in her face, which was at once very open and yet, you felt, not the face of someone who was likely to be taken for a fool. She was smart – as far removed as could be from the stereotype of the flaky model. And she already had money and fame, so she had no need to attach herself to somebody to achieve those things. That was a relief for me, because in my position that suspicion was always there: does this person really like me, the way they seem to, or does this person just like the stuff that surrounds me?

  And there was a naïveté about her, too – but why wouldn’t there have been? She was just shy of her twenty-first birthday. I was forty-five. There were nearly twenty-five years between us – but that calculation is irrelevant, much though people on the outside of our relationship liked to get hung up on it. It wasn’t that she was too young for me. She was, quite simply, too young: too young to get married, too young to become caught up in another person’s life, which is what happened. Christ, she had barely lived. But I didn’t see it. I just sailed on.

  That evening at Carolwood I believe that alcohol was consumed – certainly by me – and that dancing of a largely ridiculous nature took place. I believe that I showed Rachel around the house. I believe that in particular I showed her the dogs, the three Border collies I had at this time, which lived outside and which she was keen to see. I believe that, in a moment of high spirits, the pair of us ended up chasing through the house, pursued by the dogs. I never used to let the dogs into the nice bits of the house, because they destroyed things. That evening, I clearly didn’t care. I really must have been in love.

  She flew back to New York the morning after our first date. I sent two dozen red roses to her agency. Then I flew to New York, on no pretext at all, so that I could see her again. I called her up and invited her to dinner. We met at the Peninsula Hotel in Los Angeles where I had taken a room. She wore a stunning white dress. I held doors open, escorted her into the restaurant, helped her with her seat, as a proper gentleman should. Over dinner, we didn’t so much talk as gabble, covering a lot of ground in a big hurry. We were falling very fast.

  But not that fast. Later that night, back at the hotel, Rachel came to bed in a T-shirt down to her ankles – a T-shirt that said, ‘Not tonight, thank you’ as efficiently as if she had come clanking out of the bathroom in a deep-sea diving outfit. A bit of a shame, of course. But a good sign, I knew. A sign that maybe we were at the beginning of something serious.

  I don’t know about eight weeks to a better body, but we were five weeks to an engagement and three months to a wedding – startling even some of my closest friends, who knew and loved Rachel and saw how deeply I had fallen for her, but clearly thought we should go more slowly and were quite willing to say so. But love won’t listen to objections. I thought they were wrong and I was right, as simple as that.

  The morning after our first date, I said, ‘Let’s go steady.’ She said, ‘OK, then.’ She had a modelling job at the end of that week in Fort Lauderdale. I flew down on the Thursday to be with her. The following Sunday was 9 September: Rachel’s birthday. We made a plan to go back to New York and celebrate lavishly – both her big day and our new relationship. And maybe (if I was lucky) have sex, which we hadn’t got round to yet. Not that I was desperate or anything.

  The celebrations didn’t happen. Late in the afternoon of Rachel’s birthday, I got a call in New York from my sister Mary. She said, ‘Roddy, Dad’s died.’

  I had spoken to him on the phone that lunchtime, New York time. We had talked about the Scottish and English football results. And apparently, not long after that, he said he felt tired and went upstairs to bed and was gone. He was eighty-six.

  I don’t need to say how much his death crushed me. I wept, and Rachel held me. And it was an extraordinary situation all round because here I was, full of new love and now in mourning. I think one refers to this as ‘mixed emotions’. But Rachel was amazing, full of comfort and support. Suddenly it wasn’t me who was the senior half of the relationship, it was her. She took control and helped me through.

  We flew back to London for the funeral – me, Rachel, and Ricky Simpson, who knew my dad well. Rachel stayed behind in Epping while I went to the service. She had never met him, of course – and that was a huge additional sadness to me, that Dad hadn’t seen me with the person with whom I thought I would be happy and settled for life, that he hadn’t finally seen me come good and make a go of it. But Rachel also didn’t come to the funeral because we knew how much the press would have made a distraction out of her being there.

  As it was, the day was about Dad. There was a funeral procession to Highgate Cemetery. My brothers and sister and I organised a floral tribute in the shape of a football pitch. Gordon Strachan and Kenny Dalglish and a host of other footballers sent flowers and the respects of Scottish football. A Highland piper led the hearse and people stood still in the streets, as if all of Highgate had stopped to watch Bob Stewart set off down Muswell Hill Broadway for the last time.

  We worried most of all about how my mum would be after this. She was finding the world to be a very confusing place by then. But in fact she was fine. She seemed to assume, for the most part, that Dad had just popped up to the bookies.

  Is there a bookies in heaven? I’ll know where to find Dad if there is.

  * * *

  My dad’s death may have had the effect of speeding things up even further between Rachel and me. After the funeral, we flew back from London to New York, I helped Rachel pack up her apartment and then we flew back to Los Angeles and she moved in to Carolwood so that we could live together.

  Almost immediately, though, she had a modelling commitment to fulfil: another shoot for Sports Illustrated with Elle Macpherson, in Puerto Rico. The job meant she would be away for three weeks while I was recording in LA. It was an agonising prospect for both of us. But work was work. Still, there was always the phone. We were virtually never off it for those weeks. I guess that was really the period when we found out about each other properly, talking for hours – about our lives, our families, stupid stuff and serious stuff, nothing and everything. Rachel’s phone bill at the end of the three-week trip was $10,000.

  When Rachel’s job had finished, I took a Lear jet down to Puerto Rico to collect her. And then we took the plane on to Nassau in the Bahamas, where I had chartered a boat for the weekend. The plane hit some turbulence on the way, but we agreed that we were so happy that if we fell out of the sky and died, right there and then, we wouldn’t care.

  That night, on the boat, our relationship was consummated. As a gentleman, I must insist upon my right to draw a gauzy veil over those proceedings. I can tell you, though, that as dawn’s rosy fingers began to illuminate our lovers’ bower, both of us found our attention drawn to an unsettling sight: a long, brown stain, midway down the bed sheet. There was, for both of us, a period of flustered self-examination: ‘Surely I haven’t . . . surely we didn’t . . .’

  Closer investigation revealed the mark to be the remains of a complimentary chocolate, left on the pillow but brushed aside unseen in the haste of our passion.

  Back in Los Angeles, I proposed to Rachel during a picnic in a park. And on 15 December 1990, a little over three months since I had mimed to her at the Roxbury nightclub, we were married. The service was at the P
resbyterian Church in Beverly Hills. My brother Don was best man. The ushers were mostly my football mates from the Exiles, and I got them to wear sunglasses and carry white canes, so that, as they showed the guests to their seats, they would be performing an impression of the blind leading the blind. When Rachel arrived at the altar she performed the wonderfully romantic gesture of giving me a thick, thumb-and-forefinger pinch on the bum. As we left the chapel, kilted pipers played ‘Scotland the Brave’.

  And afterwards, the guests were invited to what the embossed invitations explicitly declared to be ‘a piss-up’ in the Four Seasons Hotel. On the seating plan for the reception, the tables were given names of football teams. The wedding feast was roast New Zealand lamb with mint sauce, roast potatoes and sprouts. The cake was in the shape of the Houses of Parliament with a three-foot-tall Big Ben and a kiwi fruit on the roof. Long John Baldry came, and Ian McLagan. Ronnie Wood couldn’t make it, unfortunately, because he was recuperating after his latest car crash. (Woody’s ability to wipe cars the length of walls is almost without equal in the Western world.) And when it was time for the groom’s speech, I stood up and told the room, with feeling: ‘I’m as happy as a dog with two dicks.’

  Unbeknown to me, my sister Mary had sat at the table that day and confided in the person sitting next to her: ‘That girl will break his heart one day.’ Not just yet, though. In concert at Wembley Stadium on 15 June 1991, I proudly told the crowd that I had been married to Rachel for six months. ‘What’s that?’ said my mum, from her wheelchair. Someone repeated what I had said. My mum thought about it for a moment, and then asked, ‘Does Rachel know this?’

  I think she did. Rachel had a favourite saying in those days: ‘The past is the past. The future is what we’ve got together.’

  * * *

  Also attending my wedding to Rachel was Rob Dickins, the head of Warner Bros. in England who had hooked me up with the song ‘Downtown Train’. I told him to bring some more songs with him when he came. I figured that if he was coming all this way to drink my wine and eat my roast lamb and sprouts, I might as well get something out of it.

  A couple of days before the ceremony, Rob was in a car with Arnold and he put on a tape – though only after a lengthy and apologetic preamble which sounded like it didn’t bode all that well. He said to Arnold, ‘I’m worried that you’ll think I’m taking the piss.’ The song he was about to play, Rob explained, was one that he had been sitting on for about seven years. Its writers, Marc Jordan and John Capek, wanted him to push it to me, but he had never had the nerve to. The song sounded so like me, Rob reckoned, that I would think it was a parody.

  Arnold listened to it once and called me from the car.

  ‘We have to get together immediately. Rob just played me a song that I know is a worldwide hit for you.’

  I had the wedding rehearsal to do, and after that I went to Arnold’s house.

  Rob was still sounding less than confident. ‘Don’t hate me for this,’ he said.

  Arnold said, ‘Stop with all the disclaimers and play it. It’s a total fucking smash.’

  The song was ‘Rhythm of My Heart’ and I absolutely adored it. Parody, my arse. It was a big old, anthemic lump of Scotland complete with skirling bagpipes, a timeless tale of a warrior far from home – and so clever, the way it took ‘Bonnie Banks o’Loch Lomond’ (‘Ye’ll take the high road and I’ll take the low road,’ etc.) and made something new out of it. (Connoisseurs of traditional Scottish song will cotton on at once to the matching rhythms of the lyrics, ‘On the bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomond’ becoming ‘Where the ocean meets the sky I’ll be sailing’.)

  I recorded the song with Trevor Horn and made it the opening track and first single off my next album, Vagabond Heart, which came out in March 1991. (There was a quiet tribute to my dad in that title, originated by my brother Don: Dad’s old football team was called the Vagabonds.) The recording is remarkable for involving almost certainly the motliest choir of backing vocalists ever assembled under my banner, including Arnold; Lionel Conway, the fabled manager of the Exiles; and Garry Cook, another former Exile and the future chief executive of Manchester City FC. Even despite this impediment, the song went to number three in the UK charts and to number five in America. The single was also a monster in Germany – the biggest hit I had ever had there, staying on the chart for about forty weeks. All in all, everything was set fair for the massive, year-long Vagabond tour which set off after it. Yet trouble awaited.

  * * *

  What I remember most vividly is being in the kitchen at 507 Archway Road and talking to my mum. In fact, I was onstage in front of several thousand people in Sheffield. But that’s hallucinations for you. You never know where you are with them.

  The date was 5 June 1991, deep into the European leg of the Vagabond tour through Europe in 1991, and I was about to pay a grisly price for trying to keep my career on the road by taking steroids.

  As the 1980s wore into the 1990s, I had been facing an increasing struggle with my voice. The pounding my throat was taking over six- and seven-month tours, straining to be heard above one of the most inconsiderately loud bands in showbusiness, was beginning to piss it off and it had started to react accordingly. Some nights I was a pale and scratchy imitation of myself. Sometimes I was trimming two or three numbers out of the set in order to get to the other end – which I hated doing, because it felt like short-changing people. Other nights, I had nothing there to sing with at all and shows had to be wiped out completely. And that I hated most of all.

  There’s no such thing as a good cancellation. But the worst cancellation is one where the audience is already in the house. That just feels like an unpardonable waste of people’s time. Imagine the embarrassment of cancelling dinner with someone who is already at the restaurant. Then imagine multiplying that embarrassment by 12,000. Or more. I cancelled at the Toronto SkyDome with the audience already in, and it proved to be a very successful way to piss off 25,000 people in one go. And it happened at an 18,000-capacity outdoor arena in Berlin, where bottles duly flew from the hands of disgruntled customers and the riot police had to be called. The crew, working at the sound desk out in the middle of the arena, had to take the precaution of removing their tour laminates to avoid getting a recriminatory thumping. Mortifying times.

  Germany seemed to cop the worst of it, for some reason. We cancelled the same velodrome in Cologne five times during this period. On one of those occasions, we tried to loop back and do a rearranged show in a gymnasium just outside the city, by way of compensation. This, we thought, would at least show willing and reduce some disappointment. The tour had crossed to England, as scheduled, and then planes were chartered out of Luton to fly the gear back over to Germany again and set it all up in the second venue – and then, again, I had no voice and we cancelled. The people of Cologne must have begun to think it was personal. I would like to state here that it genuinely wasn’t.

  It got to the point at the beginning of the 1990s where I was virtually uninsurable. Lloyd’s of London had paid out so many times on shows that didn’t happen that they simply weren’t going to take the risk any more. And if they didn’t insure me, the cost of cancelling a show was going to come right out of my pocket: the trucks, the crew, the buses, the flights. A stadium rock ’n’ roll show is not an inexpensive venture. Steroids, as prescribed by a doctor, seemed more and more attractive.

  Very quickly my voice problems became a psychological condition as well as a physical one. We singers are paranoid about our voices on the best of days – worried about the temperature in rooms, worried about air conditioning, worried about pollen and humidity levels. I would start anticipating the problem even before it arose. In the afternoon of a show, I’d feel a little tickle at the back of my throat and think, ‘Fuck, what’s that?’ And then I would take a steroid just in case. It reached the stage where I was almost as dependent on the steroids mentally as I was physically.

  By the time the Vagabond tour rolled out, in Ab
erdeen in March 1991, I had graduated from prednisone tablets to a cocktail of drugs in a syringe which I would take with me to inject before a show – normally in my hand. The cocktail was a mix of an antibiotic, a steroid and vitamin B. It would bring down any inflammation – or, at any rate, numb the effect of any inflammation. My throat could feel like I had removed its lining and used it to scour frying pans, but the cocktail would get me up and out there.

  Of course, all this was at some cost to my mood. Steroids mess with your temper. I grew aggressive and impatient – quick to snap at people when things didn’t go smoothly. Some might have thought it was just typical diva behaviour, and up to a point they might have been right. But it definitely had a new steroidal edge.

  Also, I began to fatten up. Steroids will do that for you, too, and not just because you’re so steamingly hungry all the time: you retain fluids and your cheeks go all hamster-like on you. There comes an alarming moment when you look in the mirror and the line of your jaw has gone. Inevitably there were comments in the press about how I was putting on weight. Some expert observers attributed it to middle-age spread, others to the contentment of newly married life. Both were wrong, but I could hardly come out and explain what was happening. It would have been career suicide. ‘Don’t worry, everyone – keep buying the tickets. I’ll probably be there because these steroids work great!’

  And then came Sheffield and the night of the hallucinations. Five hours before the show, my throat was painful and my voice almost non-existent. I injected the steroid cocktail. Three hours before the show, there was almost no improvement. I was in a state of desperation: now even the cocktail didn’t seem to be working. I took cortisone tablets on top of the cocktail. Cortisone should really only have been taken on a full stomach. My stomach was empty. While I was onstage my stomach lining ruptured and I spent the show quietly bleeding internally.