Rod: The Autobiography

by Rod Stewart

  I closed my eyes to sing, and when I opened them it wasn’t Sheffield any more, it was the old kitchen in my birthplace at Archway Road and my mum was over by the sink. I closed my eyes again, and suddenly the Sheffield audience swung back. But the Sheffield audience seen through a goldfish bowl. The room seemed to be folding in on me. I was clinging on to the microphone stand to prevent my legs giving way underneath me. I clung on and sang.

  I don’t really remember getting off stage. The next thing I knew I was bundled up in the limo and heading away from the confused audience in the arena, and the insurance company’s doctor was tending to me. This doctor’s specialism was actually proctology – a fact which incensed an increasingly concerned Rachel when she found out about it. ‘What the fuck is an arse doctor doing looking after my husband’s fucking throat?’ As we drove through the night back to Essex, the ‘arse doctor’ administered a blood transfusion in the back of the car.

  The following morning I felt much better, but I was told that I needed another transfusion. At the clinic, it was recommended that I remain on a bed for twelve hours while the fluid went into my system, but I decided I could lie around with a tube in my arm just as well at home, so, still under the supervision of the ‘arse doctor’, I was driven back to Epping, attached to the necessary plasma pack.

  At home I discovered, to my intense amusement, that I could support the plasma pack on the tip of a pool cue. I walked around the house like this for a while, until the joke wore thin. Actually, it had never worn that thick on Rachel in particular. But I thought it was funny.

  When it got to lunchtime, I sat in the kitchen while Rachel cooked steaks (highly recommended as sustenance while having a blood transfusion at home). Much to Rachel’s consternation, the ‘arse doctor’ announced that he was going to pop out for an hour and get himself something to eat at the pub.

  ‘But what do I do if there’s an air bubble?’ asked Rachel, pointing to the tube in my arm.

  As he left, the doctor smiled and said, ‘Trust me, there’s not going to be an air bubble.’

  Rachel returned to the steaks – but rather more distractedly now, convinced in her mind that at any second, on her watch, I would die. Lo and behold, exactly as she feared, no sooner had the doctor’s car pulled away than Rachel was confronted by a nightmare vision: the sight of an air bubble departing the plasma pack and setting off down the tube in the direction of her husband’s arm.

  There was no air bubble, I am as good as 100 per cent sure of that. But Rachel had convinced herself that there was. And, having convinced herself, she had no option really but to take the necessary drastic action. I am thus in the fairly unusual position of being able to report that, when someone, screaming loudly, grabs hold of a plastic tube that is attached to you by a needle and a plaster, and unsentimentally rips it right out of your arm, it hurts like a bastard.

  The quickly re-summoned proctologist returned to a scene of carnage: blood from the plasma pack all over the floor, a woman in a state of tearful panic and, worst of all, overcooked steaks, uneaten, in a pan. Me? I was actually laughing hysterically. After the stinging pain had died down, I seemed to find the whole thing fantastically funny. But that could have been light-headedness, as a result of the blood loss.

  In the longer term, it was clear that a blood transfusion alone – even successfully administered, in an appropriate location, with a compliant patient and no paranoid wife pulling the tube out – wasn’t going to save my career as a performer. And neither were steroids. Fortunately for me, technology intervened.

  Even before the nasty debacle in Sheffield, Lars Brogaard, who has been the sound engineer on my live shows for many years, had talked to me about getting hold of some in-ear monitors. Nowadays these little waxy earpieces are a completely familiar sight in the ears of popular entertainers all over the world. In 1991, though, the idea of feeding the onstage sound back to the performer through an earpiece was entirely new. We were all still using a system which had been in place practically since Roman times: a line of speaker wedges along the front of the stage, directing a mix of the sound back at you so that, with any luck, you could hear what was going on and join in. But the mix was always a bugger to get right and the system was inherently loud and very often I was singing to make myself heard above the racket and doing myself a mischief.

  Lars promised me that in-ear monitors could make all the difference, and I agreed to give them a try. Near the end of April 1991, Lars and I flew back between dates in Germany to go to a specialist in Harley Street in London and have some impressions made of my ears. A few days later we had a set of perfectly tailored earpieces to attach to a receiver which could go in my back pocket and through which a mix could be played that a) might not blow my head off, and b) might not cause me to blow my voice out.

  The problem was that the tour was underway, so there was no time to rehearse with them. Eventually I agreed to shove the plugs in my ears experimentally near the end of a show in Munich. But it felt all wrong to me – like I had just dropped to the bottom of a swimming pool – and I took them out almost immediately. Gradually, though, I weaned myself onto them. The effect was transformative. It smoothed the whole process out. I wasn’t having to push my voice up the hill like a boulder any more. For the next tour, we switched the whole band over to them.

  The system also had the advantage of getting rid of all those ugly lumps of speaker, excitingly opening up the lip of the stage as an area for further prancing about: an exciting expansion of the workplace. And stage sets immediately looked a lot prettier with all that unwanted furniture out of the way.

  Thus my voice managed to recover and the cancellations tapered off. It’s no exaggeration to say that I owe my career to the invention of the in-ear monitor. Without it, I would have been finished as a live performer twenty years ago – probably after one final, tragic gig in a three-quarters-empty sports hall in Cologne, babbling incoherently to a vision of my mum in her kitchen.

  * * *

  In the eight years that I was with Rachel, I was entirely faithful to her. This was unprecedented for me and, given my form, I don’t think you would have found too many people prepared to put money on that outcome at the beginning. Yet it wasn’t difficult. It wasn’t even conscious. I had no desire to wander. Rachel was everything I wanted and I went from Lord of the Philanderers to devoted husband overnight. But maybe that was the point: I just needed to find the right person. And that person, I fully believed, was Rachel. As I felt confident enough to announce to the press, very early on in the relationship: ‘I’ve put my last banana in the fruit bowl.’

  I was so happy, I even went riding. Rachel loved horses. I barely knew one end from the other, but I agreed to ride with her one day. And, of course, I wasn’t just going to jump up there in a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. I needed to dress the part. Accordingly, I emerged from the house that fine morning in jodhpurs, well-shined boots, a fancy waistcoat and an immaculate red jacket. As I stiffly guided my horse down a lane in Epping Forest, a photographer emerged from a bush and started snapping. The embarrassment of it. And also the annoyance. I went into full ‘Git orf my land!’ mode. ‘This is private property!’ I shouted, although, in fact, it was a public right of way. Pictures duly ran in the papers, which made me nearly as regretful as I was in the wake of the fabled boater shot on the cover of A Night on the Town. Rachel, of course, found the whole incident hysterical.

  My happiness only expanded with the birth of our daughter, the beautiful Renee, born at the Portland Hospital in London in June 1992. Again, I played an important role in the birthing process: mostly rushing about in a hospital gown saying, ‘It’s all going to be fine.’ Rachel was only twenty-two; so young to be a mother. I have a photo of her leaving hospital with Renee in her arms and a look of pure terror on her face. For three weeks after, there were a lot of post-natal tears. We would go for walks around the lake in Epping, with Rachel saying, ‘What if I can’t do it? And what if I’m a terrible mother? And
what if she gets to twenty-one and she’s a crack addict?’

  I would tell her, ‘Rachel, it’s fine. You’re going to be a great mother. Of course you are.’ I was so right.

  Just over two years later, we had a wonderful son, Liam, to add to our daughter, and now, when I toured, we went as a family, lifting our sleeping children in and out of arenas and onto planes, and carrying them gently through hotel lobbies.

  What also made me happy was dining at home together. I loved us to dine formally, at eight, and to dress up for it. I loved it especially because when I was on the road, so much of my life was chaos, and this represented order. Rachel and I would go upstairs to our separate dressing rooms and then meet on the landing in our evening attire, pause to appreciate each other’s outfits, and descend the stairs together.

  I had no idea, until afterwards, when we talked about the reasons why it ended, how oppressive Rachel found this, how swallowed up she felt, how much she wished she could have been in her jeans, eating poached eggs on toast, like girls in their twenties do.

  * * *

  MTV had always been a good thing, as far as my career was concerned. On the world’s first non-stop music channel’s first day on air, 1 August 1981, ‘She Won’t Dance with Me’ was the third video to be played. (The first was ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’ by Buggles, and the second was Pat Benatar’s ‘You Better Run’.) What this meant was that, within fifteen minutes of the channel’s launch, viewers had been subjected to the sight of me shaking my arse in the rough direction of Jim Cregan, and then bouncing and strutting like a loon around a headache-inducing black and white polka-dot set.

  Eleven videos later, they played ‘Sailing’, making me the first artist to be on MTV more than once. Nine videos later, ‘Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?’ was called off the bench for a run-out; ten more videos after that, ‘Passion’ got the nod; twelve more and it was ‘Ain’t Love a Bitch’ . . . and on it went. Sixteen videos on day one. As Mark Goodman, the MTV VJ, later so movingly put it: ‘We played Rod Stewart up the wazoo.’

  Furthermore, when MTV launched its inaugural Video Music Awards in 1984, Ronnie Wood and I were the opening act on the show, at Radio City Music Hall, and were then given the honour of presenting a lifetime achievement award to Quincy Jones. Alas, somewhere between our performance and the presentation, we imbibed a little freely in the green room, and returned to do the honours wearing a lampshade (me) and carrying an ironing board (Woody). I’m not sure that this was felt to have achieved the aimed-for solemnity.

  But I had cause to be most grateful for the largesse of MTV in 1993 when the station invited me to do one of its Unplugged shows. This was the format which – counter-intuitively for the original home of the wall-to-wall video – invited artists to play pared-down, acoustic-instrument-only sets in front of a small audience in a simple, unadorned studio. Eric Clapton and Paul McCartney had already appeared and released albums of their performances, and now it was my turn.

  It was a nerve-wracking prospect. Quite apart from following Clapton and McCartney, there was a lot of pressure to get it right and the format was very exposing: you make a mistake in that setting, and your mistake is going to get heard. Also, traditions of the show dictated that all musicians remain seated for the duration, an aspect I thought I was going to have trouble with. What? No running around? No slinging the microphone stand? No knee-slides? Over the course of a two-hour stage show, I commonly expect to lose in excess of 4lb in weight through sweat and exertion. A seat was going to feel like a straitjacket to me.

  In January 1993, I convened a band at a studio in Los Angeles for three weeks of rehearsals. It was a bit of an old school reunion, and also a merging of the troops: Ronnie Wood came and sat in; and Kevin Savigar and Jim ‘the Somerset Segovia’ Cregan from the early solo bands were there, with Chuck Kentis, Jeff Golub and Carmine Rojas from the later line-ups. The first thing to notice was how many of us, with the slow but inexorable march of time, now seemed to need glasses: me, Woody, Jim, Carmine . . . There were spectacles all over the stage.

  Woody had arrived in a four-by-four, and his first move was to invite everyone out to the car park to have a look in its boot. He flung open the lid, and inside was what basically amounted to a mobile pub: coolers containing beers, spirits and fine wines from all corners of the globe. We were, Woody insisted, free to nip out and help ourselves at any point. So that set the tone for the rehearsals that followed.

  And, of course, the trip from electric to acoustic was, for some of my old songs (‘Every Picture Tells a Story’, ‘Mandolin Wind’, ‘Maggie May’), a short journey to travel; merely a journey back to their roots, in fact. It was apparent very quickly that the combination of these songs, in this format, with these musicians, was going to produce something special.

  We recorded the show on 5 February at Universal Music Studios. The audience was so close – intimidatingly close, like a pub audience. And in the round, too, so there was absolutely no chance of escape. In the event, even confined to a seat, I still managed to kick my legs up and swivel about as much as possible and occasionally lean to one side to put Woody off. But between the monkeying around and the banter between numbers, the show seemed to gather a real momentum, and I found myself right back in these songs and connecting emotionally with them to a depth I hadn’t experienced for years.

  Indeed, the performance ended up totally taking me over. On the last day of rehearsal, literally the day before the show, to general, muttered alarm from the band, I had decided to throw in ‘Have I Told You Lately’, the Van Morrison ballad which I had recorded in 1991 for the Vagabond Heart album. And when we got to the end of that song on the night, I found myself thinking of Rachel, and Renee, just shy of eight months old, and I made a cradling motion with my arms and found that I had moved myself to tears.

  When I watched the show back afterwards, I realised that I had just delivered probably the best set of vocal performances of my career. And what was heartening for me about this experience was its demonstration that, if you stripped it all back, and took away the noise and the showbusiness and the fooling around, this was what I had: a voice that could carry a song. And if the truth be known, as an artist, that was all I had been trying to prove about myself from the very beginning.

  The recordings were released as ‘unplugged . . . and seated’, Arnold having deftly crossed the diplomatic minefield surrounding MTV’s Unplugged branding in order to secure the use of the lower-case lettering and the addition of the reference to my out-of-character containment in the chair. I hadn’t had an album do so well in America since Blondes Have More Fun in 1978. We toured the show through 1993 and on into 1994, and then, on New Year’s Eve that year, it was back to Rio de Janeiro for a one-off show.

  No Go-Go’s this time and no swimming in sewage-infested waters. No audience of 200,000, either. This time there were 3.5 million people there.

  That night held the Guinness World Record for the largest audience attending a concert. The scale of it was unfeasibly huge. When the crew went to check the sound system – big clumps of PA speakers distributed every 100 yards or so along the shoreline – they had to use a taxi.

  And before the show? I had the shits. Not out of fear, though. I had the shits because of something I had eaten. We were supposed to go on at midnight, and at 10.30 p.m. I still couldn’t get out of bed. A doctor gave me a shot – and then I really did have the shits. But it seemed to clear everything out and it gave me enough energy to do the show. Alas, I can tell you very little about the experience of standing up in front of that many people and being the centre of that much attention, because I felt so groggy. But at least I didn’t cancel. Cancelling on 3.5 million people is not something you really want to countenance. And at least it wasn’t my voice this time.

  The morning after, however, I was taken in a dirigible above the site so that I could see the area that we had played to. It seemed to stretch on for ever, along the bay and right around the horseshoe, an endless strip of
sand where the scaffolding and staging was now being dismantled and where some of the local populace appeared to have done a good job already of making off with the woodwork. I’m quite glad I saw the full expanse of it the day after, rather than the afternoon before. I might not have gone on at all.

  That following day, I got into serious trouble when the paparazzi snapped me drinking a can of Coca-Cola. Nothing scandalous about that, of course. Except that the event had been sponsored by Pepsi.

  Incidentally, the Rolling Stones have also played to a lot of people on Copacabana beach (although nowhere near as many as I did), and Ronnie Wood says, in his book: ‘Rod Stewart holds the all-time record for a concert crowd on Copacabana Beach but he played there on New Year’s Eve and it’s tradition that everybody celebrates New Year’s Eve on the beach, so no disrespect to Rod – people would have been there anyway. We (the Rolling Stones) claim the record for the most people ever on the beach who came to see a concert.’

  To which I have only one thing to say.

  Bollocks.

  * * *

  I had plans. I had already sold the house in Carolwood Drive and arranged for the building of a brand-new mansion in Beverly Park. Now I planned to move house in England, too. The Wood House in Epping meant a lot to me, but it’s a listed building, meaning you can’t go knocking it around, and I had always had my eye out for something bigger that I could adapt. In 1998 I made an offer for Stargroves, a beautiful country mansion in Hampshire, England. Mick Jagger used to own it and it now belonged to Frank Williams, who ran the Williams Formula One team. Williams wanted to sell and we agreed a price. Then I began to look into selling the Wood House. David and Victoria Beckham were after a place near London and seemed keen to take it off me. Meanwhile, I contacted interior designers and landscape gardeners and began to discuss plans for what I was going to do with Stargroves. I was buzzing with enthusiasm. Few things make me happier than a building project.