Rod: The Autobiography

by Rod Stewart

  And then it came, right out of the blue. One day I was showing Rachel pictures of some furniture that I had ordered. And I noticed that she wasn’t looking at them. She was looking at me. And she said, very quietly, ‘I don’t think I’m going to be around.’

  I didn’t know what she meant. She had to repeat it. ‘I don’t think I’m going to be around.’

  And then it all spilled out: that she was unhappy, that she had been unhappy for a while – maybe for as much as a whole year; that she had been trying and trying to conceal her unhappiness, but that she couldn’t any more and that she was going to leave me.

  It was like getting cracked across the back of the head with a cricket bat. I had no inkling this was coming. Not a solitary clue. When I thought back over the previous weeks, I remembered how I had been in Los Angeles, rehearsing with the band, and there had been possibly fewer phone calls from Rachel than there might normally have been. But it was a tiny detail, and I had just assumed she was busy with the kids. Otherwise, I could think of nothing I had missed that would make sense of this.

  I asked her whether she had found someone else. She hadn’t. She said it was all coming from inside her; that she was unhappy in her life. In fact, she didn’t really feel like it was her life. She felt she had entered my world as an unformed 21-year-old and been consumed by it and that now she was merely trailing along in my wake all the time. She was worried that she had no identity of her own. She had reached twenty-nine and she could see thirty coming and yet she felt she didn’t even know who she was. She needed to go.

  That conversation took days to digest. I was in a state of disbelief. The realisation that I had been blithely forging on, obliviously making plans for the future, and not reading the feelings of the person I thought I was closest to, was crushing. I felt foolish and I alternated between retreating into myself in my embarrassment and reaching out to plead with her to change her mind.

  When I realised there was no difference I could make, I began to extricate myself from the house purchase. I withdrew my offer for Stargroves. I cancelled furniture orders and called off designers. People were very understanding, but it was a painful and humiliating process.

  Rachel’s decision to leave came at the end of 1998 but, clearly, going our separate ways at Christmas would have been particularly awful for the children, so we decided to be together through the holiday. In the interim, I had a run of British shows, including five nights at Earls Court, which were the most difficult performances I have ever done. I felt like I was singing with a weight in my chest. In London, especially, I had a fantasy that Rachel would appear at the show and everything would be all right. I kept looking over to the wings, thinking, ‘She’ll come tonight.’ When she didn’t, it cut me to ribbons.

  For Christmas, we flew to the house in Palm Beach. News of our decision to separate had got into the papers by now. On the plane over, I found myself sitting near Jeffrey Archer, the novelist and former Conservative politician. ‘Rod,’ he said, ‘this is when you should start writing your book.’ And I did. I wrote a few things down, but I soon set it aside because I couldn’t concentrate.

  We said goodbye, quietly and painfully, and Rachel flew off to New Zealand with the kids to see her family. It was only when I was back in Los Angeles, on my own in the house we had shared, and realising that our relationship was genuinely over, that the misery really came over me. It was like some kind of nineteenth-century romantic fever. For four months, I was beside myself. I lost 12lb in weight. I felt cold all the time. I took to lying on the sofa in the day, with a blanket over me and holding a hot water bottle against my chest. I knew then why they call it heartbroken: you can feel it in your heart.

  I was distracted, almost to the point of madness. One week, I had Renee and Liam staying with me, and also Ruby, and I decided out of the blue to take them off somewhere. A family holiday, a week away. I thought this would jolt me back into life. I walked into the room and clapped my hands and said, ‘Right, we’re going to Hawaii.’ I told them to pack a bag for themselves and hurried them out the door. It was insane. When we got to the other end, Renee and Ruby had packed seashells and Barbie dolls. None of them had packed anything to sleep in. I sat on the beach while they played, and tried to feel connected. After two days, I couldn’t be still any longer and I gathered them up and brought them home again.

  Friends rallied round, and Kim, my daughter, moved back into the house with me and that provided a real comfort. I went to a bookstore and left with a bag full of books off the self-help shelves and drew some consolation from one of them: The Road Less Travelled by M. Scott Peck, which talked about the importance of suffering in order to come out the other end stronger, and seemed inspiring to me in the midst of my misery.

  However, other methods of pulling myself out of the depths descended into farce. I tried to take up yoga. A man came to the house to teach me the fundamentals. As I was attempting to master a beginner’s level ‘balancing table’ position, I fell over into the fireplace. (Surely if God had meant us to do yoga, he would have put our heads behind our knees.)

  And I tried therapy. This had never really appealed to me. Alana had convinced me to go with her for counselling a couple of times when our relationship was in trouble, but I hadn’t seen any lasting results from it. For me, it was a bit like a Chinese meal: very filling at the time, but then an hour later you’re hungry again. Of course, I’m British. We don’t do therapy. We do strong cups of tea, a couple of ginger nuts and a stiff upper lip.

  But I was in extremis, so I went. Indeed, I tried three different therapists. Therapist No. 1 was a middle-aged woman, and what can I say? She came on to me. I’m sure there are one or two stern paragraphs advising against that kind of thing in the professional statutes for therapists. Anyway, in answer to your obvious question: no, I didn’t respond to her interest. Instead I got out pretty sharpish and moved on to . . .

  . . . Therapist No. 2, who suggested that I get a cat. Now, that wasn’t such a stupid idea, really. I’m more of a dog person, it’s true, but a cat would, I suppose, have given me something to look after and could perhaps have made a handy hot-water-bottle substitute, if I’d got one that was tame enough. However, ‘get a cat’ wasn’t quite the heart-soothing, spirit-lifting advice I was hoping to hear at this time. And certainly not at $150 an hour.

  And then there was Therapist No. 3. And he said, ‘Don’t worry about it. You’ve seen one cunt, you’ve seen them all.’

  For Christ’s sake. Put the kettle on and break out the ginger nuts.

  And the guy who really helped me? Big Al. I was lying listlessly on the sofa in front of the television in the middle of the day, which is something I never do. The door opened and Alan Sewell, my old friend, the Ilford scrap dealer, came in like a ray of sunshine, unannounced and all the way from Essex, eleven hours away by plane, on his own – a man who absolutely hates travelling. I’ll never forget that he did that for me. It was the beginning of getting over it.

  I think of it now as eight amazing years spent with someone I deeply loved, albeit that it ended in delusion on my part. At the heart of those years was a girl who was too young, who hadn’t grown up and eventually needed to spread her wings, only to find by then that everything was locked in tightly around her. And even though it ruined me for a while when she left, I knew how brave of her that was.

  I knew something else: clearly I would never be happily married.

  CHAPTER 17

  In which our hero is obliged by cruel circumstances beyond his control to contemplate the end of his career and is consequently driven to reflect widely on life, death, destiny and the meaning of everything. Sort of.

  IN MAY 2000, I went for a routine medical check-up at Cedars-Sinai hospital in Los Angeles. I expected to be in and out, as usual. After all, I was clearly as fit as a butcher’s dog – working out every day, doing shows, still playing weekend football at the age of fifty-five. Following the various tests, I sat down in the waiting room and con
fidently waited to be dismissed.

  The wait went on for a little while. And then a doctor called me back into his office and explained that a scan had revealed something they wanted to have a further look at – something on my thyroid gland. The following day I went back to the hospital and underwent a biopsy. Under a local anaesthetic, part of the affected area was removed using a needle and taken away for analysis. And the day after that I got a call at home, which I took standing up and which made my palms go cold. The results of the tests indicated that the ‘something’ on my thyroid gland was a malignant growth: cancer.

  That piece of news will really do it to you. When the initial numbness wore off, I felt fearful, vulnerable to a degree that I never had before. The only blessing was that measures were in train so quickly that I didn’t have much time for those feelings to reign. Two days after the biopsy, I was driven back to Cedars-Sinai for an operation, checking into the hospital at 5 a.m. to escape notice and going under the name Billy Potts (the names of my two dogs, in fact) to narrow the chances of a leak to the press, who would probably not exactly shy away from the story of ‘Rock Star Rod’ going into hospital for a ‘cancer op’.

  Before the operation I lay on a trolley in the anteroom to the theatre, woozy from the pre-med, with my headphones on, singing along to a CD on a Walkman – Sam Cooke, my ever-reliable comfort in times of need. Outside, a nurse passed through the waiting room and nodded in the direction of the noise of my voice coming through the wall.

  ‘He’s actually not bad, is he?’ she said.

  Annie Challis, my managerial assistant, who had come along to the hospital to look after me, replied, ‘We’re hoping he might take it up professionally one day.’

  The procedure took four hours and brought the surgeon’s knife to within a fraction of an inch of my vocal cords. Any slip at that point and it really would have been ‘Goodnight, Vienna’ as far as my career was concerned. But the operation was a complete success. When I came round, I was given the news that the surgeon had removed everything that needed to be removed. And, because all the bad stuff was out, no subsequent course of chemotherapy was needed – which, in turn, meant there was no risk that I would lose my hair. And let’s face it: if we’re ranking threats to the survival of my career, losing my hair would be second only to losing my voice.

  That evening my ex-wife Rachel visited me in my hospital room, bringing our children, Renee and Liam, and Annie went out and brought us all lamb stew back from Le Dôme restaurant – which I was only able to pick at. But the atmosphere was celebratory. A frightening episode seemed to have passed.

  In fact, the real alarm, from my point of view, was only now starting. In order for the surgeon to get to the tumour, it had been necessary to cut through the muscles in my throat. The muscles would mend. But, as it was explained to me in subsequent consultations, the muscle-memory built up in them over years of singing would be gone. Those muscles wouldn’t have a clue what they were doing for a while. They would need to relearn.

  Naturally enough, I was keen to know: would they manage it?

  Give it three months of rest, the doctor said, and I could fully expect some kind of singing voice to return.

  Phew.

  Of course, it might not be the same voice . . .

  Ah.

  So, what if the voice I got back was a different voice? What if the voice I got back was the voice of – for example – a not very good singer? I didn’t want any old voice back. I wanted my voice back.

  Rest for three months was all the doctors could say, and see what happens.

  Never mind the singing; it was several weeks before I could even talk in anything other than a scratchy whisper. My voice had always had a rasp to it. Now it was nothing but a rasp.

  As for singing, three months went by and I still couldn’t do it. Not a note. Four months, five months . . . nothing. I opened my mouth and all that came out was a thin, weak, sandpapery sound – colourless, without tone. These were some of the longest weeks of my life. I would wake up in the morning and think, ‘Well, maybe today there will be a difference I can notice.’ And then, heart-sinkingly, no change. Hadn’t they said three months? Before long I was up to six and I still couldn’t sing.

  Was it time to reconcile myself to the idea that it was all over? And how would I go about doing that? ‘Ah, well, you’ve had a decent crack at it, mate. Sold a few records, made a bit of money, had your share of fun. Actually, more than your share. Look on the bright side: if they’d offered you all this when you started out, you would have bitten off their hands.’

  Yes, but no more singing, no more records, no more performing . . . How easy would it be to let all that go? And what would remain of me, in its absence? ‘Didn’t you used to be Rod Stewart?’ How easy would it be to have it all just . . . stop?

  And not at the time of my choosing, either, but abruptly, miserably, as the result of some random cellular malfunction. No big farewell under a spotlight on a stage somewhere; just a shrug and a silent wave goodbye.

  I once read something Sting said: that if it all ended for him tomorrow, if the music dried up and the money was gone and the fame evaporated, then he would be perfectly happy living in a one-bedroom flat again, the way he had done before he made it. I bet he bloody wouldn’t, though. I know I bloody wouldn’t.

  What was I going to do with myself, in the absence of singing? I was definitely going to need a job; I mentioned earlier my dad’s recipe for a man’s contentment: a job, a sport and a hobby. I couldn’t lack one of those ingredients and remain content. One day, in the midst of my misery, I stared out of the window and thought, ‘I know, if I can’t be a singer, I’ll be a landscape gardener.’ The designing, the vision, the planning, the standing there on the terrace and pointing: an Italianate fountain here, a statue of Hercules there, a stand of orange trees below . . . I could do that. R. Stewart & Sons, Landscape Gardeners.

  But even as I was hatching this unlikely plan, part of me was sane enough to understand the following: that if you’ve been a singer in a rock ’n’ roll band, there is very little that you can do afterwards that is likely to match it for job satisfaction. Singer in a rock ’n’ roll band is, in my opinion, quite simply the best job in the world. It could only be a comedown after that – even if I turned out to be a very good landscape gardener indeed.

  When the sixth month passed, though, something clicked in my mind and I changed tactics. I had been waiting for my voice to come back, and it hadn’t shown up. What about trying to force it to come back? And if I screwed it up for good in the process, well, what was the difference?

  I contacted a guy called Nate Lamb. He was a cantor at a nearby synagogue and I had been told that he knew everything there was to know about voices and making them stronger. Nate came round and he showed me some vocal exercises: him at the piano, me sat beside him, feeling self-conscious and worried. It was like a daily workout for the voice – one that I still use today. He got me doing scales, runs, arpeggios. He forced me to make raspberry noises and humming sounds. He was determined, patient and confident. He was exactly what I needed. Day after day, Nate came back, and day after day we did the same thing. I owe that guy one hell of a lot.

  And then I went to stage two of my plan. Stage two was that I would phone up my band, get them up to the house, install them in the garage and just fucking sing. And if the voice went, which it certainly was going to, I would do the same thing the next day, and the next day, and the day after that, until eventually it came back properly, or didn’t come back at all, whichever.

  So the band came over – Chuck Kentis, the keyboard player; Carmine Rojas on bass; Paul Warren, the guitarist; Dave Palmer on drums – and we thought ‘Maggie May’ would be as good a place as any to start. I managed the opening line, and then the voice disappeared entirely. But never mind. We reconvened the following day. And that time I could manage a pair of lines, and then the voice shut down again.

  But the next day, it was half a verse. And s
oon after that, it was two verses.

  And then, after a week or so, there was a whole song there, and then a pair of songs – and then half a set, and then eventually, weeks later, a full show. The patience and faith shown by those musicians and close friends of mine in this period was extraordinary. And my throat was no longer aching like a bastard afterwards and my voice was holding strong to the end, and I knew the overwhelming relief of feeling that I could go on from here and . . . well, as Annie said to the nurse, take up singing professionally, even.

  We had put the story out that it was the removal of a benign vocal nodule, a common enough operation for singers. But the truth got out eventually and some of the papers started billing the episode as ‘Rod’s fight with cancer’.

  There was no fight, of course; no battle, no brave struggle. I wish I could pretend there was, but that would be an insult to people who really have been ill, who really have fought and battled and struggled. In my case, the cancer was there, and then a couple of days later it was gone.

  And, accordingly, I don’t feel comfortable with drawing big conclusions from my so-called ‘brush with death’, or seeing myself as a ‘cancer survivor’, or claiming to be permanently changed by it. That stuff always seems a bit too neat to me, in any case.

  It’s true, though, that you can’t face up to losing something without working out how much it matters to you – and also without realising how fortunate you were in the first place. Rock ’n’ roll is full of singers who got lucky and started putting it down to hard work. And of course there is hard work involved, but what you are working with, and trying to make the most of, is your amazing piece of luck in the first place, the quirk of fortune which means that, when you open your mouth, this particular sound comes out, rather than any other particular sound, and that this particular sound sells more than 200 million records and brings you fame all over the world and secures you a life more charmed than anyone has a right to dream of.