Rod Stewart: Squeezing out the last rasp

By ADAM SWEETING

Poor old Rod-er-ney. He can't even enjoy a day out with his gazelle-like blonde girlfriend amid the braying and snorting of Royal Ascot (and that's just the punters) without the press trying to wind him up.

As reported recently, Rod headed for the champagne tent with "model and photographer" Penny Lancaster, where smirking hacks demanded to know how the beaky-nosed lothario felt about the news that his estranged wife, Rachel Hunter, had launched divorce proceedings in Los Angeles.

Stewart claimed he had no idea what they were talking about, even though Rachel and Penny had looked daggers at each other when they both attended the Laureus World Sports Awards in Monte Carlo in last month, but secretly he was probably quite pleased to be asked.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to remember what it was that made Rod famous in the first place, since his once-unavoidable presence in the A-list of rock megastars has been all but erased by the babble of rap, R&B, vacuum-moulded TV nonentities and everything else that currently gets labelled as pop.

Rod seems to have metamorphosed into Private Eye's cartoon character Celeb, a frazzled old rocker living in taste-free isolation with his butler and his platinum discs, the latest collagen-and-botox mannequin in tow and a couple of Ferraris crouched on the gravel outside.

Getting in the gossip columns for anything, even news of a distant divorce from a woman he separated from four years ago, has got to be welcome.

And there's the new musical. Tonight's the Night, which will open at the Victoria Palace theatre in London later in the year, is described as "an irresistible musical inspired by the hits of Rod Stewart". The plot is said to concern "the exploits of a shy young man" who emulates his hero, Rod, in order to seduce women.

But do you know anybody who would admit that their hero is Rod Stewart?

Stewart made gutsy, heartfelt music with the Faces and on such solo albums as Gasoline Alley and Every Picture Tells a Story, but all that was more than 30 years ago.

In 2003, is there anybody out there who wants to emulate a man approaching 60, with a rat's-nest hairdo and a face that looks as if it's been ploughed up by trail-bikers, singing as though somebody just rammed a cheese-grater down his throat?

It's difficult not to conclude that the stage musical has become the last money-squeezing gasp of yesterday's entertainer, yet perhaps there is something quaintly admirable in the way Stewart has always done exactly what he wants, and to hell with critics or credibility.

Certainly there was a time when he provoked envy, not for hair-raisingly frightful tripe like Hot Legs or Do Ya Think I'm Sexy? or Love Touch, but for his brash expat lifestyle in California, with his US$20 million Beverly Hills mansion, wallet-piercingly pricey art collection and most of all his long streak of skimpily clad babes.

It is hard to remember who came first or which one was which, but let's see - there was Britt Ekland, who complained that the tight-fisted Stewart "never bought me flowers or presents, not once". (As Rod's old pal Ron Wood put it, Rod is "tighter than two coats of paint".) His marriage to Alana Hamilton produced two children, Kimberley and Sean, while actress Kelly Emberg is mother to his daughter Ruby.

During his marriage to Rachel Hunter, the priapic Stewart sired Renee and Liam, and the mounting total of offspring suggests that Stewart doesn't consider it wise to rely solely on his music to carry his name into posterity.

According to the American critic Robert Palmer in the booklet accompanying Stewart's Storyteller four-CD anthology in 1990: "You must understand that when it was created, Do Ya Think I'm Sexy? was as deeply felt ... as his earlier music, made in vastly different circumstances, had been. Stewart was never a middle-class art school-type rocker. He was as authentically working class, and as determined to ride the music to riches and glory, as Elvis had been."

On one level this is sheer idiocy: "you can't criticise Rod because he's working class" - although it was written long before Changing Rooms' Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen flounced along to show us that aesthetic emancipation could be the province of all, from stockbroker to pub landlord.

But what our learned friend was groping towards (I think) was that Stewart behaved as he did because he could. If rock'n'roll ever meant anything before it reached its current condition of being an industrialised palliative, it was that you could change your life if you wanted to. The responsibility and the consequences were all yours.

For Rod, the youngest of five children born in Highgate, north London, in January 1945, the son of a Scottish newsagent, this was splendid news.

Stewart attended the William Grimshaw school in Hornsey at the same time as Ray and Dave Davies, who would later form the Kinks, but he didn't follow them to art school, the free-form ideas laboratory that would shape a generation of British musicians.

Instead, Stewart served a few weeks as an apprentice at Brentford football club - football remains one of his great passions, and his house near Epping in Essex has its own full-size football pitch - before slinging his knapsack on his back and setting off around Europe as a busker.

Back in England, the down-at-heel apprentice rocker decided music was the only career worth pursuing and his raspy, R&B inflected vocals (Stewart has never made any bones about his debt to soulman Sam Cooke) brought him to the attention of the likes of Long John Baldry, Julie Driscoll and Brian Auger.

By late 1966, he had hooked up with guitarist Jeff Beck in the prototype Jeff Beck Group, with whom he would record two benchmark albums, Truth and Beck-Ola. Truth, in particular, was a brilliant blues-rock fusion which threw down a gauntlet smartly picked up by Jimmy Page and Led Zeppelin.

But the Jeff Beck Group was, axiomatically, run by Jeff Beck, and the ambitious Stewart wanted control of his own destiny. In 1969, he accomplished the unusual feat of signing a deal with Warner Bros as part of the Faces, while also convincing Phonogram to take him on as a solo artist.

Hence, sceptics may now be tempted to see the boozy, carousing music Stewart made with the Faces as merely rest and recuperation from the serious business of promoting his solo career, and critics will always pick out those early solo hits, Maggie May and Reason to Believe and at a pinch You Wear It Well, as the focus of any serious consideration of Stewart's music.

His subsequent move to Los Angeles in 1975 marked the point where Stewart moved beyond parochial concerns of musical "authenticity" and embraced the fantasy lifestyle of the scruffy chancer who had won his own personal lottery.

Considering the enormous success he would enjoy with such albums as A Night on the Town and Blondes Have More Fun, it was the aspirational being-Rod-Stewart factor that mattered more to his listeners than his knowledge of elderly R&B B-sides.

Rod's latest musical incarnation is as the mellow crooner - or as mellow as he can be - of It Had to Be You - The Great American Songbook, his collection of such standards as These Foolish Things or The Way You Look Tonight. Stewart sounds about as convincing as Atomic Kitten singing Tosca, but regrettably it sold well enough to persuade him to record a sequel. There are bound to be a few more blondes left in him yet.

- INDEPENDENT