Rod: The Autobiography (36 page)

Pretty truculent by this stage, I simply said, ‘Well, find me a great song, then.’

And then I went away to sulk for a couple of weeks. Paul Young! Fucking hell!

Still, the good thing that came out of this conversation was that in mid 1989 Dickins visited me in Epping, clutching a cassette and a ghetto-blaster. He said, ‘I want you to listen to this,’ and he played me a song. When it finished he said, ‘Don’t say anything.’ And then he played it through again. When it finished the second time, he again said, ‘Don’t say anything.’ And then he played it a third time. By then I was wishing I had written it. And I was bursting to sing it.

The song was Tom Waits’ ‘Downtown Train’. It had a melody that connected emotionally and a lyric that absolutely ached
with yearning. My son Sean, who was eight at this time, had come into the room during the third playing of the song and said afterwards, ‘Why was that guy singing so bad?’ Which made the point very clearly, really: here was a great, great song, but sung by someone whose voice was always going to be an acquired taste, therefore hindering the song’s chance of being a hit. (I love Tom Waits’ voice, but it’s not for everyone.) I recorded ‘Downtown Train’ with the hugely talented Trevor Horn and, even though the album had technically closed, it was inserted at the very last minute, following some expert lobbying of Warner Bros. in America by Arnold, as a new track for the
Storyteller
compilation – the box set retrospective of my humble career (and still available from all reputable stockists). It gave me a hit – Top 10 in the UK and number three in the US Billboard – and it got me on the cover of
Rolling Stone
again. But, more importantly than any of that, it reminded a few people who I was and what I could do – a few people who, maybe, used to know but had forgotten, or maybe who had chosen to forget and turned away. And it reminded me, too.

* * *

Pretty much every aspect of the business I’m in has, at some time or other, and for however short a period, seemed slightly irksome to me. Songwriting, recording, producing, making videos, doing promotion: there have been phases when each of those has, for whatever reason, failed to gladden my heart or come to seem a bit of a chore. That’s bound to be the case with any job: you go on and off things, blow a bit hot and cold in certain areas.

Performing, though – never.

Since I had got past the initial nerves and self-consciousness of my rock band apprenticeship in the 1960s, and finally come out from behind the amplifiers, I don’t think there had been a single occasion when the thought of getting up and singing in front of an audience, with the band thundering away behind
me, hasn’t filled me with pure, unadulterated enthusiasm. Accordingly, whatever else was happening to my commitment levels and concentration in the 1980s, my attitude to touring was unwavering. I turned forty in 1985, but, perhaps subconsciously in defiance of that, I was flinging myself into performing with more abandon than ever before, storming about stages like an idiot. I’m often tempted to think it’s playing so much football that has turned my knees into the noble ruins which are currently to be found separating my thighs from my shins, but, looking back at recordings of myself throwing myself around in the 1980s, I realise that a lot of the damage has been done by gratuitous knee-sliding across the stages of the world’s enormodomes.

Let me stress, too, that my enthusiasm for performing has never had to be artificially stimulated. Between the end of the show and the encores, the crew would have a little reviving sniff of something available for me at the rear of the stage, which, combined with the heady release at the end of a successful night, would send me back onto the stage in a state of enormously enjoyable euphoria. It was like a reward: ‘Well done. Have a little line.’ But before a show, I have never needed to take anything to get me up. The prospect of getting out in front of an audience will do that on its own.

Fuelling up with cocaine mid-show did seem to be a fairly standard practice among the musicians in my band in this era, although Patrick ‘Boiler’ Logue did his best to complicate the process. A little background, if I may: Boiler had originally joined the crew in the mid 1970s as a guitar technician, in which capacity he quickly revealed himself to be a master of, not just guitar management, but unexpected nudity in public places. Guitarists would step into the wings to switch instruments and find their next guitar being held out to them by a completely naked Boiler. And few who witnessed it will ever forget the sight of Boiler emerging from the gents in a Tokyo cocktail lounge, being given a naked piggyback by Peter Mackay, the tour manager, for the entertainment of the band, who were
the only people in the bar when Boiler went into the bathroom but who, as he realised too late, had been subsequently joined by a large party of Japanese businessmen.

When he moved up to stage manager, Boiler’s domain inevitably expanded, enabling him to practise nudity more widely across the backstage area and also to put into operation such time-honoured pranks as placing peanuts in harmonicas, filling accordions with talcum powder and taping together the undersides of organ keys so that if one key was depressed, every single note sounded.

But where Boiler really excelled was in devising ways to come between the band members and their drugs. He more than once placed cling film over the lines of cocaine set out offstage for the brass section so that when they hopped off for a reviving snort, they found themselves repeatedly sniffing in frustration at immoveable powder. And, classically, in order to test the desperation for his break-time fix of one particular band member, whom we choose not to name and shame but who was actually Carmine Rojas, the bass player, Boiler laid the cocaine out very neatly along the most intimate part of his own anatomy, and then stood waiting in the wings, naked, with the said intimate part extended between thumb and forefinger. A brief stand-off ensued, as the musician, between numbers, weighed up the pros and cons, but, as it happened, Carmine was indeed very desperate for his pick-me-up.

The shows in the 1980s got louder and wilder and bigger. On the tour for the
Camouflage
album in January 1985, we headlined at the inaugural Rock in Rio festival in Rio de Janeiro in front of an audience of 200,000 people. You don’t often see those sorts of crowds down the Fisherman’s Arms in Purley, let me tell you. Rock in Rio was altogether one of the most beautifully organised and extravagantly wild festivals I have ever played at. We had flown in fearing chaos, but we couldn’t have been more wrong – at least, not in the way the event was run. A series of giant banners were flying from the buildings on the waterfront: ‘Welcome, Rod Stewart’, ‘Welcome, Queen’. The
festival took place in a vast clearing that had been cut into the rainforest. They had three separate stages on train tracks with a points system – which was always going to appeal to me, I guess, given my interest in railways – and these stages were simply shunted off, re-dressed and shunted back out again, like clockwork. And the noise that came at you when you walked out in front of that 200,000-strong crowd – just this wave of sound that was almost like a wind: a complete thrill. It sent the hairs up on the back of my neck and on my arms and probably in other places that I didn’t have time to check.

Offstage, the hotels were all full of musicians for a week, and scenes of madness inevitably abounded. Queen headlined on the Friday night (I headlined on the Saturday), and Freddie Mercury was to be found wandering about wearing a pair of anatomically correct female breasts. Cocaine was available at roughly fourpence a bucket. The only dark mark on the whole occasion was that, after our second performance, back at the hotel, we took on the Go-Go’s, Belinda Carlisle’s all-girl rock group, in a coke-snorting competition. This was a tactical error which someone, surely, should have been in a position to warn us about. Those girls could snort the lacquer off a table. We lost, heavily.

When the morning came, we thought it would be fun to enjoy the small remaining amount of cocaine down on the beach. Before we did so, I proposed a relay swimming race out to a pile of wood, visible in the middle distance, bobbing on the water. Arnold, my manager, got off to a quick start and reached the target soonest. But he swam back even quicker. It wasn’t a pile of wood. In Rio, we discovered, they released the sewage into the water at around 5.45 a.m. From afar came the sound of screaming band members.

Still, at least we still had that last line of cocaine to look forward to. It had been entrusted to Tony Brock, the drummer. ‘Break it out, Tony,’ we said. Tony reached into the pocket of his shorts – the wet shorts he had just swum in – and produced a small dripping package which had once been our cocaine. Chins hit the floor.

In the other performing landmark of this period, in July 1986, I made my first appearance at Wembley Stadium. Football fans will know what that meant to me. I had dreamed of playing there as a professional and I had invaded its pitch as a drunk and euphoric spectator, but now I got to stand at one end of it and look out across 66,000 people with their arms in the air in the pelting rain and, even allowing for Scotland’s momentous victory over the English in 1977, that felt like the best thing that had happened to me in that ground. Or a close second, anyway.

Something else that was lovely about that gig at Wembley: backstage as my special guest, and at the party afterwards, was Sarah, the daughter I had given up for adoption. She had got back in touch with me in 1985, and we met in London for tea, privately, and were able to talk properly and openly, and the terrible awkwardness of that initial meeting in the recording studio in Los Angeles was set aside and we began again. Both of us knew it could never be an ordinary father–daughter relationship. I hadn’t brought her up, I hadn’t changed her nappy, taken her to school, done homework with her, played sports with her. I wasn’t around when she brought her first boyfriend home. Those fatherly bonds aren’t there and, try as you might, you can’t conjure them from the air. But we have our own bond, which grew still stronger in 2007 after the death of Evelyn, her adoptive mother. And backstage that night in 1986, it felt special to be able to introduce her to people, saying, ‘This is my eldest daughter.’

* * *

It was all very well me being enthusiastic about touring, but the major worry I faced, as the 1980s wore on, was whether my voice continued to share my enthusiasm. Going out on the road for at least six months of every year was my idea of a life well lived, but it was clearly beginning to take its toll on my vocal cords – sensitive enough little things in the first place.
And if they rebelled, I genuinely was going to be fucked. But what could I do? The band played so loudly. We kind of prided ourselves on it. The volume at which we played was a badge of honour. And I think this, too, in a way, was the legacy of ‘Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?’. It was like: ‘We’ll show ’em. We’re no disco pussies. We’re a rock ’n’ roll band. A loud, kick-ass rock ’n’ roll band.’ Night after night I was forcing my voice to compete with that volume, and by the end of the show I had very commonly blown my throat out. The next day, I would walk around feeling as though I had been gargling barbed wire. Then it would get to 6 p.m., two hours before the next show, and I would realise that I simply didn’t have a voice to sing with.

The solution was not a particularly healthy one: I started taking steroids. Prednisone tablets, to be precise. I took them intermittently at first, but by the time the 1980s ended I would be well on my way to developing an addiction to them.

Steroids make you hungry, they keep you awake, they cause your cheeks to bloat . . . but they make you sing like a bird. Good old steroids, then. Except not. Much worse was to come of this in due course.

Meanwhile, my relationship with Kelly played out to its end in a kind of doomed slow motion. The firmness of purpose I seemed to have found on our trip to Spain and the commitment to her that I had declared soon dissolved. While Kelly was pregnant, I began seeing another model. This, clearly, was the behaviour of an arsehole. The affair was purely about sex and heading nowhere at all. But I couldn’t stop slipping away to see her. Horrible, horrible behaviour. She rang the house one day and Kelly, who was then eight months pregnant, answered it. I heard her say, ‘Couldn’t you at least wait until I’ve had this baby?’ Apparently the model said to her, ‘I’m obviously giving him something you’re not.’ It was all really unpleasant, a mortifying testament to how cock-happy I was in those days. The shame of what I did to Kelly there still haunts me now, to the point where I was reluctant to mention it here.

I think Kelly thought she might have the baby and leave me immediately, but the birth of Ruby in 1987 brought us together again and we did, in fact, have many happy and contented times in the first years of her life. After my divorce from Alana, I was able to return to the house at Carolwood, and Kelly and I divided our time between there and the house in Epping. My family loved Kelly, Kelly loved England, we had a beautiful daughter, and we were blessed materially with everything that we could possibly have wanted.

Yet, for all that, the little demon was at work in my head saying, ‘Don’t settle, don’t get tied.’ Anxiety, the shadow of my previous, mistimed and failed, marriage, the knowledge deep down that again it wasn’t right for me and that I wouldn’t make it last . . . to Kelly’s increasing exasperation and uncertainty, these things made me shy away from marriage.

Unlike, strangely enough, my dear friend Elton John. In 1984, Elton rang me and said, ‘I’ve got married, dear. To a woman.’ To which the only possible response was, ‘What the fuck?’ Elton gave an interview to
Rolling Stone
in the 1970s in which he referred to the fact that he might be bisexual, but it was common knowledge among the people around him that he was gay.

He said, ‘I just thought it was the right thing to do, dear.’

I said, ‘What are you going to do when you have sex?’

He said, ‘Oh, I’ll just tie a couple of lolly sticks around it.’