Rod: The Autobiography (42 page)

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 soon 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.

In those circumstances, to be the recipient of another quirk of fortune which meant that, when you got thyroid cancer, you were rid of it within a matter of days and free to carry on . . . well, lucky, lucky man. Lucky as fuck.

WHEN RACHEL LEFT,
the last thing I wanted to do was fall head over heels in love with a tall blonde girl in her twenties. I knew where that could lead a man of my years, and it wasn’t necessarily a happy place.

Within eight months I had fallen head over heels in love with a tall blonde girl in her twenties.

But this time I needed to be sure. Last time, when I thought I was right, I was absolutely wrong, and I really didn’t want to go through that again. I needed to take patient steps – assuming I was capable of doing that, which very little in my headlong romantic history thus far suggested that I was. I duly embarked upon something that I seemed to have been largely allergic to in my various love-related hurries down the years: a long courtship.

In the spring of 1999, four months after Rachel departed, and following the failed therapy and the swiftly aborted yoga, the misery of our separation began to lift. Through the clearing gloom I started dating again. I went out with Tracy Tweed, the Canadian model and actress, who was one of the funniest women I have ever met. I had some very enjoyable dates with Kimberley Conrad, who had recently separated from Hugh Hefner. And I went out for a while with Caprice Bourret, the American model. Poor Caprice was the victim of a sustained
Sound of Music
-style eviction campaign by certain of my children, who seemed to take against her, dropping pet mice in her lap and placing pictures of my ex-wife all around the house when they knew she was coming over. The relationship didn’t take off.

All these affairs were great fun, and with beautiful women for whom I had the utmost respect. But none of them was quite
the right thing at the time. I wanted to find someone to love and spend the rest of my life with.

On and off during those months, I occasionally found myself wondering about a beautiful, special woman I had met, extremely briefly, in London the previous December. Badly bruised by the end of my marriage, I had been drinking with friends at the Dorchester Hotel when a tall blonde girl in her twenties had come over and asked for an autograph. She had been cajoled into doing this as a dare by her girlfriends, who were smirking on the other side of the room.

Her name was Penny Lancaster. She was twenty-seven. And yes, she was tall and blonde, and with a drop-dead figure – I later found out that she modeled underwear – but what I was also attracted to was the real and obvious warmth she had about her, and the kindness in her face. I asked her what she did and she told me she was a model and also a photography student at Barking College in Essex. I asked her if she would find it useful to photograph one of my shows and she seemed interested in that. I told her if she came to the door at Earls Court on the Saturday night, I would make sure that there was a pass for her and she could snap away to her heart’s content.

She came to the show and took pictures, but I didn’t see her, beforehand or afterwards. Carmine Rojas, the bassist in the band, went out to the front to check that she was OK, and I knew that she had given him her phone number. Every now and again, over the next few months, I would ask Carmine to pass it on to me. But he always laughed and said, ‘Oh no – she’s much too good for you, mate.’ Eventually, though, he relented and in early August 1999, nearly eight months after that first meeting, when I was back in England for a while, I called her.

I said, ‘I’m in town. Why don’t we catch up over dinner with some friends of mine?’

‘Oh, and bring along the photos,’ I added.

We met at Neal’s, a little restaurant in Loughton, not far from the Wood House. Penny, who was now twenty-eight, arrived in ‘pleather’ trousers – quite edgy, but emphatically not
a skirt – a top that carefully concealed all trace of cleavage, and a jacket covering her arms and shoulders. I was immediately struck by her fresh face and girlish demeanour. I had invited my friends Alan ‘Big Al’ Sewell and his wife Debbie. I think Penny was nervously anticipating music-industry people, and was enormously relieved to find herself at the table with a couple who were so comforting, down to earth and hilarious to be around. It helped put her at ease.

At the start of the evening, I asked Penny if I could see the pictures she had taken, back in December, and she handed me a batch of prints. They were not the
best
concert photos I had ever seen. Penny had assumed she would be in the photographers’ pit, right in front of the stage. But the crew had put her out on the sound desk in the middle of the hall where, in the absence of a long telephoto lens, she had been reduced to taking pictures of a set of small figures jousting mistily in the distance. A lot of compensatory blowing up and cropping appeared to have gone on in the darkroom.

We put the photographs aside and ordered food and talked, and the evening went pretty smoothly right until the moment when Penny got up to use the bathroom and knocked two glasses of wine over on the adjacent table. This convinced her she had blown the date completely, but in fact it simply made the night feel even funnier and warmer.

As we walked out to the cars, I asked Penny if we could meet the next day. She said she would love to, much to my excitement, but that it was her granddad’s birthday and she was taking him out to the Theydon Oak.

I said, ‘That’s my pub.’

Penny said, ‘What, you own it?’

I said, ‘No, it’s where I go. I could see you there.’

She said, ‘I’m sure my granddad would love to meet you.’

I said, ‘Then I’ll see you tomorrow.’

The next day, not long after two in the afternoon, the intercom buzzed from the front gate.

A hesitant female voice said, ‘I’m looking for Rod?’

‘Yeah, this is Rod.’

‘Er, it’s Penny? You said you would meet me and my granddad?’

I was confused. I thought we had a date for the evening. I buzzed them in and went out onto the drive. Penny explained that her birthday treat for her grandad, Wally, was lunch, not supper. Furthermore, after the lunch had come and gone without any sign of me, Wally had stood up and said, firmly, ‘We’ll go over there. We’ll go over to Rod Stewart’s house.’

Penny had said, ‘We can’t just . . . go over there.’

And Wally had said, ‘He said he would come. And if he said he would come, we should hold him to his word.’

I shook Wally’s hand, apologised to him profusely for the misunderstanding, and then we had a long chat. In later days, when Penny and I were eventually together, Wally and I would slip off for a pint every now and again. He had been a fireman in the war, and people who have stories from that era have my ear straight away. He once told me, ‘I’ve got to be honest with you. I don’t think much of your music, but I like your taste in art.’

He had a photo of himself, sat in the driving seat of my Lamborghini, which he used to take to show people at the British Legion. The poor old boy was knocked down by a bus and killed on his way to pick up his pension at the age of ninety-five. He had that photo in his pocket that day and it went to his grave with him.

After that missed lunch, Penny and I saw each other a few times, but the relationship built very slowly and tentatively, over many months. At this point, Penny was engaged to someone with whom she had been in a relationship for ten years. She was always completely open with me about that. Recently, she said, things had not been going too well, but she was torn about letting this person go. I told her I would be there to talk to her, if she wanted me to, about her sadness over that breaking relationship and I explained that I had just been through a break-up of my own. The more we talked, the
more I realised how altogether smitten I was with Penny - yet I was proceeding very cautiously, too, and wanting to get everything absolutely right. It was a long time before we kissed for the first time. This happened at the Wood House one afternoon, after tea. We talked about Pre-Raphaelite art, which Penny had been studying as part of her course. I showed her the paintings in the room we were sitting in, and then the ones in the corridor outside. The tour continued with the paintings on the stairs, and then slowly onwards until we were looking at the paintings in my bedroom. A laden silence fell. And then, on an overwhelmingly romantic impulse, I asked Penny if she would lie back across the bed. She hesitantly did so. Then I walked round until I was directly behind her, on the other side of the bed, put my hands on her shoulders, leaned forward and kissed her, upside down. She reached up to my face and began to kiss me back. Then I stood up, took her hand, helped her to her feet and said, ‘Come on.’ And with that the art-history tour resumed.

And that, dear reader, was the birth of ‘the upside-down kiss’ which, to this day, Penny refers to as ‘the most romantic and seductive meeting of lips’ she has ever known. Try it one day.

Penny was very quiet in those early days, perhaps a bit intimidated. I would quicky learn how she wasn’t really shy at all. I would learn this in particular in late 2008, when I was invited to play at the sixtieth birthday party of Prince Charles at Highgrove House and looked out from the stage to see Penny dancing to ‘Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?’ with the Prince, our host. He asked her to dance in the hope of encouraging everyone else out onto the floor, which certainly worked. Afterwards, he asked her, ‘Where did you get your dance steps?’ To which Penny replied, ‘My dad.’ In the same show, I looked out again – this time during ‘The Way You Look Tonight’ – and saw that Penny had now been swept up by Prince William, who asked for, and got, her permission to ‘dip’ her in a formal flourish at the end.

It was quite a relief to Penny to be invited back among royalty after what had happened a couple of years previously. I was playing at a special event at Windsor Castle to honour patrons
of the Prince’s Trust charity, for which Penny and I are ambassadors, and Penny was seated next to Prince Charles at dinner. When the waiters appeared at Penny’s shoulder with the main course on a platter, the Prince was mid-anecdote. As she served herself, Penny continued to hold the Prince’s eyeline, as she believed protocol demanded, missed her plate completely and heaved a portion of meat onto the tablecloth between them. The Prince merely said, ‘Oh, don’t worry – I do that all the time,’ and casually covered the mess with his napkin. What a bloke.

Anyway, it was one of the things I quickly grew to love about my adorable wife – that you never quite knew what she would do next, or when that little look of mischief would glow in her eyes, the naughty mixed with the nice. On tour in Australia eight years ago, we were driving back to the hotel on a really hot day, slightly woozy after a tour of some vineyards, and suddenly there was a stunning vista of endless fields with huge wheels of cut hay stacked up in them. This inspired Penny to leap from the car, jump over the fence and start running, gradually shedding items of clothing as she went, right down to her underwear, before climbing a distant hay bale on the horizon and turning back to wave. That, in turn, caused me to jump from the car and set off after her, shouting wildly and joining her on the hay bale where we embraced. By now two or three cars had pulled up behind ours so the driver called us back. We ran, gathering Penny’s clothes along the way, and flung ourselves into the back seat, laughing like fools.