Rod: The Autobiography by Rod Stewart

Author:Rod Stewart
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781448135042
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2012-10-11T07:00:00+00:00

DIGRESSION

In which our hero finds himself spurned by punk rockers.

In 1977, Johnny Rotten called me an old fart. Not to my face: on a British television show. I was thirty-two – not that old, really. And not really a fart either, to my mind, although people will always be entitled to a view. The point was, in London, punk rock had arrived in a storm of spit, and I seemed to be one of the people getting spat at. For a new, young, angry generation, I was suddenly representative of a breed of musicians who were rich, out of touch, complacent and (perhaps worst of all) given to singing ballads. The decision had been taken to give my gilded cage a good old rattling and it all turned a bit confrontational, at least in Britain. Ranged aggressively against the old guard, and looking to sweep them away, were the likes of the Sex Pistols and the Clash, who sang, ‘No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones in 1977’. And no me either, apparently.

I didn’t help myself when I gave an interview to the New Musical Express into which I dropped a line that would follow me around for a while: ‘There are no fucking safety pins falling off me.’ Which sounded reactionary and sneering – and was almost certainly intended to do so. But it was also true. While punks were dressing in ripped T-shirts and bondage trousers patched with beer towels, you would have found me in my Rudolf Nureyev phase: harem pants, silk slippers, silver clips around the ankles, bit of a sash going on at the waist. Looking back, I can see how that would have got right up the nose of a young whippersnapper with an electric guitar and some attitude. Comfy, though – I’ll say that much for it. Every man should have a brief Rudolf Nureyev phase, if the option is there.

But there was a sense, too, of betrayal. Apparently the Sex Pistols had been big fans of the Faces. They used to play ‘Three Button Hand Me Down’ when they were rehearsing, a song written by this old fart and Ian McLagan. The Pistols liked the connection the band had with its audience, the sense that a show was a big party and that everyone was in it together – not like the Stones, say, who from very early on were a remote act who kept their audience at a distance. You might have felt you loved the Stones, but you never felt you knew them. And then the Pistols resented what happened to the Faces in the end and the way that I went on from there to become a star. John Peel, the DJ, had the same difficulty. He came out and said he was disappointed when I became a celebrity. He felt he had lost me to fame – our paths stopped crossing after I moved to LA – and that I had lost myself to fame, too.

But it gets bigger.

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