Rod Stewart

The Times Magazine, November 2005

Somewhere beneath the folds of his mother's flowing, jade-green dress, and carried within an impressive, eight-month bump, the ears of who will turn out to be Alastair Wallace Stewart must be burning nicely. His dad, rocker and more recently crooner Rod, can't stop talking about him, talking to him, telling him, me, everyone how excited he is to be facing paternity again and at 60. Mum Penny Lancaster, 34, is glowing in these latter days of her pregnancy too, as excited as is her partner about the imminent arrival of their first baby.

"And Rod's five other children are just as excited about it as we are, trying to guess what sex it is," she says. But hang on a minute ... What sex? The protuberance has been called Wee Jimmy all evening. "A mere technicality," insists the proud pater. "Wee Jimmy. Wee Jemimah. Our kid!"

And says mater, "We really don't know. I haven't wanted to. There aren't many surprises in life, given all the technology and wizardry that's out there, so this is something I wanted to leave in the hands of Mother Earth." If it is Wee Jimmy, all well and good, because that leaves open the possibility that he may one day play for Celtic and make his by-then rather elderly dad the proudest man on earth. "But I'd love another daughter too, and we'll certainly try for one if this little fella does turn out to be a little fella," says Stewart beaming at Lancaster, who beams right back. "Plenty of tunes left in the old violin," he then chuckles, giving his bejeaned packet a fond squeeze. Viagra? "Oh, no no no no no!"

The feather-haired pop star, then 54 and a long-time resident of Los Angeles, met the leggy, lovely model/ fitness instructor/ photography student, 27 and from Chigwell, Essex, at a nightclub within the basement of London's Dorchester Hotel six years ago. He was on tour at the time, had recently broken up with another model, New Zealander Rachel Hunter (with whom he has two teenage children), and was relaxing with members of his band. She was pre-Christmas partying with friends. After a few drinks, she accepted a friend's dare to go across and request an autograph. And he said? "'Of course.' Invited me to sit down. Asked me all about myself. And when I told him I was doing photography (at Barking College) he said, 'What are you doing tomorrow?'"

Don't rush ahead, gentle reader. What Mr. Stewart was proposing was a press pass to the pit at his final Earls Court concert , so that Miss Lancaster might practice her would-be professional skills in an exciting, live-action environment. "I thought, 'Wow! What a gent!'How generous is that?'" she recalls. "I didn't think of it as any kind of come-on."

Her fiance (they intend to marry next year, post baby, post divorce to his second wife Hunter) chuckles again, his right hand still resting comfortably in the trouser area. "I've got an honest face," he says, grinning the Rod grin. "You'd buy a used car from me, wouldn't you?" So the offer was graciously accepted. Luckily though, Stewart's long-time drummer Carmine Appice was keeping an eye not just on proceedings, but on her.

"I went to the concert next evening," continues Lancaster, "took my photos, processed the negatives, did the whole dark room thing, then didn't think any more about it. Rod had bought me a drink, had watched me on the dancefloor, and had said to me, "Don't worry about the papers tomorrow (they would contain news of his and Hunter's break-up). It's been on the cards for a while.' Not being a tabloid-reader, I was confused. I didn't know they were splitting up. So I just kept a low profile, carried on at college, got on with my life. Then, nine months later, I came home to find a message on the ansaphone."

Appice, thinking Lancaster a sweet girl and being appropriately concerned for her welfare, had held back her phone number until the time was right. "I'd been in flux," acknowledges Stewart fruitily. "A period of recovery," is her indulgent correction.

On their first proper date she, daughter of a commuting-to-London lawyer just one year older than the famous Lothario himself, wore trousers and a very long coat. "She didn't want me to get the wrong impression. It was an outfit that said, 'I'm a good girl.' In fact (here he turns to her, raking his spare hand through the Rod barnet), you kept the office closed for ages, didn't you? How long was it? A month at least."

A sound strategy, as it turned out, and one long-established in the Lancaster household. "The men in my life have always been very strict with and protective of me, my brother Ollie (two years younger than she, and now manager of a portfolio of Stewart estates that encompasses Los Angeles, Palm Springs, the south of France and Essex) even more so than my dad."

"Yeah, but he'd vet all your boyfriends, wouldn't he? And that's as in being prepared to take them to the vets !"

Stewart and Lancaster are the perfect double act tonight (no disrespect intended to Wee Jimmy, of course), feeding each other lines as they lounge, loved-up, on a sofa within a Los Angeles recording studio. He is completing an album, the fourth in his career-reviving, Grammy-rewarded (if critically cold-shouldered) Great American Songbook series (Chaka Khan will be popping by later this evening to duet with him, Diana Ross tomorrow). She has driven over just because. So how did it go, the eventual meeting of Mr. Lancaster, lifelong solicitor, and Mr. Stewart, lifelong rock stud?

"I was determind to show respect and look the part, so I wore a pinstriped suit," recalls the latter. "Simultaneously he, who's probably worn one every day of his working life, thought he ought to look less stiff and a bit more hip than usual, so dressed down for the occasion. Hilarious. But we hit it off, instantly. I consider him not just Penny's dad but a very close mate now. I actually miss him when I haven't seen him for a while."

But he, Stewart, has been involved with a dizzying list of blonde conquests/ partners/ wives down through the years - for brevity's sake, and in addition to Lancaster and Hunter, let's just namecheck Britt Ekland, Alana Hamilton and Kelly Emberg. How would he have felt as the father of a twentysomething daughter, learning of her latest suitor? "I'd have been mortified if I were him," he admits cheerfully. "But luckily, he's a tremendous guy. I love him dearly."

Wee Jimmy (as he turns out to be) will be born in the UK, and not just because Stewart is here fulfilling arena concert commitments, postponed from earlier in the year due to a throat infection. Lancaster feels she needs her mum, who will return to L.A. with the couple in January and spend four months at the Stewart mansion, so easing the transition into family life. "Obviously we'll need help some times depending on Rod's schedule, but I hate the idea of a full-time nanny, someone doing what should be the mother's - my! - job," she says.

That she's in this condition at all is still something of a wonder to her, clearly. "Last September Rod said to me, 'I've been thinking long and hard and my conclusion is that it would be wonderful if the two of us could start a family of our own.' I was like, 'Oh my God!' Forget marriage. That's the one thing in life I want more than anything.

"In fact, I was in tears when he told me, 'Stop taking your monthly pill, and let's go to the doctor's and see what they have to say.' Because of our respective ages we realised it might take some time, and were prepared for the suggestion of in vitro or other such proceedures ..."

At which point Stewart leans over, strokes Lancaster's belly and urges her, "Go on, tell him about the drive in the Ferrari." She blushes, plays for time, says, "Er, I wasn't intending to share that detail." But he's laughing now. "Let's start by saying they wanted me to have a bit of a Jodrell into a tube, and between seven and eight in the morning," he says, "and that they then needed the sperm within an hour.

"Now that's what I call pressure. So they offered us the use of a room at the doctor's office, but I took one look and knew I wasn't going to be able to get it going in there - I'd say it was too sterile, but that's hardly appropriate in the circumstances. Equally though, having decided to do the deed at home, I didn't fancy rushing back in to reception waving my sample and saying, 'Look what I've done!' So Pen, bless her, drove it down there for me in the open-top Ferrari 360."

And adds she, "I felt like in the movies, racing along at the wheel of an ambulance, a human heart packed in ice beating beside me ... 'Will I or won't I make it in time, with my precious cargo?'" She did, and all turned out to be in order. Stewart, before kissing her hand, adds only,"It's been amazing. We've been gorgeously, gloriously lucky."

He then excuses himself for "a pee-pee". It is, I suspect, a departure deliberately effected in order to give the engagingly artless Lancaster a chance to put herself across more three-dimensionally than has been the case in previous media appearances. For all her current happiness, she has not had the easiest of introductions to the more glitzy, glamorous end of public life. As a model first linked to a notorious and much older pop Lothario, the media assumption was that she was merely this year's model, not the stuff of which happy-ever-after's are made. She has struggled for own identity, too. Graduate of Barking College doesn't cut much mustard internationally, and then there was the mysterious case of her being replaced as the face/ body of Ultimo lingerie by one R. Hunter.

"Rod taught me right from the start to rise above any nastiness in the Press, and to keep perspective when things are getting blown out of all proportion," she says gamely. "Of course it's been a learning curve coming in to an existing family, him already having five children (Kimberly, 26, and Sean, 24, with first wife Hamilton, Ruby, 18, with Emberg, and Renee, 13, and Liam McAlister, 11, with Hunter). It's taken some adapting to, and on both sides. But we're at a wonderful place now." Daughter Renee is reported to have said recently that Lancaster has been fantastic for her father, and has made him a better person. "All the kids had doubts initially, which is only natural, so there's been a journey. I've just been as natural and caring as I can, and I think they've come to see the true me."

She speaks of attending hockey games and dance recitals with the two younger of her husband-to-be's offspring (mum Rachel deemed it inappropriate for them to be photographed with Lancaster, Stewart and his other children for a 'rock families' special in the current edition of Vanity Fair), and of going out to clubs or restaurants with the older ones. And with Renee? "I sit on the end of her bed when she stays over and we talk about school and boyfriends and all her dreams and aspirations. It's fun. It's great."

Stewart himself re-enters the room now and trails a loving hand across her shoulders. "Isn't she wonderul, my lady-in-waiting?" he asks. "If only I could play 20 solid minutes of football (he taps a thrice-operated upon knee) then my life would be totally and blissfully complete."

Certainly his career could scarcely be in better shape. Volumes 1 through 3 of his Great American Songbook series have had limited impact in the UK, where we seem to prefer our standards re-interpreted by Jamie Cullen, Diana Krall or (for those with a memory stretching back to the late 1970s) Bryan Ferry, but in the all-important US market they have shored up his superstar status, 30 years after Maggie May and You Wear It Well. He has enjoyed many more hits since those two, of course, but by the late '90s was covering Oasis tracks in a bid to stay relevant. 'Your last album of contemporary material ..." I begin. "Was fucking terrible, the worst I've ever made," he interrupts, endearingly self-aware. "What was I thinking of? Sub-hippy-hoppy bollocks. A lost period in my life."

Unlike famous curmudgeons Sir Cliff Richard and Status Quo, he is sanguine about the fact that youth radio (let alone the influential MTV and VH1 video networks) eventually passed beyond his reach. "I'd had a good run, and was very grateful for the support they'd given me," he says. "You can't hog it. You need to know when to move over gracefully and leave it to the younger guys." It was veteran industry boss Clive Davis who suggested he might then follow the path pioneered by Ferry, Harry Nillsson and Linda Rondstadt and since thronged by multitudinous others. "But with the proviso that there be no 3AM crying-into-your-bourbon songs, nothing downbeat or self-pitying. No big brass arrangements either. Just a familiar voice singing very familiar songs. And it's worked."

With the Rod renaissance in progress, news reached Stewart of the serious illness of someone who had helped to launch his career 40 years earlier. "I wouldn't be here today were it not for him," he says of the British r'n'b singer Long John Baldry, who died in Vancouver this past July aged 64. "We went up there to see him about nine months before the end and found him in hospital - not the best one, but I changed all that straight away. I can't express in words how much I owe him. He not only discovered me, but stood by my side when things were down, giving me hope. Camp as Christmas and theatrical, eccentric, but an absolute gentleman (Stewart is suddenly close to tears as he speaks). I'd known him since I was 19 and still can't really believe that he's gone."

There is a pause during which none of us know quite what to say. Lancaster then leans over to squeeze his fingers, her eyes full of concern and tenderness. In response and to lighten his suddenly sombre mood, he launches into a verse of I've Got My Love To Keep Me Warm, one of the tracks from his new album.

He sings softly, lightly, first to Lancaster's face and then to the bump she is supporting with her hands. Within it, Wee Jimmy keeps his counsel, surely 100 per cent certain of the welcome that awaits. "What a lucky man I am," concludes Stewart, rallying. "All that's wrong with my life is this dodgy knee." To celebrate such good fortune he asks a passing studio-hand to bring over some wine from the kitchen. "Oh, and a glass of water for the missus," he calls after her, the responsible dad-to-be.

Copyright © 2020 Alan Jackson

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