With a sea captain’s hat perched jauntily above his trademark blond hair, Rod Stewart launched into his number one hit Sailing and appeared to do far more than headline Glastonbury’s coveted Legends slot during his final mainland UK concert.
The veteran performer looked like a natural phenomenon, brushing aside the effects of age with the same carefree attitude he once brought to his love life. At 80, he was still clearly enjoying himself last June — even if health and safety concerns meant he had stopped kicking footballs into the audience.
As he danced and strutted beside backing singers young enough to be his granddaughters, all dressed in the green-and-white hoops of his beloved Celtic, it was easy for fans to imagine that Rod Stewart’s remarkable rock career might continue indefinitely.
Twelve months later, however, the picture was dramatically different. Performing in Utah’s thin, high-altitude air, the singer appeared dangerously close to exhaustion. As he sang the words “Young hearts be free tonight, time is on your side”, he seemed to be fighting a losing battle against the passage of time.
He first used a piano to steady himself before stumbling towards the transparent barrier around the drum kit, where he was forced to cling on for support.
Backstage assistance eventually arrived in the shape of an oxygen cylinder. The singer was then seen drawing deep breaths through a mask covering his nose and mouth.
Rod Stewart with his wife of 19 years, Penny Lancaster
Addressing the increasingly anxious crowd, Stewart insisted that “the show must go on” and admitted that he had “nearly f****** fainted there”.
He sat down for the following song and, apparently running on little more than determination, completed the remainder of the performance. Glastonbury had presented him as a star seemingly untouched by mortality; the Utah concert offered a far more troubling reality. After more than six decades of touring, was Sir Rod finally prepared to listen to the warning signs?
Apparently not. He pushed on through several more demanding US shows, but by the time he reached Cincinnati, it was obvious that his body could no longer keep pace.
The concert was called off just hours before the venue was due to open, with his public relations team describing the reason as a “minor medical procedure”. Two days later, the remaining dates on the tour were cancelled as well.
The procedure was, in fact, an operation to improve blood flow through a coronary artery by inserting a stent. Without that intervention, each performance had effectively become a potentially dangerous gamble.
That brings the story to this week’s announcement, made “with sadness” by a rock star finally acknowledging what may be unavoidable. Stewart’s planned 2027 tour, The Final Encore, will “most definitely” be his last.
Sceptics could be forgiven for feeling they have heard this promise before. After all, Stewart previously travelled the world on a tour billed as a farewell.
And wasn’t this year’s run marketed with the knowingly playful title One Last Time? What makes the 2027 dates, now promoted as The Final Encore, any more convincing?
The answer could be the six-foot-tall blonde force of nature he married.
“We’re not letting him get away with it,” Penny Lancaster said last month. “He has to do as he’s told.”
Even Lancaster admits that monitoring one of rock music’s most energetic older stars is no easy assignment. When Stewart’s heart scare led to the cancellation of his 2026 shows, she had to explain to his cardiologists exactly what a typical Rod Stewart concert involves.
“He doesn’t just sit down on a stool or behind a piano,” she explained. Instead, she likened him to a boxer stepping into the ring or a racehorse bursting from the starting gate.
Even after having a coronary stent fitted, Stewart remained remarkably difficult to restrain. “I can never find him,” Lancaster said. He had continued with his hobbies and gym workouts, despite strict medical guidance about how much exercise he could manage. The plan, she explained, was to increase his activity gradually — to build him up little by little.
The compromise, it seems, is The Final Encore tour in 2027. Strikingly, its first mainland UK date brings him to Glasgow’s OVO Hydro on April 29.
It will be his first performance on these shores since he left the Glastonbury stage nearly two years prior – and, with no other Scottish dates on the itinerary, could represent his last curtain call north of the Border.
For a singer who has spent his entire career as popular music’s lone ‘Cockney Scotsman’, starting his final British tour in Glasgow will strike a deep personal chord.
He has always treated the country as his ‘spiritual homeland’ – a convenient expression, perhaps, for a star who has never actually lived in Scotland or sounded like anything other than a north London geezer.
Yet this is no mere affectation. His dedication to the country and its national football team has always been entirely sincere. He once said – quite convincingly – that every time he plays north of the Border, he thinks of his father, Robert.
Rod belting out his greatest hits at last summer’s Glastonbury festival
A plumber by trade, Robert left Edinburgh a few years before his son was born, but he instilled a deep-seated sense of manners and humility in his son that survived the decades of global hedonism. And the older the star became, the more his father’s innate sense of propriety seemed to reside in him.
Even as he struggled to remain upright on that stage in Utah, the singer politely asked fans if they would mind if he sat down for the next song. It was the mark of a true gentleman of the road and entirely befitting of an entertainer who was knighted by the late Queen in 2016.
True, the early stages of his journey were not always negotiated with the same nobility.
His rise to fame in the late 1960s and early 1970s was built on a knack for self-mythology and downright lies told in the name of publicity. He used to say he was born in London’s Highgate minutes after a German V-2 missile exploded there. It fell weeks later, two miles away.
He said he was once a gravedigger. He never was. It was a tale he had gone along with after measuring out some cemetery plots with string on two Saturdays.
Even his supposed notoriety as a man careful with his cash was a fabrication. He has been an enthusiastic supporter of numerous charities for decades.
In 2022, Sir Rod rented and furnished a townhouse in Berkshire to accommodate a Ukrainian couple and their five children who had fled the war. He funded three supply trucks to the Ukrainian border and helped evacuate 16 other refugees to Berlin.
He said he previously kept his charity work low key but added: ‘I want to be seen to be doing something now. I am a knight. I should be using my power to do something for people.’
It was his ex-bandmate Ronnie Wood who spread the word about the Faces frontman’s stinginess – with the singer’s approval.
He explained: ‘In the Faces it suited me to be thought of as a bit tight. We were always getting ripped off and I thought it would be good to make people think twice about me. I told Ronnie to use an old line of my dad’s and say I was tighter than two coats of paint.’
The parallel solo career he carved out while still performing with The Faces brought international stardom and, of course, blondes galore. Album titles from the late 70s such as Foot Loose & Fancy Free and Blondes Have More Fun captured his lifestyle to a T.
For some of that decade, he and model Dee Harrington were an item. Then came two years with actress Britt Ekland, followed by marriage to American actress and model Alana Hamilton. They had two children before he moved on to another model, Kelly Emberg. Settling down with any of these women – indeed the very concept of fidelity – seemed alien to this spiky-haired lothario hard-wired for the chase.
‘I was s******g my way round the world,’ he said. But he admitted: ‘The one thing I am desperately ashamed of is the way I would finish relationships. I can have a confrontation with a bloke but never with a woman. I just have to run away from it.’
Karma of sorts finally came in the late 90s. Record sales had dropped off – indeed the singer suggested he might as well not be making them – and the collapse of his marriage to New Zealand supermodel Rachel Hunter had plunged him into the deepest pit of his life. He had been entirely faithful to her, yet it was she who pulled the plug.
He said at the time: ‘I couldn’t believe it. I was a rock star. You don’t dump a rock star! It knocked me for six. It was a huge shock.’
He later recalled: ‘I took to lying on the sofa in the day with a blanket over me and holding a hot water bottle against my chest.’
Salvation arrived in a London hotel lobby in January 1999 when a statuesque photography student from Essex asked him for his autograph and, when he obliged, slipped him her phone number. Soon he and Penny Lancaster were dating.
Her presence ushered in a stable, mellower phase that continues to this day. There were bumps in the road – none more galling for Sir Rod, perhaps, than that engineered by the cynical bra tycoon Michelle Mone in 2004.
She had signed Ms Lancaster as the face of her lingerie brand Ultimo two years earlier – but now she replaced her in the role with the singer’s ex, Rachel Hunter.
‘She’s a manipulative cow,’ said the infuriated star of the businesswoman – perhaps his most intemperate remark about a blonde ever.
But the storm was weathered and, remarkably, a friendship developed between Ms Lancaster and the supermodel. Indeed, following their marriage in 2007, the present Mrs Stewart became the magnanimous secretary of the ‘Ex-Wives Club’ – a tightknit group of her husband’s former flames who, between them, account for five of his children.
Explaining her bond with his exes, Ms Lancaster said: ‘When I met Rod, I realised it wasn’t just us, it was the children, the ex-wives. I had to show that I was genuine, show kindness, and it works.’
As for her husband, he speaks of the mother of his two youngest children, Alastair, 20, and Aiden, 15, with the humility of a reformed character: ‘They have not invented the words for how I feel about her. She is everything.’
Rock legend Rod with Faces bandmate Ronnie Wood
On the importance of a long and stable marriage, he said: ‘It took me a while to learn, because I have been a scallywag in the past.’
A certain roguishness no doubt remains. Sir Rod’s decision to attend Scotland’s World Cup opener against Haiti in Boston 24 hours after pulling out of a concert in San Diego in June was seen by many as an appalling lapse of judgment – an insult to the fans let down the previous night.
Yet, as we now know, this wasn’t simply pulling a ‘sickie’ to free him up to join the Tartan Army. He had been diagnosed with laryngitis; the wheels were coming off his career on the road and the Scotland team, perhaps, offered sanctuary.
He later claimed he went to the match to keep a promise to two of his sons.
‘I promised them since they were born that we were going to go to a World Cup. And this is the first one that’s come about.
‘And it wasn’t a good look, I admit, but I’m going to have to just take the stick.’
Almost four months on, little of it has stuck.
Could that be because the same effortless charm which once beguiled the blondes continues to work its magic on the public?
There is much to warm to in him – the indomitable survivor who has twice beaten cancer, the showman who can treat stadium rock like a giant pub sing-along, the border-defying, monarchy-supporting bastion of Britishness – but most of all, perhaps, we warm to an essentially decent bloke. One who wears his stardom well.
‘I’m not retiring but this will be my last rock and roll tour,’ he announced on Monday.
‘I’ve been singing the music I love since I was 19 years old, and I’ve had the privilege of taking it around the world to all of you. It has given me a life beyond anything I could ever have imagined, and I hope I’ve given you some fond memories in return.’
He has indeed. The show may be coming off the road but, while there is breath in his body, it is far from over for the old charmer.
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