Why I love Rod Stewart

Reader, I let you down. But I did so for the right reason: for love. On a night when all of London’s music critics were at the Royal Festival Hall for Christine and the Queens, I deserted my duty. But, honestly, I don’t regret it. The reports back from the RFH suggested some baffling melange of performance art, am dram, experimental pop and gender identity, wrapped up in a concept piece about red cars. Not me. I’ll stick with Rod, a man so comfortable with his gender identity that he’s a byword for male libido.

My love for Rod Stewart is pure and noble. I love that he embraces his own absolute Rodness; that, at just shy of 77, he’s still all leopardskin print and skintight trousers, hair like a haystack in which some young couple have been writhing. I love his rueful roguishness, the fact that he knows all the bad things he has done, and doesn’t regret them. Most of all, I love his music. Not all of it – you could make several box sets out of records it would be better Rod Stewart had never made – but anything he recorded for Mercury in the early 1970s is pretty much guaranteed to be brilliant, and there were startling singles for a good while afterwards.

But, yes, he’s 77. His voice has not been what it once was for a fair few years – he struggled with high notes at the O2, often descending instead of ascending the octaves; there was no disguising the thinness a lot of the time, and the pitch sometimes betrayed his frailties. He doesn’t stride around the stage like a Cockney peacock any longer. The age gap between him and his young, blonde backing singers is getting ridiculous.