MORE OF THE SAME
Nobody is quite as unsinkable as Rod Stewart. Three years ago, with his career in the doldrums, he recorded It Had to be You … The Great American Songbook, sloppy versions of standards, seemingly destined to appeal only to Michael Parkinson.
Three further volumes later, these records are the most successful of a 41-year recording career.
Wisely, he dipped into the mood-sapping standards only briefly, but his What a Wonderful World was less moving than Boyzone’s, let alone Louis Armstrong’s.
Elsewhere, though, despite his voice veering wildly between fabulously raw on Tom Waits’s Downtown Train and inaudible on the sole encore Baby Jane, Stewart rattled through a selection of hits with impish gusto for a crowd who sniggered as one whenever he swore.
Not especially charming and certainly incapable of gravitas, Stewart remains a self-anointed scamp who specialises in fashioning a party atmosphere where his audience hollered along to the near-hymnal Sailing, a disarming, spine-tingling You’re in My Heart and a leery Hot Legs like a giant, well-lubricated karaoke machine.
Maggie May and the opening You Wear It Well were delivered with a knowing swagger, Every Beat of My Heart had him pretending to be Scottish again. He left with a cheeky smirk and the sound of bagpipes, remaining, as ever, impossible to love, but impossible not to admire.
Courtesy: London Evening Standard
NO PRISONERS
IT IS hard to imagine how a performer could have pushed any more of his audience’s buttons than Rod Stewart did at the first of his run of shows at Earls Court.
There were fireworks, confetti, a torrent of white balloons, Christmas trees, “snow” falling, family snapshots, a New York skyline, footballs booted into the stands, terrace anthems, more changes of outfit than Kylie and more big hits than Muhammad Ali.
These included arena-rockers such as Hot Legs and Young Hearts Run Free, ballads (Have I Told You Lately, The First Cut Is The Deepest), swaying crowd singalongs (You’re In My Heart, Tonight’s The Night) and the obligatory, but mercifully brief, stretch of lounge-bar standards (What A Wonderful World, Blue Moon, As Time Goes By).
Striding through this two-and-a-half-hour orgy of nostalgic emotion, with his roguish grin and rumpled hairdo curiously unaffected by the passage of time, the 60-year-old survivor from the 1970s could reflect on a career that has defied the odds on nearly every front.
Having reinvented himself as a cabaret crooner with his staggeringly successful American Songbook series of albums, Stewart has ended up selling far more records in this century than more lauded veterans such as Paul McCartney and the Rolling Stones. And if younger bands such as Oasis are hoping to go anything like the same distance, they will have to step up the core entertainment value of their shows, at the very least.
But it was not all perfect. The performance was a little ragged around the edges. Stewart stopped Having A Party mid-way through the first verse, apologised for cocking up his vocal part, and started again, an extraordinary faux pas for a performance at this elevated level. And his famously rugged, ragged voice sounded less than imposing on several songs, particularly the upbeat soul stomp of It Takes Two and Twisting The Night Away.
But if Stewart is not the singer he was, this 18,000-strong mob of middle-aged admirers was not about to hold it against him. Resistance was futile as a tumultuous, arm-waving finale of Sailing and Maggie May was followed by an encore of Baby Jane. Then, as the band departed and the lights came up, the sound of a lone bagpiper could be heard playing through the PA while the battlefield emptied. No prisoners were taken.
The tour continues at Earls Court on December 12; the MEN Arena in Manchester on December 15; the Hallam FM Arena in Sheffield on December 17; then to the NEC in Birmingham the next day; back to Earls Court on December 20; and in the Odyssey Arena, Belfast, on December 23.
Courtesy: David Sinclair / The Times