Credit: Far Out / Warner Bros. Records
Mon 25 May 2026 19:00, UK
Ronnie Wood once called Rod Stewart “tight as two coats of paint”. It’s as good a simile as any to describe the general public perception of the ‘Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?’ singer, who publicly fell out with English sweetheart Elton John in 2018, and pleaded guilty to simple battery in 2021.
Though there has been more than enough tomfoolery from the performer in the last decades to keep the tabloids churning, nothing could compare to the media frenzy surrounding Stewart in the 1960s and 1970s. The swaggering blonde worked hard to cultivate a playboy rock star persona, and realised only too late that he’d placed himself right in the journalistic firing line.
When Stewart was in the rock band Faces, he recalled in an interview with the British Film Institute, women were oh so available: “Women literally used to throw themselves at us. It really was, ‘Oh, not again tonight, Ronnie’. It has changed, I can only speak from my perspective, but as a rock and roll singer, I used to show off with the girls.”
Yet, Stewart was clear that, despite his egregious licentiousness, he always insisted on consent: “I would never touch a girl unless she wanted me to.”
This didn’t necessarily mean that he stayed faithful. In 1977, at the height of his womanising days, Stewart and The Man with the Golden Gun actor Britt Ekland publicly ended a two-year relationship after the tabloids spat out pictures of him leaving a nightclub with another woman. No doubt all the drink and drugs, particularly his social cocaine use, worsened the affair.
But does Stewart regret all the hurt his divadom caused, the messy nights and fallings out, the misdemeanour battery charge? With a loaded question like that, it depends on who asks Stewart. If the question was coming from Ekland, I’m sure he’d have the common sense to say yes. But from British bigot Piers Morgan? That’s a whole different kettle of fish.
Morgan has been behind most, if not all, of the worst moments in recent television history. Famously, Kanye West has walked out of two interviews with the GB News host, and countless musicians, actors, and politicians have found themselves unfairly disgraced, ridiculed, and spoken over for daring to suggest an alternative mode of thinking than Morgan’s unique cocktail of defamatory, derogatory slander.
Further reading: From The Vault
Writing for The Sun, Morgan recalled a conversation he had with the ‘I Don’t Want to Talk About It’ singer, when he asked him, straight up, whether he regretted “all those years of womanising, boozing, drug-taking and hotel room-trashing?”
Stewart’s first response was solemn, with a heartfelt, remorseful “I do”.
He held the facial expression for a beat or two, amid Morgan’s incredulous reaction, before cackling at the absurdity that he might’ve, in the end, been sorry for any of his untoward behaviour. “Do I fuck! I loved it all!”
Could we expect anything less from the artist who publicly endorsed Reform UK leader Nigel Farage before his Glastonbury appearance in 2025?
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