There are insults that chill the blood, and then there’s Rod Stewart saying last week that Elton John is “not rock and roll” for wanting to spend more time with his children: it could barely have chilled an ice lolly. Rod, 73, is apparently annoyed because Elton, 70, has recently announced a big old 300-date world tour, with the added news that this will be his last, because he’s retiring to spend more time with David Furnish and their two young sons. This is all a bit naff, according to the wildness czar Rod Stewart, who says rock stars should just “fade away” if they really must, and not faff about retiring and mentioning families and suchlike.
Of course, we can only respect the rock and roll edicts of a man who has already revealed in his autobiography (rebelliously and iconoclastically entitled Rod Stewart: The Autobiography) his own scandalous private passions. Yes, beyond the erotic conquest of young ladies with long yellow hair, enacted so repeatedly it becomes as about as erotic as a nine times table, Rod Stewart is obsessed with model railways.
Such is the sanctity of his devotion to his home set-up of very small trains that, as he explains in the book, nobody is allowed to make choo-choo noises around them. The book also explains that, through the various yellow-haired women, he has had about eight children, but you don’t much hear about what he’s done with them since having them. Perhaps they made the fateful error of saying choo-choo trains.
The thing is, Rod is not wrong about fake retirements. Frank Sinatra retired so many times it got silly. Lily Allen said she wanted to live in the country and be a housewife, then got bored of that and came back to London to be a divorced pop star again. Jay-Z and Ozzy Osbourne have both given up a few times – and even Elton John himself first quit the road in 1976, telling Rolling Stone magazine: “I mean, who wants to be a 45-year-old entertainer in Las Vegas?”
And he was quite right – he didn’t take on his residency at Caesars Palace until he was 53. Cher, meanwhile, finally retired with her “Last Farewell tour” in 2002 and 2003, leaving no doubt that this really was it. Shortly before taking on a residency in Las Vegas of her own. And then another tour. And then saying, more recently, “I’m never coming back. I swear to God,” even though God himself knows full well that, in the event of a nuclear war, there will only be three things left on Earth and proven unkillable: Michael Gove, cockroaches and Cher.
Clearly, the touring lifestyle takes its toll, leaving musicians desperate never again to hear their own voices reverberating around the stage, not to be asked to sing ye ancient greatest hits, nor to be tempted by drugs, nor sleep so far from their own bed. And then the years pass at home and they hate their own bed, miss the lovely drugs, and feel they would really love their children a lot more if, rather than singing intimately to them, they could sing intimately about them. To an audience of thousands who have paid over the odds for the tickets, and will leave afterwards.
This is all because nobody really wants to spend more time in the valley of frustration that is one’s family. We lesser mortals all say we want to, too, and then, as soon as we actually have more time to spend with our families, we devote a year to building a costly and over-complicated extension so we can get up to 35 feet further away from our families.
Parents all love the idea of their children, it’s just that the reality contains opinions, flatulence and the worship of false gods, including but not limited to Minecraft. We confiscate their phones, then hide in the lavatory so we can look at ours. We clear the diary for family time, then we fill the family time with things, to circumnavigate the aching, mortal chasm of all that time and all of that … family. Pop stars like Elton love telling the audience how children changed their lives – what they never say is how, which is that half your life is now spent in the resistance of expletives. And the other half in the deployment of them.
It may seem unlikely, but I think we could all learn a lot from politicians, who actually have a far more honest approach about how they plan to spend their time after departing public life. Tony Benn famously announced that he was retiring from Westminster to spend more time with his politics, which in turn inspired Tony Blair, who left to spend more time with his dictators. David Cameron, meanwhile, unimpeded by any actual interest in government, may have been more convincing at wanting to spend more time with his children – but only so he could find more gastropubs to leave them in.
To add insult to injury, Rod Stewart added the final blow, suggesting Elton’s big retirement ruse is a swindle which smacks of “trying to sell tickets”. Of course, if you’re wondering how we know that he said this, it’s because he said it on live television, while on a promotional appearance to alert people to his own forthcoming tour, should they want to, you know, buy tickets.
• Sophie Heawood is an Observer columnist
