“I didn’t care”: The album Rod Stewart was hardly involved in
The road to making any great album has to be a labour of love. As much as people try to do their best with a couple of good songs, it doesn’t mean anything if they don’t have the heart behind the performances to get everything going. Because audiences always know when they are being hung out to dry, and Rod Stewart couldn’t even pretend to say that he put his entire heart into making the album Camouflage.
By the time Stewart had reached the 1980s, though, he already had multiple career renaissances under his belt. His time with the Faces and Jeff Beck felt like another lifetime ago, and while a lot of fans still had the foul taste of ‘Do Ya Think I’m Sexy’ in their mouths, the rasp singer at least knew not to take that massive a nosedive off a cliff like that again.
But in the age of MTV, something definitely needed to change. Stewart had come from a world where everything revolved around bringing music to the people directly, and now that everything shifted towards the television, it was about sounding slightly futuristic, especially with the new school of pop and hair metal bands starting to become the darlings of the channel.
And considering the success of ‘Young Turks’, it’s not like Stewart couldn’t work with that kind of formula. The idea of having a squelchy synth playing behind him instead of someone like Jeff Beck would have seemed unthinkable just a few albums before, but he actually had a much better grasp on the medium than many people realised.
There is a moment where the trend-chasing catches up with someone, though, and Camouflage feels like the epitome of Stewart treading water. There were pieces of his sound that were still intact, but outside of a few singles like ‘Infatuation’ and ‘Some Guys Have All the Luck’, most of the album just feels like him going through the motions in the studio and just letting the producer record whatever comes out of it.
And judging by Stewart’s dismissive attitude towards the sessions, he had to admit that he hardly even wanted to be there pumping out some of the tunes, saying, “[Producer Michael Omartian] did the best he could with an artist that wasn’t involved. I didn’t care.”
That kind of mentality is also palpable if you look at the songs that were used on the record. ‘Infatuation’ was a big frontrunner for a single, but considering it clocks in at just over half an hour and one of the songs is a fairly lacklustre cover of Free’s ‘All Right Now’, it’s easy to see Stewart just looking at his watch half the time that he’s singing as he waits for the session to be over.
Despite Jeff Beck coming back into the fold for a few tracks, we were left with half of a record that never really came together like it should. Not everyone can knock it out of the park, but you know that something’s going to go very wrong when Jeff Beck makes appearances on the album, and Stewart is still only halfway there.
