The album Rod Stewart “didn’t care” about making
“Instead of getting married again,” Rod Stewart once said after one of his three divorces, “I’m going to find a woman I don’t like and just give her a house”.
It’s a quote that is not merely clever, if not somewhat questionable, but also a stark indicator of how open the gravel-voiced, tight-trousered rocker really is – he frankly couldn’t give a shit, and he’s pretty open about that.
It seems fitting on that front that his biggest hit and magnum opus, ‘Maggie May’, is a track that hints at the momentous moment that the self-proclaimed sexy Scot lost his virginity. However, he is equally as open when it comes to the low points in his discography, too.
As the opening quote conveyed, after his romp with the mystical Maggie, poor Rod soon found out that love is not all sunshine and rainbows. And even at the beginning of his relationship with Kelly Emberg, things had gotten so fraught that his music began to suffer. It was 1984, and despite a magnificent bouffant hairdo, he was tired of singing, “Oh no, not again”.
But a sexual attraction sustained, with the Celtic fanatic also singing, “It hurts so good.” As he’d later explain, “I’ve been out with some extremely beautiful women who have had no sex appeal whatsoever. It really is a lot more than skin deep.” With Emberg, with whom he would eventually have a child, it was rather more puzzling than that even.
Caught up in a melee of emotions, with a wealth of hits already behind him, when he went in to record Camouflage, he had lost sight of any idea of artistry. Michael Omartian was merely meant to be producing the effort when work got underway, but before long, Stewart had spiritually checked out of the process. He wanted to cancel the record, but his manager suggested the Omartian should take the reins instead.
The result was far from a record that he looks back on with retrospective pride, but he also recognises that it could’ve been far worse. “He did the best he could with an artist that wasn’t involved,” Stewart told Mojo. “I didn’t care”. In a deeper sense, he was lost in the mid-1980s uncertainty of how he should even sound anymore.
Yet, it was a mark of the cache that Stewart had behind him at this point that not only was he able to attract great musicians to the record – the likes of Jeff Beck and Michael Landau both feature – but it fetched a creditable chart position of eighth in the UK, too. Not bad for something you barely bothered with, and you couldn’t possibly say his hair, fashioned into what you might call Wisps of Regality and Rays of Sunshine, didn’t flourish as a result of the extra attention, too.
