Opposites Attract: The album that made Steve Jones fall in love with Rod Stewart
There have been many myths and rumours about the so-called ineptitude of the Sex Pistols. Steve Jones could sue everyone espousing that for slander, and he’d win in a court of law.
There’s nothing inept or novice about Jones’ guitar playing. The Shepherd’s Bush strummer was a one man army on stage, creating a spear of sound so pointed that the first five rows at any show could shave their beards on the airwaves. It would be impossible to snarl, swagger and shock in the manner that the Sex Pistols did if they didn’t have a rollicking backdrop.
And the backdrop that Jones provided was honed on pop. From the get-go, it was easy anthems that resonated aplomb that got him going. After all, the triumph of the Pistols wasn’t just their radicalism, but the fact that such radicalism rattled the mainstream into a frenzy. From Throbbing Gristle to the KLF, radicalism often abounded in and around that era, but none of those were so catchy that your nan still remembers them.
Jones is the first to admit that hits were what was raised on, revering Rod Stewart as one of his first heroes. “I can start with Every Picture Tells a Story by Rod Stewart,” he said when picking out the five albums that have influenced him the most in an interview with Spin.
The novelist Graham Greene once wrote: “There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.” And seems the unlikely Stewart was behind the door that a young Jones was knocking at.
Speaking about his classic 1971 record, Jones continued, “That was a big album for me growing up for many reasons. I remember buying it down Oxford Street at the HMV shop. I didn’t know who it was. I just liked the cover. Then I got it, and I loved Rod Stewart’s voice. I loved ‘Maggie May’ and the song ‘Every Picture Tells a Story’.”
These two tracks became a massive hit for Stewart. The gravel-voiced Celtic fan was still flitting between solo flirtations and the Faces at this point, but his third solo outing proved so successful that things changed from thereon, and in the process, Jones came to feel as though he had an innate sixth sense for predicting trends in art. The way his life worked out thereafter, maybe he bloody does?
As he explained, “I was really proud of myself because after buying it, it became the number one album in America, number one album in the UK, and then number one single in America, and number one Single in the UK with ‘Maggie May’. I thought, “Oh, I must know what I’m doing then.”
However, he didn’t just abandon Every Picture Tells a Story and go looking for the next chart topper with his subsequent pocket money, the mulleted maestro had Jones under his beer-swilling pop spell, and you sense he even wanted to be like him. “I was obsessed with Rod Stewart when I was a teenager. I liked his hair, the fashion, his voice, and the Faces as well, the band he was in with Ronnie Wood,” Jones adds.
In truth, this is perhaps only surprising in retrospect, as we now picture old Rod in a lime green suit that he seems to have borrowed from a social club act, and forget the pint guzzling lothario who lit up the charts with careworn soul-pop-folk-rock hits too catchy to ignore while looking like a promising young centre half for Leeds United who squandered his talent down the boozer.
