The strange, petty feud between Rod Stewart and Sting: “Miserable fucker”
Across music history, some of the most aggressive feuds have occurred between two people in the exact same band. Others come from disagreements with so-called peers, or unexpected moments where someone feels disrespected. Rod Stewart and Sting, on the other hand, engaged in a strange feud for entirely different reasons.
Although they rose from entirely different spaces, Stewart and Sting actually have more in common musically than you might think. After all, both had intensely successful periods in the late 1970s, spearheading the entire rock scene with material that drew from different influences but which set an entirely new standard across the board.
However, while it seems that the pair should’ve gotten on considering their shared love for great tunes and musical innovation, their relationship has been a strange one, with many public exchanges veering more towards mutual dislike than admiration. After all, over the years, they’ve issued public jabs towards one another and endured questionable encounters that even the most friendly of peers would have probably left feeling a little out of sorts about.
Sting even once penned a Stewart diss track called ‘Peanuts’, which he said was about his “disappointment” with Stewart becoming “a big joke when he used to be a big hero”. In other instances, though, they seem to actually like one another, praising each other’s talents and indicating that their strange quarrels are more akin to sibling rivalry than anything genuinely rooted in hatred. After all, Sting also once described Stewart as “a brilliantly talented man”, suggesting that maybe there really are no bad feelings.
However, he also once locked his musical comrade outside of his house for hours in a “prank” that seemed more malicious than anything else. What’s strange, however, is that Stewart, by his own admission, started the whole thing during a plane journey to America that they had each taken a day apart from one another. The day before, knowing that Sting would be arriving on the same aircraft, Stewart left a note that read: “Where’s your fucking sense of humour, you miserable git ‘String’?”
Sting was understandably left feeling confused by the note, and a little irked, and felt that he needed to go bigger and harder to make a point – and so, he travelled to Stewart’s home, and fastened a massive chain to his fence, one that he’d have only been able to remove with “arc-welding equipment”. Once he arrived home, Stewart immediately knew that Sting had been behind the prank, but he still had his agent call him up the next day with threats of calling the police, to which Sting said, “Where’s his sense of humour?”
As far as prank wars go, this one seemed to escalate fast, with people assuming that the entire endeavour left a bitter taste in Stewart’s mouth, who made it look like he felt that Sting’s decision to lock him outside of his own house was entirely disproportionate to leaving a little provocative note in the cabin of a plane.
However, when it came down to it, Stewart admitted that his decision to call the police was purely practical. To him, he didn’t really have a choice: “As you do when you’re chained in.”
Elsewhere, he also reassured GQ that there’s no lingering hostility or animosity, and that they remain good friends, suggesting that their pranks were all playful and nothing sinister. “We were never archenemies,” he said, claiming that they just “take the piss out of each other” and that Sting’s fence trick was “revenge for me carving ‘Miserable fucker’ into the table on a plane he was using”.
