Rod Stewart on Glastonbury 2025's legends slot – and why he's turned his back on Donald Trump

“Yeah, won’t be doing that again,” sniffs the man sitting in front of me. The occupant of the Legends slot at the world’s greatest music festival this year is dressed in a checked white two-piece suit, box-fresh baseball boots, snakeskin belt and statement shirt emblazoned with the image of a bird in a tree. It’s unbuttoned to the nipples, the better to show off a shiny piece of jewellery with the crest of his football team, Celtic. I know he loves the club and, 60 years and 120 million record sales into his career, he’s not short of a bob or two, so is that custom-made bling?

“Oh yeah!” he beams with a proud pout. “Diamonds and gold, mate. I don’t mess about!”

Meanwhile, the Rod barnet remains a magnificent construction, an age- and gravity-defying explosion of canary yellow. I ask if his dad had hair like that, meaning as thick and fulsome, but Rod thinks I’m referring to the rock ’n’ roll nature of his follicles. “No, he didn’t! He was a f***ing plumber! No, I started this haircut... well, me and Ronnie both started it together,” he says of old mucker and Rolling Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood, who sports a similar bird’s-nest thatch.

As for this year’s Glasto clobber? “I’m not sure yet, but I’ve got the band all decked out in proper outfits. They all wear white jackets and black ties, and the girls wear sequins. It’s a bit more Las Vegas than it’s been before because, obviously, I’m doing my residency,” he says of his long-running engagement in Sin City’s Caesars Palace. “I’m up to 217 shows, which is amazing.”

Breaking down his 12-piece band, half of them women, the Grammy- and Brit-winning man knighted in 2016 for services to music and charity says: “They’re all drop-dead gorgeous, but they’re very talented. And it just levels out the egos of the men. They’re always light-hearted and they keep me young – ooh!” titters the once serial squirer of women who has been married to third wife Penny Lancaster for 18 years.

At the age of 80, Rod – or, even, “Sir Rod” – is very much refusing to go gently into that good night. This is one legend who remains very much a going concern.

He’s a breezy geezer multimillionaire with eight kids, a fleet of cars (Ferraris, Lamborghinis, a Pagani Zonda, the white Rolls-Royce he arrived in today) and property portfolio (Essex, Florida, Los Angeles, France) who works hard for his money and still gigs for kicks. There’s a 30-track Ultimate Hits compilation released in time for Glastonbury, two new albums in the pipeline and a reunion record and retrospective documentary with his old 70s band the Faces.

At the RT photoshoot in London, Rod is a few days out from a return to Vegas and the resumption of his residency (although, as it transpires, he has to cancel his Vegas shows and further, pre-Glastonbury US dates due to a bout of flu). It’s a long-running commitment that presented a bit of a speed bump when discussions began with the festival about his return this year.

“It was about eight months ago when I was asked to do it,” Rod says, “maybe a little longer. But it didn’t fit with my schedule because I’ve got to bring everybody back from America.”

Factor in the cost of shipping over the equipment and staging and “it’s going to cost me £300,000 to do it and they only pay you about 120,000 quid. So, it’s going to cost me.” But such is the honour of performing in a slot previously occupied by Barry Gibb, Diana Ross and Shania Twain that a personal financial hit “doesn’t matter”.

And to be clear, he’s not scrimping. The band are being treated to Premium Economy, and he’ll be flying in his usual manner – “I haven’t flown commercial for 20 years.”

Does he have his own private jet? “I keep thinking about it. And then certain people that have owned planes have said, ‘If it f***s, flies or floats, rent it,’” Rod says, unabashedly recounting the old-school adage beloved of high-flying rockers of his vintage.

“It’s a headache I don’t want, so I just rent. I’m going up to Glasgow [in a private jet] on Saturday for the Cup Final. Me and five mates watching the Celtic pull off another treble – wahey!” he adds, the latter a frankly unnecessary dig at your correspondent, whom Rod knows to be a Rangers fan. (Sir Rod Stewart’s feelings now, given that Celtic lost to Aberdeen in that match, remain, sadly, unrecorded.)

Anyway, the “PJ” is a well-earned but necessary practicality for a musician who’s been touring all his life. “You gotta get there in comfort. You book the best hotels. I’ve been to every major city in the world, and because I’m a keen model railroader, the hotels will set me up with a spare room, with a table, so I can build my models. I don’t take the whole set with me, because it’s in a room [in his Essex mansion] that’s 40 feet long. But I’ll take a project, like a building to make, and bring all my tools and my paints. It’s lovely, and I don’t waste any time.”

So that’s his on-tour relaxation now; he’s not in the hotel bar any more? “No, no, I do the bar as well,” he adds hastily, lest I get the wrong impression. “One thing I do love is a drink.”

That said, Rod recently found himself appraising the rider provision in his dressing room. “I looked at it the other day and I thought, what is all this s**t doing here? All I need is a few bottles of wine and some crisps, and that’s it. And there’s all these bloody things! What am I gonna do with them? No houmous, but big piles of bananas and apples! And when you think the whole world’s bloody starving. I gotta do something about that. Thank you for reminding me.”

But the alcohol, including some bottles of his own Wolfie’s whisky brand, will remain. “The band have their booze that they request and I have mine. But I think why I love touring now is that we have the best after-gig party. All the girls come, we all get showered, all the girls are dancing,” he recounts, admittedly possibly not in an accurate chronology. “We put music on and we’re all having a laugh. It’s so much more fun than it was in the old days with just the guys. So many egos and drug-taking. It’s brilliant, I love it now.”

The booze remains for medicinal reasons, too. “I always have a little gargle before I go on: rum and coke. Been drinking that 40 years. I never drink it any other time… The vocal cords need a lot of looking after. I mean, they’re absolute gold. I warm up for an hour, warm down for half an hour. And when I feel I’m losing my voice, I go into what they call ‘voice rest’ and wear a little card around my neck that says ‘I can’t talk. Don’t talk to me.’ And it’s remarkable how your voice will come back.”

But looking after himself is a year-round job, “I don’t wait until I start touring”. Rod’s competitive footballing days are over after having a replacement right knee. (“What’s it made of? Metal. Well, not metal it’s carbon fibre or some bollocks.”) But at home in Essex, next to the five-a-side pitch where he’ll still have a kickabout with his youngest sons, Alastair, 19 and Aiden, 14, he’s had a 100m running track installed. “I can do it in 19 seconds. And the record for an 80-year-old is 14 seconds. I’ll never get it to that. But I’m trying. There’s all the little techniques – where you put your arms and where they finish. How high you can get your heels to your bum. They could knock a second off. I’m working on that.”

Still, he has to remember that replacement knee, in part the legacy of decades spent performing on stage. “When I look back at what I used to do, falling down on my knees and sliding along…” Like the man says, he’s been doing this all his life, ever since he made a name for himself in the early 60s as a gifted young belter on London’s blues circuit. But before that, as a working-class lad raised above the shop – his Scottish dad’s newsagents in Archway – he paid his grafting dues. Did he ever deliver the nation’s favourite magazine?

“More than likely, because my dad used to sell the Radio Times. When I was 16, I’d just left school, hadn’t got a job but wanted to be a musician. He’d get me out of bed and say, ‘Come on, you gotta deliver some newspapers.’ I’m up [to this height he indicates], and the other newspaper boys were only down here… So embarrassing! But bless him, he made me do it.”

A stint working in Highgate Cemetery followed but didn’t last very long – “and I never dug any holes, because they used to do ’em with a little tiny digger”. But it was followed by a job in a funeral parlour. Well, to be clear, “above a funeral parlour. We were beatniks and all had long hair, so we couldn’t get jobs. So my mates set up a picture framing business. And downstairs was a funeral parlour, and to get a job in the framer’s, you had to lay in the coffin for ten minutes. They’d nail you in. That was the initiation. F***ing awful experience!”

As for his attitude to death now, it’s best described as chipper. “It’s unavoidable!” he laughs. “I don’t worry any more than anybody else. But you can keep yourself fit. I’m surprised at how many men are so scared of going to the doctor’s. I had prostate cancer,” he says of his 2017 illness, a sequel to the thyroid cancer he had in 2000, “and I tell people: go to the doctor – finger up the bum, no harm done.

“I can’t believe [Joe] Biden’s got it,” he adds. “What’s happened there? Did he avoid check-ups because he thought he could run for President again, or what? It’s terrible.”

Speaking of which, how does he feel about performing in Trump’s America? “I’m not a great fan of Trump. I knew him very, very well. I used to go to his house,” he says, pointing out that they’re neighbours in Florida. “I live literally half a mile away… We’re both on the beach. I used to go to his Christmas parties. He’s always been a bit of a man’s man. I liked him for that. But he didn’t, as far as I’m concerned, treat women very well. But since he became President, he became another guy. Somebody I didn’t know.”

Would he still count him as a friend? “No, I can’t any more. As long as he’s selling arms to the Israelis – and he still is. How’s that war ever gonna stop?” he adds, voice rising. “And we should stop selling them as well. What did Starmer say yesterday? They dropped the talks on trade? What f***ing difference is that gonna make? Someone’s gotta do something. What Netanyahu is doing to the Palestinians is exactly what happened to the Jews. It’s annihilation, and that’s all he wants to do – get rid of them all. I don’t know how they sleep at night.”

Stewart knows from experience that criticising Trump on stage doesn’t go down too well in America. “I had a little joke about him when he had all the tan, you know, the Orange Man. And: ‘Boooo!’” But he does (literally) fly the flag for Ukraine in his set, during the song Rhythm of My Heart – “and I wear a blue and yellow suit to match the flag. That goes down very, very well.”

Whether he’ll play that song at Glastonbury, he isn’t saying. But he will say that he has some tough choices to make about his set list. In 2002 he started with Handbags and Gladrags and ended, 22 songs later, with Sailing. This time?

“It’s difficult because they only gave me an hour-and-a-quarter slot. So I begged them: can I do another 15 minutes? Because usually I play for two hours. It means that there’s a lot of songs that people love that I won’t be able to play – and I’ve got three guests coming on,” he adds, clarifying that they’re singers (he won’t say who) and that Ronnie Wood, the Rolling Stone who’s his old Faces mate, is also coming on.

“But I’m really looking forward to it. And it is a different gig. It’s like when you’re playing a cup final: you’re trying to treat it like another game. But, of course, it’s not. It’s special.”

So, what can RT readers tuning in at home expect to see? “It’ll be glamorous, it’ll be sexy. Not me – I’m talking about the other members of the group! And we’ve got a little orchestra coming on to play with us. And we may have some bagpipes…”

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