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Fri 16 October 2026 13:00, UK
Rod Stewart wasn’t always going to be considered the most tasteful rock and roll singer ever to exist.
As much as many people loved to listen to him whenever he made one of his classics, there were definitely thousands more who hated him for the crime of actually wanting to hear himself on the radio. He may be ridiculed for leaving rock and roll more than a few times, but all can be forgiven as long as you find yourself back at the places where you started when you first picked up a guitar.
And it’s not like Stewart was outwardly trying to go against his roots or anything like that. There were always going to be songs that had a lot more to do with whatever new trend was going on at the moment, but given that many of his favourite singers were coming from the R&B world long before he was becoming one of the biggest artists on the planet, seeing him go into the disco world on ‘Do Ya Think I’m Sexy’ wasn’t the most unheard-of idea when he first started playing that song.
It was all done in the service of him moving his sound forward, but he did know that there were a lot of periods of his life that may have been a bit too glossy. Some of the biggest tunes of his career did see him being a little too high on his own supply whenever he played tunes like ‘Hot Legs’, but when he looked back on what happened next, he did feel like there were a lot of bands that had the same hunger that he did when he looked at the charts.
The biggest names of the late 1970s wanted to rid the world of people like Stewart that seemed too larger than life, and the punk movement gave the entire scene something to latch onto that wasn’t a massive production. Bands like Sex Pistols and Ramones had a lot more energy than anyone else, and while Stewart was more than happy to call out bands that he liked, he knew that The Clash had the potential to make something much better if they committed to their craft.
Because of the first regime of punk bands, The Clash were by far the most eclectic. No one in the group was looking to make anything other than great music, and with Joe Strummer’s lyricism and Mick Jones’s penchant for hooks, they would try out anything that suited them, whether that was some offbeat reggae tunes or throwing in tracks that called back to the glory days of rock and roll.
All of their songs had the potential to be bigger and better, but Stewart felt that they shouldn’t have kneecapped themselves right when they were hitting their stride in the early 1980s, saying, “I really like The Clash – ‘The Magnificent Seven’ is wonderful, one of the best tracks of last year, I reckon, and ‘Hitsville UK’ should have been a big hit. But you can’t keep whining and moaning about the state of the bloody world for the rest of your life. The so-called saviours of rock & roll, and I include The Clash in that, just haven’t matured.”
Further reading: From The Vault
But that kind of “maturity” that Stewart is talking about isn’t really what punk bands needed to thrive. If anything, The Clash were already maturing by leaps and bounds as a band, and when they realised that they needed to fold after the band put out an album like Cut the Crap, they were still trying to fight the good fight for people that didn’t have the chance to fight for themselves whenever they released one of their tunes.
Rock and roll can take on many forms, but Stewart’s condemnation of The Clash meant getting one thing critically wrong about the nature of rock and roll. It’s one thing for bands to want to make music for grownups, but the fire in the belly of every punk kid is the kind of thing that keeps those bands forever young, which is something you would think Stewart would know a thing or two about.
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