Free Rod: The Autobiography by Rod Stewart

could see why the pay was handsome: Long John’s reputation as a singer went ahead of us, and we were earning big money – out several nights of the week, up and down the country, playing the clubs, doing the universities. At the peak of it, we’d be booked for seven nights a week and sometimes playing as many as three shows per night at the weekends.
    Our transport was an old, bright-yellow removals van, for which Long John had paid £40. It was driven by a bloke called Mad Harry, who had flown Lancaster bombers in the RAF in the Second World War and had never really come down. He had the dashboard done out like the cockpit of a plane, withaltimeters and clocks and dials and redundant bits of aircraft memorabilia, and he wore a uniform of goggles, a leather jacket and a silk scarf. Mad Harry’s other duty was to announce the band on stage each night, and to milk the audience for their appreciation at the end. For this he changed into a tailcoat with his service medals pinned to its front.
    The band would be sat around in the back of the van, on four knackered old sofas which were grouped around a paraffin stove, tied down to the floor with ropes to prevent it upending when the van turned corners. The stove kept us warm. It also filled your throat and eyes with oil fumes. I’m not sure ‘health and safety’ would have been impressed. And God knows what would have become of us all in the event of a crash. Any collision at speed would have converted the van into a rocket.
    The sense of danger was increased by Mad Harry’s driving style, which owed a lot to the accelerator and not much to the brake pedal. For Harry, speed was everything. He drove at all times as though hammering a plane along a runway. Long John – a nervous passenger at the best of times – would permanently be thumping on the dashboard and shouting, ‘For the love of God, man, slow down!’
    Mad Harry had a special trick for the last stages of the trek to Eel Pie Island, which was to take the final corner at speed and nearly put the van over the side of the road into the Thames. It was his signature move – his barrel roll, if you like. Long John eventually got tired of being scared and started taking the train to gigs whenever he could. Ian Armitt, the pianist – Scots boy, fabulous player – bought himself a car, specifically because he thought it would increase his chances of staying alive. I probably would have done the same, but I was still saving up.
    Of course, it was pretty punishing for the van, too. It eventually decided it had had enough on the way to a gig at Newcastle University, when it ground to a halt and would go no further. We turned up for that show in the back of a tow-truck.
    Still, by then, the mock Lancaster bomber had carried us the length and breadth of Great Britain. It had taken us to Stoke-on-Trent, to a club called the Place, where the audience went nuts, punching the air in delight – to the confusion of Long John, who, misinterpreting the gesture, thought he was witnessing some kind of Nazi gathering and halted the band in order to announce, ‘We’ll have none of that fascist bullshit here!’ It killed the gig stone dead.
    And it had taken us to Dundee, where a performance at the university was the setting for my first experiment with tartan clothing onstage. Long John had suggested we go into the city and buy some Scots-themed trousers and waistcoats. He thought this would be a winning gesture with the crowd, which we knew could be tough to please. In the event, the audience took one look at this tall English guy and his mate with the big nose and the Dusty Springfield hairdo, both of them wearing tartan to try and ingratiate themselves, and decided they were having none of it. Beer cans rained down on the stage. It would be a few years before I tried that again.
    In some places, of course, I didn’t need to be wearing tartan to attract hecklers. Sometimes the hair was enough. Every now and again you’d get