It’s not unusual for Jools Holland to pick up the phone to rock royalty. Or, indeed, actual royalty (this is a man whose friends and acquaintances include everyone from Sir Paul McCartney to the King). But when the musician and TV presenter took a call from Sir Rod Stewart a couple of Christmases ago, neither of them had any idea it would be the start of a beautiful new friendship.
“I was minding my own business on Christmas Eve, or thereabouts, and the phone rang, and it was Rod. I thought, wow,” recalls Jools. “He said, ‘I’m thinking of doing a new record, and I’d really like to get your band to do it. What do you think?’ I thought about it for about a millisecond, then I said, ‘yeah, great’.”
Rod, sitting next to Jools in a London hotel room, takes up the story. “I’d been making a swing album, and it wasn’t turning out how I’d wanted,” he explains. “It was a bit too polite. It just didn’t have all the edges that I wanted. So I called up Jools…”
“And I said, ‘if you want rough around the edges, you’ve come to the right bloke’,” laughs Jools. “But it happened so quickly… After I put the phone down, I thought: did that actually just happen, or did I imagine it?”
Two years on, the result of that brief (but very real) conversation is an album, Swing Fever, recorded with Jools’ celebrated Rhythm & Blues Orchestra, that serves as a joint love letter to the glory days of the American big band era. From the early swing of Fats Waller’s Ain’t Misbehavin’ to the New Orleans jazz of Louis Prima’s Oh Marie, via well-loved classics such as Sentimental Journey, Frankie and Johnny and Pennies from Heaven, it’s a record, in Jools’ words, “filled with joy” (they had a strict ‘no ballads’ rule), designed as a finger-snapping counterweight to these frankly trying times.
The album was recorded in Jools’ quirky east London home studio, Helicon Mountain. A mock railway station assembled from an assortment of stables and lock-ups, and rendered in an Italianate style inspired by the Welsh village of Portmeirion, it’s no Abbey Road: there’s barely room to swing a cat, let alone record a swing album with an 18-piece band.
“It’s a bit of a squash,” admits Jools. “When Rod first came in, he was quite surprised by the… cosiness of everything. But I assured him we’ve been making records there for years. By that point, we’d gone away and arranged two or three songs, but I didn’t know if it was what Rod was really after. I was thinking, if this isn’t right, I don’t know what we’re going to do. And then I looked over and saw him having a dance in the control room. And from then on, it’s honestly been the most enjoyable process of collaborating and making music that I’ve ever known.”
Jools is on record as saying that Rod can “sing anything”. Is that true, Rod? “Well, I wouldn’t say I could sing opera but… yeah, more or less. God has given me a very flexible instrument. And I’m talking about my voice there,” he adds, with a schoolboy snigger. (By this point, it’s clear that Jools, 66, is here to do the expository heavy-lifting, while Rod – as cheerfully down-to-earth as you could reasonably hope for a 79-year-old global superstar – is the joker in the pack.)
As if a big band wasn’t enough personnel, the album’s opening track, Lullaby of Broadway, also features real live tap dancers, inspired by the song’s use in Busby Berkeley’s film The Gold Diggers of 1935.
“When Rod said he wanted tap dancers, I thought: I suppose we can fake something in the studio,” recalls Jools. “Then he rang me and said, ‘I don’t want any fake stuff – everything on this record’s got to be real. So I’ve got them all here, now.’ I said, ‘got all who here now?’ And he said, ‘the tap dancers – they’re all here at my house.’ So I went to his house and, sure enough, there were about a dozen dancers, all with their tap shoes, all ready to go.”
“It was in my gym,” says Rod. “It’s got a wooden floor, so it sounded great.”
Both men have enjoyed a lifelong love affair with jazz, rhythm and blues. It was the music Jools learned to play as a child, on a beaten-up pianola in his grandmother’s front room in south-east London, and to which he’d eventually return after his years on the post-punk circuit with Deptford heroes Squeeze. North Londoner Rod, meanwhile, started out singing the blues with the likes of Long John Baldry and the Faces – the foothills of a globe-conquering journey that’s taken him to all corners of the musical map, applying his trademark smoky croon to everything from rock and roll, R&B and country to standards from the Great American Songbook.
But while both will happily rhapsodise about their musical influences, it soon becomes clear that what they really, really enjoy talking about is their shared love of model railways.
Three years ago, Rod chartered two shipping containers and a couple of freight planes to bring his vast track layout – modelled on 1940s New York and Chicago – from his home in Malibu to the Essex mansion he shares with his third wife, Penny Lancaster, and their teenage sons (the youngest of his eight children). Meanwhile, Jools – who has a daughter and a stepson with his wife Christine McEwen, and a son and a daughter from his first marriage – has spent the best part of 50 years assembling a sprawling recreation of the London of his childhood.
Rod once claimed that being featured on the cover of Railway Modeller magazine was a bigger thrill than being on the front of Rolling Stone. “That’s true. I’ve been on the front cover four times now,” he beams. “And I’ve not been on the cover of Rolling Stone since I said that…
“I’ll tell you what, people may laugh,” he adds. “But you’ve got two guys here who feel exactly the same about our hobby – how much into it we are, and how much the rest of the world can just bugger off. We love it to death.”
“I don’t know if you, or your readers, have a particular hobby,” says Jools….
“Wanking,” chips in Rod, helpfully.
“But for us,” Jools ploughs on, “there’s no better way to relax. The best advice I was ever given, probably about anything, was when I first met Rod years ago, and he said, ‘You’ve got to put your layout in a much bigger room. In fact, he said, ‘put it in the biggest room you’ve got, because it will make you much happier’. And he was right.’”
“It didn’t make his wife happier, though,” chortles Rod. “He put it in the dining room.”
So who’s got the biggest…
“Cock?” says Rod, somewhat inevitably.
… layout?
“It’s not about the size,” explains Rod. “It’s about the authenticity.”
“Each layout is somebody’s artistic study of the world around them,” agrees Jools. “When someone’s spent a lot of time doing that, it’s like you’re seeing a part of them – the contents of their brain, spread out on a shelf. “
Told you they really love talking about model railways.
As well as collaborating with everyone from former Beatles to Motown legends on record, over the past three decades, Jools has welcomed hundreds of the world’s greatest artists onto his long-running Later… TV show. During which he’s often observed that, the bigger the star, the more courteous and less demanding they’re likely to be.
“I think that’s because they’ve been through it all,” he considers. “It’s often when people are a bit nervous, or a bit less confident, that they aren’t so gracious. Whereas people like Rod are always thinking of others, because they know people are looking up to them, and they like to set an example.”
Rod’s certainly been making a habit of helping others in recent years, with stories emerging of him putting up Ukrainian refugees, sending money to struggling families, and paying for people to have MRI scans at his local hospital (not to mention helping fill in potholes in the road near his house). Is he just trying to spread a little of his good fortune?
“Not only that, but a bit of my wealth,” he says. “I try to do as much as I can, but it’s a double-edged sword, because it gets into the papers, and then people are like, ‘oh, he must have an album coming out’. Also, since I’ve had my knighthood [in 2016], I feel I should. I want people to know I don’t take it lightly. I want to help people.”
Next year, Rod will turn 80, and he’s been incredibly famous for more than 50 of those years. With up to 250 million record sales, a string of iconic hits like Maggie May, Sailing and This Old Heart of Mine, a haul of lifetime achievement awards, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and all the other trappings of superstardom, does it all just feel normal to him now? Or does he still sometimes stop and think: how did this happen?
“Every day,” he insists. “Every day I think: how come I’m so lucky? You know, I’ve got a bit of talent, I must admit. But it’s all about those simple twists of fate. I was in the right place at the right time when Long John Baldry discovered me singing when I was 17 or 18. You need a bit of luck.”
He doesn’t seem like a man to grumble about the pressures of fame, suggests Weekend. “No, I don’t grumble,” he says. “I don’t turn people down if they want a picture, as long as they’re polite, and not drunk. The public put me where I am. Nobody else.”
That said, nor is he a man who lives in fear of being cancelled by the court of public opinion – happily expressing, for example, his unfashionable admiration for Boris Johnson, or talking about being pals with Donald Trump in the past. Though he probably wouldn’t hang out with Trump any more, he says. “He’s not the guy that I met 20 years ago. I used to go to his house every Christmas and New Year and do concerts for him. He was a good guy. But he’s turned into somewhat of a monster, in my eyes.”
And for Julian Holland OBE, the working-class south London boy who started out as a bit of a jack-the-lad – famously getting suspended from Channel 4’s The Tube for dropping the f-bomb on early evening telly – but now owns a manor house in the grounds of a 14th century Kent castle and gets invitations to stay at Highgrove: does it all seem a bit unlikely?
“It seems completely unlikely,” he says. “And also, just playing music. If somebody had said you’ll make a living out of playing boogie-woogie piano, and running a big band… that wouldn’t have added up at all. Learning piano in my nan’s front room introduced me to a whole world, where I often can’t believe that I’m doing what I’m doing. If somebody had said, when I was listening to Rod when I was 12 years old, ‘some day you’re going to make a record with him’, I’d have been like: ‘Well how does that work?’ I wouldn’t have believed it five years ago, actually. But that’s the great thing about life. You never know what’s around the corner.”
So it really is the start of a beautiful new friendship?
“Obviously we both hope this record will be a success,” says Jools. “But even if it’s not, I think we’ll be continuing our relationship, because of our shared interest in the world of our hobby.”
“Yeah,” nods Rod. “The railway will go on forever. So even if the album tanks, we’ll still be mates.”
Swing Fever (Warner Music) is out now
This article was first published (in slightly more SFW form) in Waitrose Weekend on 22 February, 2024
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