Rod Stewart, Jools Holland explain how a phone call led to new album | Music | Entertainment

When the phone rang in the mid-Kent castle Jools Holland calls home, he wasn’t expecting to hear Sir Rod Stewart’s cheeky London rasp on the other end of the line. The two weren’t close.

“He said, ‘I’m phoning to wish you a happy Christmas’,” Jools recalls. “I thought it was a joke, or some kind of scam. Then he said, ‘Anyway, do you want to record an album with me next year?’.”

Chuckling, Rod takes up story, “He told his wife and she said, ‘Have you been drinking, Jules?’”

That call, in December 2022, set the wheels in motion for the duo’s new musical collaboration – Swing Fever.

Stewart had been trying to record a swing-infused album with American musicians in LA. “It wasn’t working out too good,” he tells me. “It was a bit too smooth, too polite; it didn’t have any rock edge to it.”

Jools adds: “So we met, and Rod said he wanted it a little bit rough around the edges. I said ‘You’ve come to exactly the right man’…”

The two stars are holed up in a Warner Brothers record company office in Kensington, West London, when we chat. To their delight it overlooks a railway line. A mutual love of trains cemented their friendship. Both are fervent model railway enthusiasts.

Holland’s recording studio in Greenwich, southeast London, even looks like a Victorian train station; and before Xmas they “busked” at London’s St Pancras with Jools’s 18-piece Rhythm & Blues Orchestra in the evening rush-hour.

“We were supposed to get permission but as I’m a knight of the realm they overlooked it,” Stewart says with a grin.

Self-styled “Cockney Scotsman” Rod, the north-London-born son of a master-builder from Leith, was blessed with a singing voice like black velvet scratched with sandpaper – perfect for rock’n’roll.

A string of unforgettable hits and a discography studded with more gold and platinum than a rap star’s stage bling testifies to his enduring talent.

Rod, 79, has stepped outside rock confines before, with his multi-million-selling Great American Songbook collections. Wasn’t performing big band numbers a greater challenge?

“No, I was in my comfort zone,” he says. “God has given me a voice where I can sing this stuff as well as rock ‘n’ roll.”

Massive in the 1930s, swing had its roots in jazz, but shares elements of its musical DNA with early rhythm and blues, which in turn evolved into rock’n’roll.

Rod: “Listen to Louis Prima and Chick Webb – the songs are swing, but they’re close to rock’n’roll. The first rock’n’roll record I ever heard was Bill Haley’s Rock Around The Clock and that’s swing really.”

The 13 infectious numbers are largely American but “It’s a very London album, very boisterous,” says Jools, 66, who found fame as the piano-player with Squeeze.

At Stewart’s insistence there are no ballads.

They recorded Lullaby Of Broadway first. Jools recalls, “Rod wanted to leave a gap for the tap dancers, I said we’ll use synthesisers. He said ‘I don’t want any synthesiser nonsense – I want tap dancers!’”

Rod: “I wanted Busby Berkeley!”

Tracks include Love Is The Sweetest Thing, with a Jamaican ska vibe, Good Rockin’ Tonight – the jump blues classic covered by Elvis in 1954 – and almost inevitably the rollicking swagger of Night Train.

Trains have played a huge part in Stewart’s life. He got his first break when blues singer Long John Baldry heard him singing on Twickenham Station, southwest London, early in 1964.

“I was drunk,” Rod recalls. “I’d gone to see the Rolling Stones – there were only 15 people in the audience – and I was going back to London. He ran over and said, ‘Would you like to join my band?’ Cyril Davies had just died. I joined; I was 18.”

Rod’s breakthrough, both solo and with The Faces, came in 1971, 250million record sales ago…

Blackheath-born Julian Miles Holland, OBE, left Squeeze in 1980; his fourteen albums include two platinum-sellers. The former co-host of The Tube has presented BBC2’s Later…with Jools Holland since 1992.

Son of a self-educated lorry-driver, Jools lived with his grandparents after his parents split.

“Tell him about your uncle,” says Rod.

Jools: “I was eight and my uncle David was playing boogie-woogie on my grandmother’s pianola…I nagged him to show me how to play it, and then I kept playing it…”

Rod recalls hearing jazz bands “in pubs and clubs and at jazz festivals” adding “I met the first woman I had sex with at Beaulieu Festival – that’s where Maggie May came from.”

Jools: “Were you going for the music or the sex?”

Rod: “Both, mate…”

Stewart, whose first heroes were Sam Cooke and Muddy Waters, recalls walking past pubs in Bermondsey and hearing the muted sound of trumpets – “Open the door and it was like being in New Orleans…”

He adds, “When I started, it was brave to go into the music business; it was a risk. People in the family would ask ‘Why don’t you get a proper job?’ I didn’t realise I’d be 79 and still be doing it.”

Jools agrees. “If you told the careers advisor at school you wanted to be a musician, they’d look at you blankly and say, ‘Have you considered the career in brick-laying?’ In Rod’s day, nobody in England had been an international star, it wasn’t an option.”

Rod: “Not even Alma Cogan. Also, where do you get started now? The pubs have gone. The labels gave you a chance then.”

While his generation were fired by love of music, Stewart thinks many current wannabes are motivated by the desire for fame and fortune.

Young Rod was a radical, keen on CND marches and the Young Communist League. Although a long-time Tory-voter, he has lost faith in the party, famously calling Sky News last year to complain about government failings.

This month he said, “It’s time for the government to go”, adding that Starmer’s Labour Party “deserve a crack”.

Rod’s old Faces bandmate Ronnie Wood famously described him as being “as tight as two coats of paint”. Not anymore.

Last year, the Sunday Express told how the big-hearted star was paying for a young woman’s treatment for a rare genetic disorder. But when I mention it, he doesn’t remember.

“I do it all the time, but under the radar,” he says.

Sir Rod generously housed a family of Ukrainians for a year, sent £5,000 to a student nurse seriously ill with Covid-19, and paid for 20 diagnostic cancer scans at his local Princess Alexandra Hospital in Harlow, Essex.

This year, he left hotel staff in Perthshire a £10,000 Hogmanay tip. In 2022 he fixed potholes…

“I’ve got a lot of money. I want to help,” says Rod, who sold his back-catalogue for a staggering £79.4million this month.

“I’ve had such a wonderful, successful life. I feel happy doing anything. I’m so grateful that I’m doing this.”

This being making music, some of it timeless.

Although written in 1936, Pennies From Heaven has a re-assuring message for these grim days – no matter how tough life gets, things will turn out okay.

“Music can express great joy,” Jools observes. “There are awful things going on but this album says ‘It’s all right, just enjoy each other’.”

Neither Rod nor father-of-three Jools has time for old-school rock debauchery, preferring to escape through their scale model railways.

Stewart has constructed a 1500-square-foot replica of 1940s Chicago and New York; Jools has opted for a multi-era mash-up of the Berlin Wall and London’s East End, with a tram.

Father-of-eight Rod has a European tour and a summer season in Las Vegas ahead. So there are no immediate plans to tour the swing album together.

“This year’s really busy, so we’ll probably wait until next year,” says Rod, adding, “I’m always gonna be a rock star, but I just love singing these songs.

“It’s heaven it really is.”

*New album Swing Fever by Sir Rod Stewart and Jools Holland with his Rhythm & Blues Orchestra is out now