When he was at Prague’s O2 arena for the last time, he had the stage set up as a black and white chessboard and welcomed the audience with the song Having a Party taken from the Sam Cooke repertoire. Next year, the 78-year-old British singer Sir Rod Stewart will return to the same place. As part of a world tour, he will perform here on July 3, 2024.
Tickets for prices starting at 1,990 crowns are on sale from this Wednesday, announced the Live Nation agency, which organizes the concert.
According to her, Stewart will also present his greatest hits during the second performance in Prague. In 2016, he sang for two hours at the same venue. In the course of the evening, among other things, he waved a microphone stand, threw footballs among people and shuffled his foot like a horse in a circus, they described Economic newspaper.
According to them, Stewart showed that a performer can easily be thirty years past his singing peak and still manage to create an evening from which visitors leave in a pleasant mood.
The expressive singer, for whom the flowing blond hair and particularly raspy, even cutting voice became typical, became famous as the frontman of the band Faces. At one time, she tried to compete with the more famous The Rolling Stones. Already on the solo track, Stewart grew into one of the biggest pop stars of the 70s and 80s of the last century, selling over 120 million records worldwide.
He achieved his greatest success in the 1970s, when his recordings topped the charts on both sides of the Atlantic. He became famous especially for rock melodies interwoven with blues and soul, but he also immersed himself in swing and did not shy away from the fashionable waves of disco music. His greatest hits include the marching melody Maggie Maycreeper Sailing or songs You Wear It Well a Da Ya Think I’m Sexywhich was also completed by the Prague concert in November 2016.
Rod Stewart at a concert in Prague in 2016. | Photo: CTK
He was born Roderick David Stewart in London, the youngest of five siblings. The father was Scottish, the mother came from England. The boy excelled in football from an early age and later recalled his childhood as a time when he was “amazingly happy”.
He left school at fifteen and briefly worked in a silk-screen printer, he also made a living as a fence-builder or gravedigger. He started music in 1962 as a busker and backup singer in Ray Davies’ band. Two years later, he joined Jimmy Powell & the Five Dimensions, where he also played harmonica. After that, he briefly worked in several groups, including the blues-rock group The Jeff Beck Group, with whom he recorded the important album Truth.
At the turn of the 1960s and 1970s, he adopted the image of the London subculture of the so-called mods. He began to present himself with platinum-bleached or blonde parted hair, leggings imitating leopard skin, silver vests and other fads in a similar vein.
He experienced commercial success with the group Faces, which was formed in 1969 after the departure of singer Steve Marriott from the original band Small Faces. The remaining players were joined by guitarist Ronnie Wood and Stewart took the mic. The group then changed their name to Faces.
They released four studio albums before disbanding in 1975. Wood joined the more famous Rolling Stones, and Stewart fully developed a solo career. “I didn’t feel good about doing other people’s music. I think you find yourself when you write your own material,” he said.
Already in 1969, he debuted with the solo album An Old Raincoat Won’t Let You Down, followed by the albums Gasoline Alley and especially Every Picture Tells a Story from 1971, which already dominated the charts in Britain and the USA.
Since then, Stewart has recorded more than three dozen other albums, the last one called The Tears of Hercules he published the year before. He gradually acquired an unusually wide repertoire, from swing standards to covers of Bob Dylan songs and British folk to black soul and hard rock.
His expression changed a bit when he successfully overcame vocal cord cancer in 2000. After the operation, his voice is softer, perhaps a little more worn.
The British tabloids were also interested in him for a long time in connection with his reputation as a womanizer and a rioter who did not avoid alcohol and drug excesses. Today, he has long used the title of sir. When he introduced the composition at the last concert in Prague Rhythm Of My Heart written by the Czech-born author John Capek, large screens recalled how Prince William knighted Stewart at Buckingham Palace with the right to use the title of Sir.
Da Ya Think I’m Sexy? from 1978 is one of Rod Stewart’s greatest hits. | Video: Warner Bros.
