(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Wed 7 January 2026 7:51, UK
Every rock band usually has to deal with following the money for most of their career. As much as fans want you to stay true to what you’re doing whenever they pick up a new record, there’s always that cruel, tempting feeling of making something that will give you a much larger audience. Rod Stewart may have exuded bluesy rock and roll, but no one was safe from disco, especially with ‘Do Ya Think I’m Sexy’.
Granted, has time changed the public opinion on this track? The backlash from disco had already seen a backlash of its own when people insisted that it wasn’t that bad, and since acts like Daft Punk reminded us how fun the genre could sound, can we really say the same thing for Stewart’s classic?
Well, I can report to you, good people, that our findings are a resounding… not really. Stewart may have still had the vocal chops of a bluesy singer, and hearing his signature rasp over what sounds like a rejected Donna Summer backing track just makes him sound weak compared to his predecessors. The Rolling Stones’ ‘Miss You’ might not be a glowing endorsement of rock and roll disco, but it sounds like a masterpiece compared to whatever this is.
Speaking to Songfactsin 2004, drummer for the session Carmine Appice reflected on recording ‘Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?’, and how ‘Miss You’ impacted it. “We were in the studio, and ‘Miss You’ by The Rolling Stones was a big hit,” the drummer remembered. “Rod was always a guy that used to listen to what was going on around him.”
“He was always looking at the charts and listening. He was a big fan of The Rolling Stones, so when they came out with ‘Miss You,’ disco was really big at the time, so he wanted to do some kind of disco-y song, but nothing like Gloria Gaynor.” Famously, Gloria Gaynor’s best-known song is the 1978 disco-pop hit, ‘I Will Survive’.
Rod Stewart in his glamorous youth. (Credits: Far Out / Allan Warren)
Providing more detail about how ‘Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?’ emerged, Appice continued: “With the band, he would always tell us, ‘I want a song like this’ or ‘I want a song like that,’ so I went home and I came up with a bunch of chords and a melody. I presented it to him via a friend of mine, Duane Hitchings, who is a songwriter who had a little studio. We went in his studio with his drum machines and his keyboards, and he made my chords sound better.”
Although Stewart may not have wanted to rehash the same thing, it’s not like he was completely sold on the disco move by the end. Since this was the guy who sounds rootsy rock songs like ‘Maggie May’, he had no business being on a track with a disco hi-hat beat and a string section that sounds like it was programmed by a kid’s pre-school keyboard.
When talking about his big hit, Stewart even admitted that he would have wanted his money back after he heard the song, telling Classic Rock Stories, “Isn’t it a wonder I’ve survived some of my fucking terrible career moves? Sometimes I worry about me! ‘Do Ya Think I’m Sexy’? If I was a male fan, I’d think, ‘Up yours, Jack!”.
If there’s anything to be taken out of ‘Do Ya Think I’m Sexy’, though, at least it helped expose Stewart to a new audience. It may not have been the more representative song in his catalogue, but for those curious to look into his older material afterwards, they were in for some of the greatest singing of the 1970s.
There are even a few pieces of the track that work well for what they are… only if they were in a different song. Since the guitars sound like static through most of the track, if you were to ditch them, remove Stewart’s voice, and bring up the orchestral pieces in the mix, you would have a pretty decent Gloria Gaynor B-side on your hands.
It’s not like Stewart couldn’t adapt, either. Just look at his recent turn making his own version of jazzy standards and you can hear the power that he has just with his voice and an orchestra behind him. There was potential for him to stretch out, but rarely does anyone try to experiment and take every wrong step like this.
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