(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Sun 2 November 2025 14:45, UK
The music industry isn’t exactly the most professional world to be a part of. It comes with the very nature of having your hardest working hours at midnight. It comes with the backroom dealings, the free booze and drugs, the clout, the autographs, and the egos blown to unimaginable proportions.
It’s a reality that’s often depicted in music biopics. Shady back rooms and trashed hotel rooms, bands slurring words in front of audiences made of thousands of fans, broken tour buses thanks to acid-fuelled mania, instruments with four or five strings missing. No, the music industry is not often professional, by any means.
Yet, those bands that have been sucked into the scene and choose to replicate this hedonistic behaviour often get chewed up and spat out faster than they realise they’re sweating out the digestive juices of an engine sizably larger than they are. You have to play the game before it plays you.
One musician who prospered above the odds was Rod Stewart, whose career spans over six decades. He’s been around the ringer and still performs and releases new music to this day. He’s been in his fair share of bands, beginning with The Dimensions in 1963.
It’s safe to assume that Stewart has seen it all. Yet, in his eyes, the most demonic, unprofessional band he was ever aware of was one of his very own: Stewart was the lead singer of the rock band Faces from 1969 to 1975.
As they often do, things reached a fever-pitch towards the end of their time together. Barrelling through no less than six tours of the US, the band, save for Stewart, consumed lethal levels of cocaine, alcohol, and hash, and dabbled in their fair share of licentiousness. Stewart became quickly concerned for the band’s welfare, most notably that of Ron Wood.
The worry didn’t just come from Stewart; beloved drummer Kenney Jones also shared of the beginning of the 1970s: “Mayhem. There was lots of drinking and cocaine and girls in every corridor. I never took drugs because they messed up my timing, but I was surrounded by it all. Drinking was rife. Horrible stone bottles of some muck we called Stanley Mateus and plenty of brandy.”
Stewart had a greater work ethic than the rest of his mates, so he enjoyed a career that charged further and faster ahead. Looking back on their six crazy years together, where he’d mostly avoid the incessant boozing and only stutter through stoned stories on curiously sourced hash, Stewart admitted later that “The looseness that the Faces were known for just became too loose.”
He added, “It was such an unprofessional band. How many times can you get away with being an hour and a half late at a gig for $15,000? You can’t go on doing that, year in and year out.”
Stewart made a brave choice and has enjoyed international success thanks to the wise decision. Professional parties only from here on out.
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