Penny Lancaster has claimed she wasn’t a fan of her husband Sir Rod Stewart when they first met, and initially wondered “what the hell” she was getting herself into.
The former model and Loose Women star first met Stewart in 1999 and, at the time, the 27-year-old “definitely wasn’t” thinking about a relationship as she’d just come out of something long term.
“Rod was such an unknown entity,” she told Saga magazine of the “Maggie May” crooner. “There were a lot of times after that night when I thought, ‘What the hell am I getting myself into?’ But Rod’s world was a vortex and I was sucked in.”
Before she and Stewart got together, the “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” musician was married to actor Alana Stewart between 1979 to 1984, then to model and TV presenter Rachel Hunter between 1990 to 2006 (the couple separated in 1999).
He and Lancaster tied the knot in a ceremony in Portofino, Italy in June 2007. They have two sons together: Alastair, 19, and Aiden, 14.
Stewart has six other children from previous relationships as well as five grandchildren. He initially told Lancaster that he did not want any more children but relented after she told him she wanted to be a mother.
“Now Rod always says, ‘I wish I’d said yes [to babies] earlier, because then we could have had more children,’” she said. “Even five years ago, we were talking about adopting but it ended up not happening. We thought there might be too much of an age gap.”
In an interview with The Times earlier this year, Stewart recalled that Lancaster approached him at the bar of the Dorchester hotel the day after he broke up with Hunter.
“So I said, ‘Do you like dancing?’” he said. “She was an incredible dancer, gorgeous, 6ft 4in [in heels], ai-yi-yi. I was very lucky. I went out of one marriage and into the next.”
However, Stewart said there was a six-month break between the end of his relationship with Hunter and the moment he and Lancaster began dating: “My bass player, who had Penny’s number, wouldn’t give it to me,” he said.
“He said, ‘All you’re going to do now is shag around.’ And he was right: I had a splendid time in those six months. Rachel left me because she was too young – my sister said I should never have married her in the first place – but it tore me to shreds. Now I’m with Penny and she’s got everything I could possibly want.”
Stewart headlined the Legends’ Slot at this year’s Glastonbury Festival, which also featured performances from The 1975, Olivia Rodrigo and Neil Young.
In a two-star review for The Independent, critic Mark Beaumont said that Stewart’s set suggested “the old guard’s time has well and truly passed, and that in future all legend slot bookings need to involve a fresh audition tape”.
Lancaster’s new memoir, Someone Like Me, is published on 25 September.
