THE CLASSIC ROCK INTERVIEW
One of rock’s all-time great vocalists looks back at his life and times with Free, Bad Company, The Firm and Queen, the tragedy of Paul Kossoff, his solo career, and why he probably owes the fact that he’s still alive today to his involvement in martial arts.
'Yow!… all right, all right…’ It’s a timeless performance: Paul Rodgers with Free, playing All Right Now at the Isle of Wight Festival in the summer of 1970. As the band chop away at the riff, Rodgers strikes a pose, with one knee cocked and a hand outstretched, like he’s about to deliver one of Shakespeare’s sonnets rather than ‘There she stood, in the street, smiling from her head to her feet.’
Rodgers sang into not one but two microphones that day. The doubling up was due to the requirements of the PA, but also magnified his image as a man whose voice couldn’t be contained by just one. Paul Rodgers launched a thousand imitators, but the man with the flawless delivery (whom his former bandmate Jimmy Page calls “the Sam Cooke of rock”) is a true original.
Born on December 17, 1949, Rodgers was the son of a Middlesbrough docker, who ignored his father’s advice to “get a trade”, and instead fled to London to try his luck in the music business.
Rodgers distilled his love of Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding and Muddy Waters into the hits All Right Now and Wishing Well with the pioneering bluesrockers Free. When Free imploded in 1973, Rodgers formed Bad Company and broke America with the charttopping radio staples Can’t Get Enough,Feel Like Makin’ Love and Rock’n’roll Fantasy. Since then, he’s made solo and tribute albums, formed supergroup The Firm with Jimmy Page, and toured the world as guest vocalist with Queen.
Midnight Rose is Rodgers’s first album of all-new songs since 2000, recorded with members of his solo group, released on the historic Sun Records label and produced by Bon Jovi/Metallica fixer Bob Rock and Rodgers’s wife Cynthia Kereluk. “Yes, she kicks me up the arse, in every respect,” offers her husband.
New songs such as Living It Up and Highway Robber either celebrate the music of Rodgers’s youth or reference the outlaws and desperadoes of the Bad Company era, but reimagined through the eyes of their now 73-year-old writer.
Resplendent in a blue Hawaiian-style shirt and baseball cap, Rodgers joins Classic Rock from a quiet corner of his home in British Columbia. “I live in the Okanagan Valley, but there’s enough English here for my tastes,” he says.
While the 1970s were the era of excess and a “blur of fisticuffs”, the modern-day Rodgers exudes a Zen-like calm and talks an awful lot about peace and love. In fact, “fucking” becomes “effing” in some of his answers, even if a glint in his eye suggests the ol
