Low Culture Essay: Wendy Erskine on Rod Stewart's Hot Legs video

In this month's Low Culture essay, Wendy Erskine unravels the power and gender dynamics in Rod Stewart's Hot Legs video. Subscribers please note – we're starting to send all of your subs content to your email inboxes to make sure you're able to access it easily, please do let us know what you think.

In the summer of 1983 I went to stay with my French pen-pal for a month. I had a Lady Di hair-cut, I didn’t know much French and I was fourteen. Tracie Young, who had sung backing vocals on The Jam’s ‘Beat Surrender’ the previous year before going on to have her own hits, was my favourite pop star. An article in No.1 magazine, in which she met her idol Paul Young and told him how she checked his horoscope every day was, to my mind, a work of great literature. I forgot to bring anything to read on the trip, so I made do with the two English-language books I found on the shelf in my Paris bedroom: Fat Is A Feminist Issue by Susie Orbach and The Prophecies of Nostradamus. When I wasn’t being introduced to psychoanalytic dissection of the ideologies of eating, I was pondering how the young lion would overcome the older one on the field of battle and pierce his eyes through a golden cage so he died a cruel death.

I’ve never really gone in for that idea about French people being stylish. That said, it dawned on me quickly that my French pen-pal’s family were pretty cool customers. There were two older brothers: the one with very blue eyes was into 50s rock & roll, and the other had a crew-cut and liked King Sunny Adé. One July afternoon I stood in a shop with my pen-pal and her cousin, staring at a wall of singles. At number one was ‘L’Italiano’ by Toto Cutugno. My pen-pal’s cousin pointed at one of the 7" and asked if I liked it. It was Rod Stewart and the single was ‘Baby Jane’. I hated ‘Baby Jane’ so I instantly said, non. She lifted ‘Baby Jane’ from its plastic slot to examine the cover with its multiple versions of lovelorn Rod in black PVC. She said that I must in fact like him because he was English. Actually, non, I repeated.

I couldn’t explain how he was someone to be laughed at, how in the Kenny Everett Video Show Rod parody his bum inflated over the course of the dopey song ‘Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?’ until he took off into the air. My French didn’t extend to that. (‘Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?’ is, it has to be said, not really very sexy. It might seem all black satin sheets, Jackie Collins and zipless fucks, but it’s tentative and reasonably angst-ridden – she’s alone, he’s nervous; her heart is pounding, his lips are dry. She points out that if they are going to pursue things, then she needs to borrow a dime so that she can phone her mother. He, unfortunately, doesn’t have any coffee or milk.) Instead I feigned an interest in French singers and bands I’d never heard of, lifting records, pretending to read the notes. Je n’aime pas Rod Stewart. Il est très awful.

And then I remembered that I liked the video for ‘Hot Legs.’