Rod Stewart started touring with a harmonica and got deported from Spain for vagrancy. He ends it in an arena in Hanover, Germany, in July 2027. The distance between those two points — roughly sixty-five years — is the actual subject of Rod Stewart: The Final Encore, a UK and European run starting April 2027 that takes in Belfast, Glasgow, Birmingham, Manchester, London, and twenty-one dates across the continent. The announcement comes off the back of a genuinely rough 2025. His US farewell tour, One Last Time, accumulated cancellations from flu, Covid, strep throat, and vocal rest. He paused a Utah concert to use an oxygen mask after nearly fainting. A heart procedure ended the tour. His Glastonbury legends slot looked shaky until it wasn't — and a Guardian reviewer noted, with some affection, that he moved like 'one of the leggier Muppets' while being 'in good voice, especially given he cancelled gigs.' The years show most in his struggle to sustain long notes, which is a fair accounting for an 81-year-old who has been doing this since his teens. The career arc underneath all this is worth holding. Stewart didn't emerge fully formed — he shuttled through Jimmy Powell & the Five Dimensions, Steampacket, Shotgun Express, the Jeff Beck Group, and Faces before his solo career took hold at the close of the 1960s. Every Picture Tells a Story went to number one in 1971. Every studio album since — bar one — has reached the UK Top 10. The most recent, Swing Fever with Jools Holland in 2024, hit number one. Twenty-nine studio albums. That is not a nostalgia circuit; that is a working recording artist operating at the top of the charts into his eighties. There are two asterisks on 'final.' Stewart has explicitly not ruled out one-off gigs. And he still has two rescheduled dates at Red Rocks, Colorado, in September 2027 — after the European tour nominally closes — because the original June 2025 dates were lost to inflamed vocal cords. More intriguingly, he told Desert Island Discs that he and Ronnie Wood have unfinished songs from the Faces era waiting in the studio. 'When we do get a chance to get in the studio again, we will finish off these songs. We've got a good body of songs going.' So the road may end; the recording career appears to have at least one chapter left. For the committed Stewart fan, the window is specific: the UK leg in April–May 2027, before the European stretch, gives the most accessible options. The O2 London date on May 11 will sell fastest. For anyone who has watched the recent health bulletins with concern, the honest framing is: this is a show by an 81-year-old who has had a heart procedure and a year of rolling cancellations. The tour is announced; whether it runs at full schedule is a separate question.
