DA YA THINK I'M EIGHTY? (Of course not Sir Rod!)

As our most enduring rocker becomes an octogenarian, his biographers reveal how, aside from his 10-day superyacht birthday bash, he's largely swapped his wild lifestyle for a quiet life in the country with third wife Penny

- By Karen Rockett

The elderly man in a tracksuit and high-vis jacket filling potholes in an Essex country lane was a far cry from the leopard print-clad rock star we know and love... although the trade-mark spiky blond hair remained wonderfully intact. Sir Rod Stewart is rightly proud of his fine head of hair, so much so he dedicated a whole chapter to it in his best-selling 2012 autobiography and vowed to "have a weave like Elton" if he ever lost it.

"The hair is part of the job. It is my signature," he says, and fortunately, like his six-decade career, it shows no signs of receding.

As he celebrates his 80th birthday today onboard a £10million superyacht in Barbados with his wife Penny Lancaster and children - Rod the Mod or the Caledonian Cockney may still be a hair-raiser but he's certainly no longer the legendary hell-raiser he once was.

These days, he's more likely to be tinkering with his model railway or having a kick about with his kids on his own five-a-side football pitch, than snorting cocaine with models in nightclubs.

His biographer Tim Ewbank tells the Daily Express: "Rod will be hugely grateful to have reached the age of 80, and somewhat surprised too, that he has come relatively unscathed through all the booze and drug excesses of the rock world that claimed so many of his contemporaries.

"In many ways, he's had a charmed life. He has survived a brush with thyroid and prostate cancer, and twice he has found himself staring down the barrel of a bandit's gun. In 1974, he was lucky to escape with his life in Argentina when a gang of gun-toting thugs stormed a restaurant where he was dining and a shootout with police ensued.

"And he won't have forgotten how a gangster relieved him of his Porsche at gunpoint in Los Angeles."

After eight children with five women and affairs with some of the world's most beautiful women, including Swedish actress and Bond Girl Britt Ekland, Rod has come full circle, Tim believes.