Rod Stewart (GB)

About

Also known as: Rod Steward, Roderick David Stewart, Roderick Stewart

Rod Stewart's raspy voice is one of the most recognisable sounds in rock history, and the numbers back it up: over 120 million records sold worldwide. His early albums blended rock, folk, soul and R&B into something genuinely distinctive, and the 1971 breakthrough Every Picture Tells a Story made him a global name overnight. The single Maggie May and the album hit number one simultaneously in the UK and the US, something that had never happened before. That run of form continued with Never a Dull Moment, Atlantic Crossing and A Night on the Town, the latter producing Tonight's the Night which spent nearly two months at the top of the US chart. His later pop and soft rock years kept him in the upper reaches of the charts across multiple countries, from the disco flavoured Da Ya Think I'm Sexy? to the power ballad All for Love with Bryan Adams and Sting. In the early 2000s he took a sharp turn into Great American Songbook territory, winning a whole new audience. He holds 10 number one albums and 31 top ten singles in the UK alone, and guitarist Steve Cropper put him in the same breath as Otis Redding as one of the finest singers he ever worked with.