“I picked up a CD with a quivering lip and was like, ‘When’s grandad coming home?’”: up until the age of 11, Yungblud thought Rod Stewart was his grandfather

Yungblud has always acted like an artist who possesses a resolute faith that he belongs on the world’s biggest stage, and now the Doncaster pop-punk dynamo has revealed that there might be a good reason for it. In an interview with Bill Maher on the US broadcaster’s Club Random podcast, Yungblud – real name Dominic Harrison – told Maher that he was brought up thinking that Rod Stewart was his grandad.

It came about, he explained, because his mum and grandmother thought it was better option than tell him the real tale. “My mum never knew her dad,” he said. “My mum’s dad knocked my grandma up and then pissed off. I always thought my grandfather was Rod Stewart.”

It was a statement that prompted a further enquiry from Maher, in one of the rare occasions where the interviewer doesn’t try to make the chat all about himself, instead asking as to whether there was actually any relation between him and Stewart. “No,” replies Yungblud. “Because my mum never had a dad, so my grandmother always lied to me. I don’t think my mother or my grandmother wanted to upset me so she always said to me, ‘Rod Stewart was my grandfather’, so I was always like, ‘Fucking hell, I’ve got this rock star grandad’.”

He carried round this belief, he said, through many of his younger years, never doubting that the Maggie May singer was his grandad. It was when he was 11 that that the bubble was finally burst. “When I found out, I was in a supermarket and I picked up a Rod Stewart CD and I was with my grandmother,” he recalled, “and I was like 9 or 11, I picked up this CD with a quivering lip and was like, ‘When’s grandad gonna reach out to me? When’s grandad coming home?’”

With a line of store staff looking on, his grandmother was about to get seriously rumbled.

“Everyone at the checkout started hysterically laughing cos obviously they’d caught my grandmother in a blatant lie,” he said. “And that’s the day I found out Rod Stewart wasn’t my grandfather.”

But there is a happy ending. The story has already got back to Stewart after Harrison shared it earlier this year on The Jonathan Ross Show and he got in touch. “He sent me a DM on Instagram,” Harrison told Ross. “He was like, ‘Alright me wee grandson!’. Then he sent me a bottle of his whisky, which was pretty good actually’.”

Yungblud does actually have some real music lineage in his grandparents, though – his grandfather on his dad’s side was a keys player who unsuccessfully auditioned for T.Rex.