Rod Stewart's beautiful blonde ends up being a man

Rod Stewart once took a "beautiful" blonde back to his hotel room - and discovered she was a man.

The 68-year-old rocker claims he was set up by his Faces bandmates when they visited a bar during a tour of Australia in the 1970s and despite his initial shock, he still saw the funny side.

He told Sirius XM DJ Howard Stern: "There was this beautiful woman and I was thinking, 'Why aren't the guys trying to chat her up?'

"They said, 'Rod, we have left her for you.' It turned out she was a guy. I finished up in bed with a bloke who had a block and tackle.

"I thought, the guys have set me up, fair enough. I just said, 'You stay there, I'll stay over here.'"

He denied they kissed, but then admitted: "There may have been a peck on the neck."

Rod - who has eight children with five women - also insisted he had never been interested in sleeping with more than one woman at a time as he found it "distracting".

He said: "I never really got into orgies. I tried it with a couple of Japanese girls a long time ago and I found it all a bit disappointing and distracting."

These days, the 'Maggie May' hitmaker is happily married to model Penny Lancaster - the mother of his youngest children Alistair, seven, and Aiden, two - and says they have sex "three quality times" a week but fitting in passion around family life can be difficult, so he regularly hires a nanny to care for the kids while he and his 42-year-old spouse take a break at their Florida beach house.

He said: "You've got to understand when you've got two small kids and you're both in bed and your son comes home through the door and says, 'Mum! Dad!' - we've got to fit it in between the children.

"Four of them live with me and although it's a massive house it's very noisy. We go to Florida three or four times a year and that's probably when I get my leg over the most."