He once claimed that an old raincoat never lets you down, but Rod Stewart has proven otherwise time after time, giving us both the sublime and the ridiculous, and often at the same time. For quite a while now he’s been churning out albums in his sleep and this mostly sounds like another one, made to measure for the mindless American market.

On the upside, his gritty vocals seem to have recaptured some of their old smoky magic. On the more provocative tracks, such as the slowie ‘Smitten’, partly written by Macy Gray, and his collaboration with Helicopter Girl on ‘Don’t Come Around Here’, he reaches the parts few others have ever reached.

But on the rest of it he simply goes through the motions in singing-by-numbers fashion. His cover of Prince’s ‘Peach’ seems like a pointless act of desperation like a poor man’s ‘Get It On’, the version of Curtis Mayfield’s ‘It Was Love That We Needed’ is merely adequate and the opening song ‘Human’ starts off like an incongruous meeting of Clannad and Destiny’s Child that he wandered into by accident.

Dolly Parton was once asked how long it took to do her elaborate three-storey hair-do before going on stage, and she replied that she didn’t know because she was never there at the time. This album sounds a bit like that. File alongside Cher and Tina Turner.