Rock Stars In Relationships With Uncomfortable Age Gaps

Sexuality in all its forms is at the heart of rock music. "Rock and roll" was once a euphemism for the carnal act between two people, before it was co-opted to describe the kind of music that may work people up into a physical fervor. Over time, the concept of a rock star developed: confident, and almost oozing with magnetic energy as they stalked around stages or growled through their records, which were often about fornication or the social dance that leads up to it.

Rock music isn't just about physicality, it's also about youth. It's the music of young people, no matter the era, and rock stars need to feel like they can stay forever youthful, fresh, and vital. For many, that means connecting romantically (and physically) with someone with a much lower biological age than their own. It's a recurring story in the history of rock music, with stars marrying or carrying on affairs with people born decades after they were. Sometimes they do it in a habitual fashion, and sometimes in a way that's less than legal in certain circumstances. Here are the rock stars with relationships on the record with some eye-raising age gaps.

Along with her sister Nicola, Mandy Smith became a London nightclub scenester in the 1980s when she was 13 years old. One night, after gaining entry into a music industry event, Smith earned the attention of Bill Wyman, the original bassist in the Rolling Stones. Promising to help her make headway in her fantasy career of modeling, Wyman visited Smith at home the next day, and the 47-year-old musician told Nicola that he'd already fallen in love with the 13-year-old Mandy. A romantic relationship developed, which Wyman kept hidden from public view. "It was kept from the press and strangers, of course," Smith told The Daily Mail. "For the first couple of years, I had to lie. If we were out in a club, I'd have to say I was doing a secretarial course. When it actually came out, I was 16, so I suppose it wasn't as bad. Although it was still bad."

Smith said that after the nature of the relationship became public knowledge, police interviewed Smith's mother, who refused to press charges against Wyman. In June 1989, Wyman and Smith married shortly after the latter's 18th birthday, not caring much about the 34-year age difference between them. Two years later, they divorced.

A folky singer-songwriter who broke through in the early 1970s, Don McLean has made lots of music over the past five decades, but he's best known for the monumental and allegorical 1972 song "American Pie." Now stripped of its 50-year record as the longest song to reach No. 1 on the pop chart, "American Pie" details the history of rock n' roll and the Baby Boomer generation through allusions and symbolism. In his work, McLean has often trafficked in a discussion of the past and old things, and what they mean; his second-biggest hit is "Vincent," a meditation on 19th century painter Vincent Van Gogh. However, in his personal life, McLean prefers youth and relative newness.

McLean and Paris Dylan were first romantically linked in 2016, and publicly acknowledged their relationship in 2018. Dylan is a model and influencer who, before becoming a social media celebrity, was best known for being victimized in a scam that also involved NBA player Chris "Birdman" Andersen (explored on an episode of MTV's "Catfish," a show that could also be called fake). Dylan said on her website that she was a huge fan of McLean's music, and that was in 2015, before the pair became a couple. There's a substantial difference in the ages: McLean is 48 years older than Dylan.

Neil Diamond isn't really around anymore, his days as an in-demand songwriter in the '60s, a pop-rock superstar in the '70s, and performer of consistently theater-filling concerts behind him as he deals with a Parkinson's disease diagnosis that triggered his retirement. Throughout the many phases of Diamond's career, he's been a part of multiple lengthy relationships. In 1963, 22-year-old Diamond married his high-school girlfriend, Jayne Posner. After they divorced in 1969, Diamond moved quickly to marry production assistant Marcia Murphey, eight years the singer's junior.

Diamond and Murphey stayed married for 25 years, and in the aftermath of the divorce, Diamond entered into a brief personal relationship with his manager, Rae Farley. Single once more, Diamond fell in love again, and possibly for the last time, with video producer Katie McNeil. They met in 2007, while working on the Diamond documentary "Hot August Nights" together through the musician's primary manager and her boss, Irving Azoff. "Part of me said, 'Don't get involved; he's a client,'" McNeil later told Parade. "There are a lot of complications for a lot of reasons. But our chemistry grew into something that couldn't be denied." McNeil then became Diamond's main manager in addition to his partner. They got married in 2012. The age gap between the client and his manager is 29 years.

When she was 18 years old, singer Edie Brickell went up on stage on a whim and started jamming with a Texas bar band called New Bohemians. That was in 1985, and three years later, Edie Brickell and New Bohemians had released a debut album, scored a hit single with "What I Am," and served as the musical guest on an episode of "Saturday Night Live." That show's lead producer, Lorne Michaels, and folk-rock superstar Paul Simon happen to be very close friends, and the latter was hanging around backstage the night Brickell performed; they felt drawn to one another and spent the "SNL" afterparty talking to one another. "I was thinking, 'I like the way she sings, I love the way she looks [and] I'm happy enough to be here,'" Simon told "The Howard Stern Show." "I'm not thinking, 'Hey, maybe I'll marry this girl.'"

But he totally did, in 1992. It was Brickell's first marriage and Simon's third. At the time, she was 26 and he was 51, a difference of 25 years.

Heidi Klum is best known for a long career in modeling and hosting the reality show "Project Runway." Tom Kaulitz is the guitarist in Tokio Hotel, a theatrical electro-rock band that had a surge of popularity in the 2000s and won the MTV Video Music Award for Best New Artist. Klum and Kaulitz are both among the few well-known celebrities who were born in Germany, and at any rate, they met in February 2018 at a birthday party. Within a month, photographers hounded the couple, caught canoodling on the set of Klum's "America's Got Talent," and in February 2019, exactly one year after the day of their first meeting, the model and musician got married.

Klum has often spoken of the chemistry between herself and her third husband, who was himself briefly married in the year before he took up with Klum. "Sport en chambre is my favorite exercise — it sounds better in French. I have a younger husband, Klum told The Times. How much younger? Klum is 16 years older than Kaulitz.

In the 1970s, Kiss barnstormed around the world with its epic hard rock stage show. As explosions went off around all four members, each in the costume and makeup of a fantastical persona, Paul Stanley shrieked the lyrics, Peter Criss hammered the drums, Gene Simmons spewed fake blood, and Ace Frehley shredded out epic guitar licks. In and out of Kiss frequently since the 1980s, a series of personal and career setbacks left him an iconic musician who is surprisingly poor.

Frehley has been involved in multiple relationships and marriages since the 1970s, most recently with Lara Cove. She's a high school teacher, and is such a big Kiss fan that she makes crafts featuring the band's famous horror-sci-fi imagery. She first connected on a personal level with Frehley while they were both working in 2018. "I met her December 7th at a Kiss convention in New Jersey that I was actually performing," Frehley told AXS TV (via Blabbermouth). "She had a booth with these mugs. She painted one of me, Paul, Gene, and Peter." Cove gifted a Kiss mug to Frehley, and they started dating a few months later, after she attended a Frehley solo show. The musician later featured Cove's backing vocals on some of his recordings. At the time of the relationship's end, Frehley was 73, and Cove was 54, a 19-year difference.

Aimee Ann Preston worked as a personal assistant for stars like Victoria Beckham and Christina Aguilera before Aerosmith singer Steven Tyler hired her. The relationship moved from professional into personal; they made their public debut as a couple in 2016. Preston was born in 1988, the same year that Tyler turned 40. That makes him almost four decades older than his latest flame, and even the rock star's daughters, model Mia Tyler and actor Liv Tyler, are both more than a decade older than their father's romantic partner.

His own age rising while those of the women he pursues do not is a pattern in the life of Steven Tyler. Prior to his relationship with Preston, Tyler was engaged to Clear Channel Communications higher-up Erin Brady. At the time that their relationship began, Tyler was 63 years old and Brady was 38, a gap of 25 years.

After leaving the British Invasion band the Faces, Rod Stewart embarked on a solo career, using his raspy voice to more often than not peddle songs about women, the pursuit of women, human sexuality, and other more lascivious topics. Among Stewart's many hits are "You Wear it Well," "Tonight's the Night," "Hot Legs," "Passion," and "Da Ya Think I'm Sexy?" Stewart and his first wife, actor Alana Collins, were both born in 1945. After they split in 1984, all three of the rock singer's successive long-term relationships have been with progressively younger women. From 1983 to 1990, Stewart's partner was the 14-years-younger model Kelly Emberg. In 1990, Stewart married model Rachel Hunter, who was born 24 years after the singer.

After the dissolution of that marriage, he wed Penny Lancaster in 2007, and quickly. "Rachel broke up with me on a Monday evening, and it was heartbreaking. No one leaves Rod! But that Saturday night, I met Penny at the Dorchester Hotel in London," Stewart told People. "She has mended my heart in more ways than one." Rod Stewart once took 26 years to build a massive model train set, and that span is the exact same period of time between the births of the musician and his third wife.

There might not be a rock star more quintessential than Mick Jagger. As the frontman of the Rolling Stones for more than 60 years, he's shouted, sang, and strutted his way across thousands of stages in front of millions of fans, radiating an energy and charisma that's led to fame, fortune, and a storied personal life. It's part of Jagger's untold truth that he's been linked with many, many women over the years, including models Chrissie Shrimpton, Marsha Hunt, Jerry Hall, Carla Bruni, Anita Pallenberg, and Luciana Gimenez. Almost categorically, Jagger has generally had a few years on his professionally pretty partners.

In the last decade, Jagger has cut down on the carousing and settled into a relationship with a non-model. In June 2013, he connected with Melanie Hamrick, a dancer for the American Ballet Theatre. In 2016, Jagger became a father for the eighth time, when Hamrick delivered a baby son. Two years later, Jagger brought his toddler son along on a Rolling Stones tour so that Hamrick could continue her dance career. As of 2025, the couple is still together. Jagger is 81 years old, and Hamrick is not even half that, at 37 years old.

In much the same way that he's been a member of multiple major classic rock bands of the British Invasion era — the Faces, the Jeff Beck Group, Creation, and the Rolling Stones — guitarist Ronnie Wood has been a part of many marriages. For most of the 1970s, Wood was married to model Krissy Findlay. When that union began to die down in 1977, he met model Jo Karslake, who was eight years younger than he was. They wed in 1985, and the bride filed for divorce in 2009 after the then-61-year-old Wood started a fling with an 18-year-old bar server. 

In 2012, Wood got married for the third and — to date — last time, to actor and producer Sally Humphreys. When the pair walked down the aisle, Wood was 65 years old and Humphreys was 34. Instantly a grandmother of six, Humphreys is younger than two of Wood's sons.

Before shooting the video for the single "Drive" off of the 1984 the Cars album "Heartbeat City," frontman Ric Ocasek rehearsed opposite the female romantic lead of the clip, model Paulina Porizkova. The co-star chemistry was apparently palpable, because Ocasek and Porizkova became a real-life couple after one day of rehearsals and three days of being together on set. 

Porizkova was already familiar with the Cars' previous videos, and called her connection to Ocasek "love before first sight" in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. Ocasek was still married to his wife, Suzanne, but began the relationship with Porizkova anyway, getting around to filing for divorce and finalizing the split in 1988. In August 1989, the legally single Ocasek was ready to marry again, and he and Porizkova wed in a private function in the Caribbean.

After a marriage of nearly 30 years that produced two children, Ocasek and Porizkova announced their split in May 2018. The pair still lived together, and Porizkova took care of Ocasek until his death in September 2019 from heart problems and emphysema. Nevertheless, Ocasek cut his not completely estranged spouse out of his will. "I have made no provision for my wife Paulina Porizkova ('Paulina') as we are in the process of divorcing," he wrote in the legal document (via Page Six). "She had abandoned me." At the time of the death, Ocasek was 75 years old, and Porizkova was 54.

In 1996, The Who's guitarist and primary songwriter, Pete Townshend, was two years removed from the end of his first marriage to Karen Astley when he met composer and arranger Rachel Fuller. Townshend and his bandmates were in a London studio complex practicing for a New York concert, and he asked Fuller to accompany him on the trip. "It had nothing to do with music; it was just lust. She said, 'F*** off,'" Townshend told USA Today. Fuller was 23 years old at the time, born the same year that the Who released its monumental "Quadrophenia" LP; being 28 years younger than Townshend, Fuller had never heard it. A year later, Townshend hired Fuller to arrange his operatic "Lifehouse Chronicles."

Townshend and Astley separated in 1994 but didn't legally divorce until 2009, by which point the guitarist was more than 11 years into his relationship with Fuller. She was responsible for the orchestral arrangements on the Who's summer 2017 tour, and at the conclusion of that jaunt, the pair announced they'd gotten married in a civil ceremony with two employees as witnesses in December 2016. "We married nearly a year ago and did keep it as quiet as we could, telling only close family. Why did we keep it quiet? Really, we were being selfish," Townshend wrote on Facebook.

Prince and Mayte Garcia enjoyed their first blushes of fame at around the same time the multi-instrumentalist and genre-bending genius scored his first major hits in 1979 and 1980, and Garcia guested on "That's Incredible!" in 1981, demonstrating her belly-dancing skills at all of 7 years old. A professional ballet dancer in Germany as a teenager, Garcia joined Prince's musical collective in the early 1990s. She auditioned to be a backup dancer at age 16, but Prince hired her shortly after her 17th birthday. The musician released a concept album inspired by Garcia, 1992's "Love Symbol," and then produced her 1995 album "Child of the Sun."

By that time, Prince and Garcia were romantically involved. He signaled to her that he was ready to take their close friendship and working relationship to the next level by informing Garcia, "Time to get you on birth control," she recalled to the Irish Times. Years later, when Garcia was 22 years old and Prince was about 37, on Valentine's Day 1996, the musicians married, and four years later, they divorced.