After five decades of hedonism, eight stints in rehab and three marriages, at 71, Ronnie Wood says his only vice is coffee. Polly Vernon braces herself to meet the ageing rock star


Ronnie Wood at an exhibition of his paintings
Chris Floyd

The Times, October 27 2018

At some point during our 45 minutes together, I ask Ronnie Wood – the 71-year-old Rolling Stone who, if rumour and rock mythology and decades’ worth of paparazzi shots and multiple reports of addiction, one cocaine-ravaged septum (removed, then substituted with plastic), the accounts of raging exes and his own personal, if hazy, recollections of the past 50 years are to be believed, has pursued a lifestyle so hedonistic, it is the gold standard by which all celebrity excess is still measured – how he’s not dead.

“I’ve got a little valve in me,” Wood says – rasps, rather. His voice is scratchiest Estuary, tickled by age, booze, fags and the thousand gigs he surely must have performed.

“So there’s a little valve. A little voice. It says, ‘I don’t think you should go any further.’ It says, ‘Hang on.’ You know? ‘You can’t have any more.’ A little light that doesn’t go out.”

Do you think someone’s watching over you?

“Yeah.”

God?

“Some … Angel Gabriel looks after me. You know? In the dark. You know?”

Have you ever not felt special?

“Never. They used to stop me when I was a kid because I was ‘Splinter’, I was a little chip off the big wood. My dad was …”

A local celebrity?

“ ‘Timber’ they called him, and I was ‘Splinter’. But everyone has that, don’t they? In your neighbourhood, when you were growing up, you must have had people who treated you as special, and you thought, ‘Ooh, I deserved that.’ ”

No. I felt either weird or irrelevant, growing up. “Really? I must have been looking out for it, then.”

When was the last time you failed at something?

“I haven’t.”


Wood at his wedding in 1985, with Charlie Watts, Jo Wood and Keith Richards
REX SHUTTERSTOCK

It’s hard to work out if Ronnie Wood is a screaming narcissist, inclined to romanticise himself to preposterous lengths, to view himself as charmed, protected, innately special – or if he’s just entitled to think that. What a ridiculous, wonderful life Wood has led, and continues to lead. How expansively his talents have been received, how handsomely his worst behaviour has been rewarded. Guitarist with four extraordinary bands (the Birds, which he joined as a teenager in 1964, then the Jeff Beck Group in ’67, the Faces in ’69 and, finally, following a prolonged, tactical campaign on Wood’s behalf, the Rolling Stones, 1975-present day); three wives (two models, one theatre producer; let’s not mention the affair he had in the Seventies with George Harrison’s ex-wife Pattie Boyd); six kids; six grandkids; eight spells in rehab (the last of which, in 2010, finally took), a parallel career as an artist (he says Tracey Emin says he’s better at drawing than her), one brush with cancer, yet no hint of an end – not even a gentle mellowing into retirement – in sight.

Here he is today, look: clean and – I want to say “serene”, but “explosively excitable” is closer to the mark. He’s peddling a new project: a vast coffee-table book entitled The Rolling Stones Set Lists. It’s a compilation of 20 years’ worth of what look like discarded flipchart pages to the untrained eye – Wood calls them canvases – onto which he had handwritten and illustrated the set lists for the band’s concerts as they rehearsed in various locations. He’s broken up the words with doodles of devils and horses as song titles require; finessing the whole with insights such as, “We like Paris. We like the food.”

I have to be honest: I’m not sure about Set Lists. I mean, you could see it as art. You could see it a vital documentation of rock’n’roll history. But I’m inclined to see it as a flagrant cash-in on Wood’s behalf. Seventy-five limited-edition sets have already sold out, with collectors paying £2,000 a pop; the basic model goes for £295. I flick through it irritably, wondering how much more dosh/applause Wood requires, and how much more stuff Rolling Stones fans need to amass …

But then I come across the multiple penis doodles with which Keith Richards routinely annotates Wood’s “work”.

I like Keith’s penises, I tell Wood. (Truthfully. I’ve got a thing about penis graffiti; it tells us so much about the perennial teenage-hood of mankind. In this instance, it also offers an incontestably delicious glimpse into Richards and Wood’s relationship. Oh, and they’re just funny.)

“Yeah.” Wood says. “Keith’s a bit like Rod [Stewart]. Rod draws knobs everywhere. And look!”

Wood flips excitedly through Set Lists, settling on a different page. In one corner lurks a doodle of a long-nosed chap peering over a wall.

“ ‘Kilroy woz ’ere!’ ”

Keith?

“Keith!” he says.

Somehow, Set Lists grows on me. Equally perplexingly, so does Ronnie Wood.

----------

I start our interview with my hackles up and my prejudices firing. I’m no Rolling Stones fan. The po-faced feminist in me finds them – their music, the culture they inspired and perpetuate, their ability to go on and on and on while female musicians 10, 20, 30 years younger are written off as haggard has-beens – oh, it’s all so impenetrably male. On top of which, 10 years ago I interviewed Jo Wood, Ronnie’s wife of 23 years, mother to 3 of his children, the woman he had, at that point, ditched for a 19-year-old waitress he’d met on a drinks bender. I’d really liked Jo. What on earth must it be like, I’d wondered, to dedicate your life to an addict man-child like Wood, then have him unceremoniously drop you on a pissed-up whim? And so what if, in the intervening decade, Ronnie Wood has straightened himself out? Given up drugs, booze and even fags; remarried (respectably: Sally Humphreys, a 40-year-old theatre producer), produced twin girls (Alice and Gracie, now two), even breezed through the episode of lung cancer that inevitably resulted from a 50-year chain-smoking habit … That’s just more irritating yet, isn’t it? That, after everything, Wood is allowed to start over with such a pristine clean sheet.

I’m cross with him basically, and all I think he represents.

Then I meet him.

----------

He boings up to greet me when I walk into the hotel suite from which he’s basing the day’s press operations. He’s a coiled spring of a septuagenarian, diminutive, perhaps a little deaf, incredibly bouncy. That face – bones and crag, eyebrows and mischief – and that hair, which he swears he doesn’t dye, “and if it went grey, I wouldn’t. And if it fell out, I wouldn’t sew more back in.”

I reach out a hand. Wood goes in for a full embrace, kisses me on each cheek, offers me “refreshments” from a nearby table, waving an arm at it regally. It’s buckling under the weight of multiple caffeine products: coffee, all the Cokes.

“Coffee’s my favourite vice, and it’s my only vice I’ve got left,” he proclaims.

I’d been told, sternly, by Wood’s publicity department that I am to ask Wood only about the book, that this is not a “Ronnie Wood interview” but rather a “Ronnie Wood Set Lists interview”. I’m not sure, however, that this information has been communicated to Wood himself; or if it would have made a blind bit of difference if it had. He is a circuitous and rogue interviewee; partly, I assume, as a consequence of exposure to mind-frazzling substances, although clearly, when you have as many anecdotes from which to draw as Wood does, it’s hard to know where to start, or how to stop.

We do kick off with the book, Ronnie’s PR department, truly we do. But my attempt to establish some sense of the true hierarchy of the Stones (ie is Mick solely in charge?) by deconstructing Keith Richards’ penis doodles, inspires Wood to reminisce about his childhood in Hillingdon in the Fifties and early Sixties.

“We’re brothers,” he says (tritely) of the band’s dynamic, “and being the youngest [among the Stones], it’s still like being with my [real] brothers [Art and Ted, both of whom were older, both of whom are now dead], you know? If they’re fighting and arguing, I step in and stop it. Make the peace. I think maybe it does stem from childhood. I can just see my brothers. I close my eyes and I see them fighting in the front room, going over the furniture, and me crying and splitting them up. Really crying, you know?”

When was the last time you had to physically tear Rolling Stones apart, I ask.

But Wood is still mired in mid-20th century Hillingdon.

“Same with my parents. When my mum and dad were having sex, I’d run in and say, ‘Stop hurting my mum!’ I used to pummel on my dad.”

Gosh.

“I used to think he was really hurting her, you know?”

Ronnie, Art and Ted were the first generation of Wood’s family to be born on dry land. His parents were “bargees, water gypsies”, canal workers; Wood’s brothers, meanwhile, ten and eight years older than Ronnie, and both born before the Second World War, were art-school students.

“My brothers, they still had the air-raid shelters, you know? That’s why they drew, to amuse themselves. And there was no TV. And I came in on the tail end of that, although TV was just coming out when I was a youngster, but I saw them draw. I would try to step up. ‘I can draw a horse that well. Yeah, I know the way a horse walks …’ ”

Ronnie drew to keep up with Art and Ted, who then started making music, “Because art and music went hand in hand. All the art students were playing music.”

So Ronnie Wood first picked up a guitar?

“Drums. I’m a drummer first … No, a footballer first. Then a drummer.”

Born to be a star, one way or another.

“Good point. Yeah.”

Ronnie Wood’s ascendance to rock megastardom was assured and speedy, but not exactly a romantic inevitability predicated only on his raw talent and innate star quality. While researching Wood, I sniff out evidence of some naked ambition, a capacity to manage situations and people to his own advantage. “A little bit of manipulation on my part. Just kind of pushing everybody out of the way, and getting in,” he has said in past interviews. In Set Lists, Wood reminisces about being in the audience of a 1969 Rolling Stones concert at Hyde Park and “knowing” he would be in the band eventually; knowing, in effect, that whatever success and acclaim the Birds and Faces brought him, it wouldn’t be enough. The Stones was the ultimate goal.

Would you describe yourself as “ruthless” about becoming a Rolling Stone?

“Oh yeah. Always making sure I was in the right place at the right time. And it would work. And I’d be able to get one more rung up the ladder.”

When Wood was “16, maybe 17”, Mick Jagger invited him to play on a recording session he was producing. Wood agreed. (What was Jagger like? “Nice. Aloof. Nice.”) After which, Wood gently stalked the Stones, bumping into them accidentally on purpose after the 1969 Hyde Park gig. “Mick and Charlie [Watts] came out of the car right in front of me. I was walking around the park. I knew the Stones were playing a free concert.”

It would take Wood six more years of careful manoeuvring to get in, at which point he discovered Jagger had attempted to hire Wood away from the Faces some years earlier, only getting as far as the band’s bass guitarist, Ronnie Lane, who’d taken Jagger’s call “and said, ‘No, he’s quite happy where he is. Don’t call again.’ ”

Wood thinks, in retrospect, that delay was for the best. He’s convinced he would have died had he joined the Rolling Stones any earlier.

Really?

“Quite possibly. I don’t think I’d have done it to myself, but somebody might have done it to me.”

Murdered you?

“Injected me.”

Did that happen?

“Yeah. Keeping up with junkies. There were a lot of dangerous men around and a lot of dangerous dealers that would show off, sort of: ‘Eh, you ain’t done enough … Have a bit more,’ you know?” Wood mimes an injection. “You had to have your wits about you. Brian Jones [founder and original leader of the Rolling Stones, found dead in the bottom of a swimming pool in 1969] had no control of it.”

Somehow – I swear he does this on his own – Wood segues from talking about drug overdoses in the late Sixties to his experience of fatherhood in his seventies.

“Alice and Gracie, they’re brilliant. I mean, I’m up to my neck in it and they’re really great. They wake me up in the mornings and …”

Are you a better dad, this time around?

“I’m a more conscientious dad. Or, conscious.”

Literally more conscious?

“Yeah.”

I tell Wood that I’ve met some of his older children over the years and been unexpectedly impressed by them. Various brief encounters with Leah (now 40), Jesse (41) and Tyrone Wood (35) have all left me with a sense they’re unusually well adjusted for the offspring of celebrity: calm, well mannered, non-entitled.

“Oh yeah? Great,” he says.

Is that a reflection of your parenting skills – or of their mothers’? “Oh, it’s them, you know,” he says, meaning the children themselves. I wonder if he’s consciously sidestepping any reference to Jo or his first wife, Krissy Findlay, the mother of Jesse, who died of a suspected drugs overdose aged 57. “It’s great. They take the good points of both.”

Are you a strict dad?

“No. I mean, I set boundaries. You’ve got to. But they [the twins] don’t listen.”

I resist suggesting this might make them their father’s children.

----------

Ronnie Wood has been sober for eight years. “Amazing, ain’t it?”

I wonder what it was about that eighth time in rehab that worked for him in a way the first seven hadn’t, and he rattles off practised rhetoric about, “I finally found out rehab was me, you know?” And how, “A bell rings inside me, you know?” And, “What they call serenity, an incredible kind of happiness.”

I ask him if it’s risky, being on tour – as the Stones so often are – as a recovering addict. Wood says not at all. “I go into bars. I sit in bars. But I don’t feel a trigger. I don’t want a drink.”

He still parties, he says. What does partying involve when you’re sober?

“Oh, talking, rant, rant, rant … Enthusiastic, ah, coffees. Three o’clock in the morning, yeah, we’re still going. And Coke.” He waggles his half-drunk glass of Coca-Cola in the interest of clarification.

The process of his sobriety coincided with the beginning of his love affair with Humphreys. Is it different, falling in love sober?

“You remember more.”

I ask if he has any regrets about his non-sober years. I’m thinking specifically of the manner of his split from Jo Wood, the flurry of paparazzi pictures that showed Ronnie drunkenly embracing young waitress Ekaterina Ivanova, a girl whom, Jo revealed in her 2013 autobiography, Hey Jo, Ronnie once brought back to the family home in a drunken haze, introducing her to Jo and their bemused children. At which point, Ivanova inadvertently set fire to her own hair. I don’t mention Jo specifically to Wood; I assume she might spring to mind independently, in the context of regret.

But Wood says he regrets nothing.

“Not really. The world was spinning that much faster, and I was living in LA and I was living in New York, and I was living over at Wimbledon, and in Kingston and Richmond [with Jo],” he says. “I mean, I might have told a few people to f*** off, but they deserved it.”

I push a little further. Is there anything you think you probably shouldn’t have done? Any lines that shouldn’t have been crossed?

“There’s a lot of time-wasting, I think. Waiting for the dealer, waiting for the man. And then the man did come! We had a lot of fun in the waiting, you know. You’d make your own amusement. And when he did come, all hell broke loose. And the high, whatever that meant, was there for the time being. I suppose you never came down. In the early days, when I joined the band, you never really came down. It never left my system. Whatever it was. We were always topping up. ”

So it goes on, with me attempting to shepherd Wood’s freewheeling reminiscences and theories into some kind of coherent order. He somehow manages to be grandiose and spoilt and utterly charming throughout, even when discussing his 2017 treatment for lung cancer.

How afraid was he when he got the diagnosis? “I let go immediately. I knew it was going to be there, because I smoked for England for 54 years. It was, ‘God, of course I’ve got cancer of the lung. But I haven’t got it anywhere else.’ I knew I was strong enough not to let it be anywhere else in my body.”

Which it wasn’t.

We move on to Wood’s appearance.

You make a strong physical impression, I tell him.

“Do I?” he says. He’s twinkling, fishing for compliments.

You’ve got A Look.

“That’s great. I could talk to you all day!”

It’s part of your job, isn’t it? Being looked at, ensuring that’s gratifying on some level to those who are looking?

“I have my own standards, and I have to fit them. I polish up pretty good, let’s put it that way.”

How do you keep thin?

“Well, that’s another thing I think we all share in the Stones. We’re all out of the same stable. We’re war babies.”

Rationing left you eternally lean?

“Lean and mean. And the immune system, you know?”

You think you’ve got stronger constitutions because you were born in the Forties?

“Yes. There wasn’t a lot in the early years, luxury-wise.”

Does that mean you especially enjoy the luxuries fame has brought?

“Yes.”

What’s your weak spot?

“Caviar. I had it for breakfast this morning.”

You did not!

“I did. With my boiled eggs and a bit of onion and salmon.”

What about women?

“What about ’em?”

You a fan?

“I still love ’em, yes.”

Do you think it’s possible to be a rock star and be faithful?

“Yes.”

But it wasn’t possible for you. Before Sally, the twins and sobriety, I mean.

“It was possible, yeah.”

That doesn’t mean that you were.

“Rumour has it …”

It certainly does.

“You run across people who are beautiful, you can’t help fancying them, but the thing is, everyone can look, can’t they?”

It’s tricky to pin down Wood to the present moment for long enough to establish any real sense of his current lifestyle. I know that he, Humphreys, Alice and Gracie live in a big house in Holland Park, west London. He tells me he relaxes by going and talking to the deer of the Ashridge estate, near his country studio: “It’s silent and they come up to you, and did you know they bark?”

I did not.

“I had one bark at me the week before last. I walked up as close as I could to this deer and it went ruff! And it was quite frightening. Loud. Then he went off. It was beautiful. I put it in a painting.”

I also discover that he voted Remain.

“I thought, ‘Well, they don’t need my vote, because we’re obviously gonna stay in. I’ll just consolidate it. Solidify it. Do my bit.’ And of course …”

We didn’t.

“That’s so annoying. And then Trump got in, and I thought, oh dear.”

How do you feel about Trump commandeering You Can’t Always Get What You Want for his speaker events?

“Oh God. Each to his own.”

But it’s not “his own”, is it? It’s the Rolling Stones’ own; that’s the point.

“Yeah. It’s a good thing I didn’t write it. Imagine how Mick and Keith feel.”

Finally, and because I seem to have made death something of a theme, I ask Wood if he’d rather die on stage or with a paintbrush in his hand.

“On stage, with a paintbrush in my hand. Guitar pick in one hand, brush in the other. I’d love that.”

I take my leave of him, caffeinated to the gills and generally befuddled, but not nearly as annoyed, frustrated or disapproving of him as I’d intended to be. It’s all very well objecting to Ronnie Wood in principle. Sustaining that in practice, in the presence of his contagious glee, his storytelling and his swagger, is quite another matter.

The Rolling Stones Set Lists from Genesis Publications is available at ronniewoodsetlists.com

[www.thetimes.co.uk]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2018-10-27 18:45 by Cristiano Radtke.

Thank you Cristiano I appreciate your consistent consideration to the fans!


I loved this interview, bright quick clever is Ronnie.
Being 100% honest and classy while the interviewer tried to pry whatever dirty laundry she thought she could get.

Of course he didn't keep it on the book, he was entertaining to the hilt.
That’s what he does for us, ya?

I’m so happy for him xxoo

Brilliant interview, thanks for sharing

The older I get and the more I learn about Ronnie I think he would be the most fun out of all the Stones to be around. It's ironic that he no longer drinks because he seems to have aged like a fine wine and was phenomenal on the last tour.

It is a puzzling thing. These are human beings. Of course they have regrets. They also have a public image and part of that image keeps them eternal and another part protects their privacy. "I stay out of range to survive" as Mick once said.

This feature opens with what might be the longest run-on sentence in history and concludes with a discussion about Donald Trump. Seriously? The Times sucks and the author is a hack.

...interesting article...seems like he opened up a bit...allowed himself to be seen as the smart guy that he is...rather than just happy go lucky Ronnie...nice.

Loved the interview.
In the UK, its the papers like The Times ans The Guardian who usually achieve the best interviews. The journalists aren't 'fans' as such....and this helps. The music mags are just PR pieces, quite often.
One error (at least): Ronnie and Jo had 2 children together, not 3. Also, he failed to hold his marriage together, whichever way you look at it. And no doubt put his loved ones through a lot of anguish for a long time.
Still, he seems in a good place right now....which is... good.

A self-sufficient idiot.

Thanks Cristiano for uploading the interview.

Nate

Fun to read Ronnie. Thanks C.

~"Love is Strong"~

"I’d been told, sternly, by Wood’s publicity department that I am to ask Wood only about the book,
that this is not a “Ronnie Wood interview” but rather a “Ronnie Wood Set Lists interview”...."

Thankfully it veered away from talking strictly about his setlists book - might have been a rather dull interview.
Instead, lots of good stuff from Ronnie.

_____________________________________________________________
Rip this joint, gonna save your soul, round and round and round we go......

Fantastic Ronnie! Thank you for publishing it.

Charmed life, indeed!

Caviar for breakfast ……



ROCKMAN

Oh dear.Those set lists of songs never likely to be played.Sounds like the guy will be selling toilet paper next.Pretty sad.Mind you if there are people are so gullible to fork out that sum of money,then who can blame him.

Which reminds me,I have run out of Weetabix for breakfast.Gonna follow Ronnie's lead.Now I wonder if I can get some Beluga at Aldi ?

Great interview, certainly does show Ronnie in a different light, astute and maneuvering...although you have to wonder how much of that he could do when he was boozed and drugged for most of the 80s/90s/00s.

Also I can't believe he still insists he doesn't die his hair ?! That would make him special indeed ;-)

As a side note I thought the story about Mick calling the Faces to talk to Ronnie was a misunderstanding, i.e. Ronnie Lane thought they wanted to hire him to replace Wyman ?

--------------
IORR Links : Essential Studio Outtakes CDs : Audio - History of Rarest Outtakes : Audio

I guess if they hadn't sobered up they wouldn't have been around still. I'm mainly addressing the guitar duo here. Ronnie had to sober up since his burden has increased in the same rate as Keith's has decreased. I remember though when Bill said in an interview before the Ullevi concert (Gothenburg, 1982) that they have stopped taking drugs now. That was a thing of the past. But I guess alcohol is as worse in the long run. Maybe he didn't include that in the word "drugs"? Probably not. And in his case cigarettes. He has COPD now.

Quote
Stoneage
I guess if they hadn't sobered up they wouldn't have been around still. I'm mainly addressing the guitar duo here. Ronnie had to sober up since his burden has increased in the same rate as Keith's has decreased. I remember though when Bill said in an interview before the Ullevi concert (Gothenburg, 1982) that they have stopped taking drugs now. That was a thing of the past. But I guess alcohol is as worse in the long run. Maybe he didn't include that in the word "drugs"? Probably not. And in his case cigarettes. He has COPD now.

I thought Charlie has his drug troubles in the mid-80s. That's why Mick said the band was in no shape to tour then. Maybe Bill stopped taking drugs. What did he do, smoke a little marijuana? (Cue his song). Maybe Keith finally stopped Heroin, but did Ronnie stock smoking crack by 1982?

Yep, 24FPS. A white lie probably by Bill. There was a bit of commotion prior to the gig since they had been frisked at the airport customs. Which didn't go down well in the band.
They didn't find anything though. The eighties was a veritable coke fest of course. Ask Ronnie...



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2018-10-30 08:05 by Stoneage.

Quote
Stoneage
Yep, 24FPS. A white lie probably by Bill. There was a bit of commotion prior to the gig since they had been frisked at the airport customs. Which didn't go down well in the band.
They didn't find anything though. The eighties was a veritable coke fest of course. Ask Ronnie...

I think Bill was talking about heroin.

Quote
Stoneage
Yep, 24FPS. A white lie probably by Bill. There was a bit of commotion prior to the gig since they had been frisked at the airport customs. Which didn't go down well in the band.
They didn't find anything though. The eighties was a veritable coke fest of course. Ask Ronnie...

Haha, Jagger also claimed in Finnish TV interview in 1970 that "we don't use drugs". That was just after the customs at airport when they were checked big time... Jagger looked and sounded damn angry.. "I don't like people with dogs"... [www.youtube.com]

I guess it generally is not any good idea to shout around while doing a tour that 'oh hell yes, we always take a lot of drugs, especially our guitar section..."

By the way, I recall there being some sort of 'coke scandal' after some Swedish gig (1990? 1995?)... Something was found after all, not directly connected to any of The Stones, though.

That said, I need to say that during the 80's Bill's propaganda at least worked for my blue-eyes. I generally considered them having cleaned their act. That of Keith's much hyped heroin days were gone by had a huge role in that impression. Later I found out that it wasn't quite the case...

EDIT: By the way, here is the interview I think Stoneage is referring to, check from 15:55 on.. [www.youtube.com]
I also recall Bill being more 'anti-drugs' there, but he still seem leave some room for not all of them being totally straight... (after saying that Keith has been clean for four-five years)

- Doxa



Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 2018-10-30 11:23 by Doxa.

Quote
gotdablouse
Great interview, certainly does show Ronnie in a different light, astute and maneuvering...although you have to wonder how much of that he could do when he was boozed and drugged for most of the 80s/90s/00s.

Also I can't believe he still insists he doesn't die his hair ?! That would make him special indeed ;-)

As a side note I thought the story about Mick calling the Faces to talk to Ronnie was a misunderstanding, i.e. Ronnie Lane thought they wanted to hire him to replace Wyman ?

I take everything Ronnie says with a pinch of salt ( "not drank for 8 years" lol. Seen him held up and staggering out of parties many times obviously on something, perhaps its cherryade soda ) because if he will lie about not dying his hair ( i know his hair is dyed because I've seen the grey coming through for over 20 years ) he will lie about anything, imho Ronnie is a BS kind of person, shallow, insecure, a bit sad, maybe that's part of his charm and why we love him, he's human like the rest of us. Perhaps he believes his own BS, denial will do that, "i knew i'd be a Stone", oh so he knew Taylor would leave the band ?, he knew "if he joined earlier he would be dead" ? yeah Ronnie you know everything, its all part of your master plan, this is narcissism out of control, "i beat cancer" ( no one beats cancer Ronnie its in remission) "i knew i'd be a Stone when i watched them in 69 at Hyde Park" of course you did Ronnie haha good luck to him, R$ock on Ronnie you da man.

Very grey third picture down.
[www.dailymail.co.uk]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2018-10-30 11:08 by keithsman.

Buzzkill

Good interview. I really appreciate the honesty of the interviewer. Let's be honest, the Stones are relics in many ways and although #metoo hasn't uncovered anything specifically about the Stones, we must all know that there were certainly things in their past that would rightfully not be acceptable behaviour in 2018.

Brushed through the interview. Not much said there. Except the journalist's own opinions. I always get the impression Ronnie is a nice guy though. He really seems to be. I kind of prefer the question and answer format in these kind of interviews. Easier to read through anyway. The journalist is right about the book though. It has very little to do with art.

Ronnie Wood is a lucky man, a rock'n'roll face and it is nice that he is living a life of pleasure. Yet, this interview shows a man, who is a narcissist, obsessed with himself. I am surprised, that people see him as a "down to earth" man. Anyway, roll on Ron!

When was the last time you failed at something?

“I haven’t.”

to my taste, it is not an answer from a quiet stable man.