Ronnie Wood on his art, addictions — and the future of the Rolling Stones

As an exhibition of his art opens in Hertfordshire, Ronnie Wood talks to Rachel Campbell-Johnston about drugs, women and life with the Stones


DAVE J HOGAN/GETTY IMAGES

Rachel Campbell-Johnston
August 21 2020, The Times

Ronnie Wood is 73. But don’t imagine that he is lounging about gathering moss. This Rolling Stones guitarist is still living at a pretty pace. When this year’s leg of his band’s sell-out No Filter tour (scheduled to kick of a 15-city American run last May) was cancelled by Covid, he took off with his family to his rural Hertfordshire home to pursue his other great passion. “I’ve been in my painting studio,” he tells me when I catch up with him at his London flat via Zoom.

Next week a huge show of Wood’s will open at Ashridge House, a sprawling architectural confection, formerly the private residence of Henry VIII, but at present, having been given a full neo-gothic overhaul in the 19th century, a business school, wedding venue, conference centre and now gallery space for its rock-star neighbour.

Wood, who skirts its perimeters whenever he takes the woodland path from his country house to his painting studio, has long been intrigued by a building he describes as being “like a Vatican in miniature”. Now, thanks to the sister of the former Spice Girl Geri Haliwell (who works there), his paintings will be displayed (although, given that the building is listed and nails can’t be battered into walls, not hung) in at least eight of the rooms, including its magnificent fan-vaulted chapel.

Wood has always loved painting. Sweeping his computer around his study to show me the pictures, he lingers for a second on a row of Goya etchings before, swinging on via a photograph of himself and Jimi Hendrix, he momentarily hovers before a large Grayson Perry map. In other rooms he has Picasso etchings, he informs me, and watercolours by William Orpen — the latter the result of “an early dabble” in the auction rooms when he sent his manager to the sale room to buy a canvas that had by chance caught his eye. He snapped up the Orpen fairly cheaply, but then the next day got a call from a museum in Dublin. “They offered me 50 grand for it, and then, the next day, 100 grand. ‘You’ve found the missing Orpen, they said.’” Wood didn’t sell the picture. Instead he bought more.

“What’s that?” I wonder, catching sight of a small greyish square. It looks a bit like a Philip Guston. But it turns out to be a work that was painted by Wood; his first abstract apparently. He did it in the 1960s, when he was at art school. “I have always painted,” he tells me, “ever since I was in grey flannels.” His parents were encouraging.

Coming from a long line of “water gypsies” (bargees who work on Britain’s rivers and canals), his parents were the first in their families to live on dry land. They were given a council house in Hillingdon in west London. “It was small,” Wood says, “but my parents allowed me and my brothers a back room to work in. My brothers were eight years and ten years older than me, and they were both artists and musicians. I looked up to them, so I copied them. They were always sitting around playing and drawing, and they made it seem like such a natural thing.” Quite apart from anything else, they would bring back girlfriends from art school. “I would be there thinking, ‘That looks like a good job; lots of perks on the side, and you can paint too.’”

n the 1960s Wood went to Ealing Art College (Freddie Mercury of Queen and Pete Townshend of the Who were also there around that time). But music, it turned out, was more lucrative. By the age of 16 he was already the main breadwinner in the family. “My dad spent all his money in the pub. I realised that me and my little band could earn as much money with one gig as my brothers did slaving over a hot desk in a week.”

In 1964 Wood and Rod Stewart formed the Birds, one of the top-grossing live acts of that era. Ten years later he was playing for the Stones. With his whipcord physique, spiky feather cut and Fender Stratocaster he cut a striking figure. Yet increasingly he found himself equally famous for his outrageous behaviour. He was so dissolute that Keith Richards, apparently, once put a gun to his head and threatened to blow his brains out. “When he thinks you’re out of control, you think, ‘Christ, there must be something wrong,’” Wood later quipped.

And that was before things got really bad. His marriage to his first wife, Krissy (with whom he had had a son), had already failed. But when he walked out on his second wife, Jo (with whom he was bringing up three children), and moved in with a teenage Russian model, he lost his only moderating influence. The drinking, the drug-crazed benders, the mad mood swings ran out of control. Eye-stretching stories erupted in the tabloids. Once or twice the police got involved. Wood cemented his reputation as the wildman of rock.

Disarmingly frank, he is happy to admit that he enjoyed it at the time. “Amazing the poisons I used to put in my body. I used to love it. Any junkie will tell you that they enjoyed that bubble when they were in it.” But he knew too that it had to stop — “I never lost sight of the light at the end of the tunnel” — and after about eight goes at rehab he succeeded. He has been clean — “clean and serene”, he says, grinning as he chants the Narcotics Anonymous mantra — for ten years; “not even cigarettes, though I smoked for Britain for 50 years”. He takes a swig from can on his desk. It’s water. “That’s what I drink now. Though sometimes I take this stuff too,” he says, waving a can of Diet Coke about.

Married (in 2012) to his third wife, Sally, who is more than 30 years younger than him, he comes across as gratefully uxorial. Her name slips repeatedly into his conversation. He describes her as his muse. “Sally has put a totally different slant on my life” — and not least because, four years ago, she gave birth to twin daughters, Gracie and Alice, who, as if on cue, suddenly take his study by storm. Giggling and shouting, they make an excited dash for their father. He looks, to be frank, as if he would like them to stay. However, somewhere off-camera someone is already calling and (with impressive obedience) they bustle off as energetically as they had arrived, one of them doubling back briefly to deliver a good timber-shivering slam to the door.

“They are so lovely. So rewarding.” Wood’s smile, bracketed by two deep creases, conveys sheer unadulterated delight. “It’s not anything I had planned, but they came and it was like having a second chance.” All six of his children get on very well, he assures me. And his twin daughters and his grandchildren — about the same age — play happily together whenever they meet.

Does having these two little girls make him think about his past relationships with women, I wonder. Does he feel any need to protect his daughters from men who might be like he once was? “Not really,” he says. “To be honest, I don’t think they would go far wrong if they met someone like me. I haven’t treated women unfairly. I haven’t been violent. Everyone I have been with has really enjoyed the ride and we’ve had a good time together, and then it has been time to get off the bus.”

Wood is not complacent, though. “Even though you’ve cleaned up, straightened up, your troubles aren’t over.” About three years ago he had a brush with lung cancer. He rejected chemotherapy — “this hair wasn’t going anywhere,” he declared — but part of his left lung was removed. He has been in good health since. “I want to stay alive. I feel a responsibility to the little ones. And I want to stay alive for me. There is so much that I still want to do.”

Did he get frustrated, then, during the enforced holiday of lockdown? “I got off on the clear skies and the lack of fumes,” he says. “It felt so surreal to be in the clean atmosphere. I read my meditation book [an NA publication], Promise of a New Day. But this Covid is not a joke. It’s really pissing me off. Nobody seems to know about it, nobody seems to be its boss, everyone seems lost. You could go to a restaurant and it was packed and yet you weren’t allowed to go to a concert. What’s that about? I’ve lost faith in not having any direction from people who should know.

“So yes, I’m impatient to get going.”

For a start the Stones are in the middle of working on a new album. “It’s just on the front burner, it was almost there when lockdown happened,” he says, and all of them are eager to get back to the studio and finish it.

“We don’t see a lot of each other between touring. We don’t get saturated in each other’s company. We enjoy getting together to rehearse, and there’s a lot of energy there then, but, after, we are all happy to go off and say, ‘Right, we are going to go and do our own thing.’ We don’t try to overexamine too much of the magic that goes on. We never see a lot of each other between tours. We enjoy getting together to rehearse when it happens, but we don’t saturate — that’s probably why we get on. We don’t overexamine the magic of our relationship.”

t has been several months since the band met. Wood, after all, is the youngest. Understandably, they have all been watchful of their health. Yet in April they came together virtually to fast-track the release of a song, Living in a Ghost Town. Based on 2019 recording sessions, it was finished remotely, its lyrics rejigged by Mick Jagger to make it relevant to the moment. It was given four stars by the Times critic Will Hodgkinson, who described it as “a moody stomp that captures the miseries of being in lockdown”.

“When it reached No 1, that felt fabulous,” Wood says. And when the Stones were reunited online to perform in the One World Together at Home concert, the band who for more than three decades have been shrugging off “rolling bones” jokes, more than proved that they could still out-strut younger musical rivals. Wood won’t be drawn into discussing other talents, but “it’s nice to feel that we have the quiet confidence of wisdom among our bones”, he says.

Will they tour again? “Oh yes, that’s what we do. We are a touring band. And we miss it. We miss being together as a band.” They plan to resume their No Filter tour once the pandemic subsides. “But right now, until we can get going again, we are staying in contact and just hanging in there doing our own things.”

Wood’s “thing” has been painting, the childhood passion that picked up again in earnest in the 1980s, “when I was hitting it really hard and I thought, ‘Well, I do have another talent; why don’t I exploit it?’ And it turned out to be fun. When I am painting, I lose track of time. I get engrossed. It’s great.”

He works fast. “At least 20 of the paintings that you will see in the new show were done during lockdown,” he tells me. “And I’ve also used this time to go back into studying art history for myself. Being a gemini, I like to pick up a scent and follow it.” When he was young he studied the Renaissance, impressionism, expressionism, he explains. He loved Delacroix, Tiepolo, Titian, Picasso. “They bring out a drive in me, a very spiritual stirring.” But now he has added Braque and El Greco to the mix. And he’s thrilled by his recent discovery of Max Beckmann.

“I am like a kid in a toyshop” he says laughing when I question him about his plethora of different styles. Images in his new show range from a delicate academic pencil study of deer in Ashridge park, through watercolour landscapes of the surrounding woods, to oil portraits of horses (he has a longstanding interest in thoroughbred breeding and racing), to sliced metal sculptures of a rhino (he is a keen supporter of the wildlife charity Tusk), or designs that hark back to days when he imagined that he might make a career as a sign writer.

Most striking, however, are his extravagantly idiosyncratic takes on works by old masters. Before the Show replaces the two focal figures of Delacroix’s Jacob Wrestling the Angel with Richards and Jagger tussling viciously over a guitar. A massive altarpiece, intended for display in the chapel, adapts a glorious El Greco in much the same way. Wood tackles the greats, from a Tiepolo ceiling to Picasso’s Guernica, head-on.

“When I was young, I went to a show of Magritte. It was a mind-altering experience. It was like going to a concert. The paintings were so vibrant and living. I felt like I had just seen Magritte live. And I want to get that feeling going in my work. I want this new show to give people the same feeling as going to see a great group, of hearing a great piece of music played.”

Would he have liked to have got more attention for his painting, I ask him. “Yeah, but that’s just an ego thing,” he says, then pauses. “But I like to think that after I have died people will look at my work and say, ‘Well, he really could paint.’”

Ronnie Wood x Ashridge House is at Ashridge House from Aug 21-27

[www.thetimes.co.uk]

Rod Stewart was never the singer of the Birds. That was Ali Mackenzie (still around and performing).

Thanks for sharing! Ronnie be good.