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Rocky Dijon
Josephine Karslake was her name at birth. Jo Howard was the name she modeled under. Howard was her father's middle name. For years, I thought either Howard or Karslake was her first husband's last name, but it was neither of those, simply a professional name she chose.

Thanks for clearing it up!
Jo's first husband and father of Jamie was Peter Greene...not to be confused with the great British guitarist of course.(Green/Greenbaum).

Looking forward to Phelge's interview. Time moves on and all, but I "miss" (if that's the right word) Jo and Jerry.

Does anybody know if Jo will have a signing session?

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Harlem Shuffler
Does anybody know if Jo will have a signing session?

[www.eventbrite.co.uk]

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Lien

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Harlem Shuffler
Does anybody know if Jo will have a signing session?

[www.eventbrite.co.uk]

And more dates ; [www.instagram.com]

Not the most original of book titles.
Is her Publisher aware that Andrew Oldham's Memoirs had the same title? Maybe it doesn't matter in the book world.

Yeah ALO has the same title ……



ROCKMAN

Quite a nice interview with Jo here:

[www.thetimes.co.uk]

…. thanks beast but I cant even get into the free trial ….



ROCKMAN

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Lien

Quote
Lien

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Harlem Shuffler
Does anybody know if Jo will have a signing session?

[www.eventbrite.co.uk]

And more dates ; [www.instagram.com]

Thanks, Lien.

Are you going to any of these signings?!

Especially for you, then, Rockman dahlin' Though without the photos. Not sure how to post those. Anyone?

I only have the trial, which I think allows one article a week, but it worked for me.

Here you go:

It’s been 11 years since Jo Wood’s long marriage to Ronnie Wood – they wed in 1985 – broke up and she stepped out of what she calls “the Rolling Stones bubble”. Ronnie Wood’s debauchery hit a new low when he came home like a ragged old tom cat with a drunk 18-year-old girl in tow. In 2011, he cleaned up, then got married again and had a new family. Now, finally, aged 64, it’s Jo Wood’s turn. She’s officially in love: “My lovely Carl. He’s just lovely!” she says, almost purring.

“It’s so great. He’s different from anybody else. He’s down to earth. He loves me, I know he does, and that’s what’s so nice. I don’t think he’d do anything to ruin what we’ve got because he’s that sort of guy, very loyal. [At the moment] I’m happy as we are; I don’t need to get married again. But you can never say never.”

Her new bloke, as she would say, is Carl Douglas, a former rugby coach and now a sports and business development consultant. Photos of him reveal a rather gorgeous silver fox, but looks have never been a priority, she says (as 30-odd years with Ronnie prove). “A funny guy, that’s what I like. A man with personality.”

There is something of the Barbara Windsor about Wood: the Essex accent (born in Benfleet); the pale blond hair; the naughtiness. But if there was a movie of her life, she’d be best captured by Goldie Hawn. She still looks like she belongs on tour. If Ronnie Wood was Jack the grandad, then she embodies cool granny. Only the other day, one of her ten grandchildren asked her, “Gran, what would you have done if you hadn’t met Ron?” It’s a question that speaks to the fact that being a Stones wife was, for her at least, a profession. (The answer was, “Act.”)

Today, she has the same black kohled eyes (a look that dates back to when she was 12). Her hair is still feathery and fringed around her face, although in the Stones days she wore it naturally curly. She only managed to give up smoking six years ago, when she was 58, but for more than 25 years, after a misdiagnosis of Crohn’s disease in 1991, she has been a convert to the organic life. There is no longer any Botox in her face, for ethical reasons. She eats well, regulates her hormones with supplements and boxes to keep fit. As a result, she looks at least ten years younger than she is.

Wood was not desperate to find love again. She gave up looking after a few early forays onto the dating scene. When she went on the TV programme Celebrity First Dates, for example, she was paired up with a man who looked like Ronnie Wood’s older brother – “I thought, ‘Oh Jesus. Not for me!’ ” Ronnie Wood is a hard man to get away from, in the dating sense. He’s more a “one-off” than a type.

Still, she did think she was beginning to like her own company a little too much. After a wild period post break-up that saw her out on the town with “Mossy” – Kate Moss – who lived down the road, she settled down, building her organic beauty business (Jo Wood Organics), going on TV shows such as Strictly and lending her voice to the campaign to save the planet.

“I had stepped out of that bubble and I was free. I could go where I wanted, when I wanted. I didn’t have the responsibility of young children or a husband. Initially, I felt lost being on my own. But then I came to love it and I felt really comfortable with myself and ready to have a proper relationship. I didn’t want to be a hermit.”

She’d had one brief affair with the builder who worked on her Camden house where we meet today but that fizzled out. This time last year, a friend suggested a dating website. “I thought, ‘Oh bloody hell, I can’t be bothered.’ ”

But one evening, she uploaded a picture of herself wearing no make-up, with her rock chick hair tied back in braids. “I wanted it to look as little like me as possible,” she explains.

There can’t be many Stones exes floating around on dating websites. The next morning she woke up to 80 “likes” on her phone. “I thought, ‘Woo-hooooo!’ ” There were a few “No, thanks”, and then Carl Douglas contacted her to ask, “How are you finding this?” She replied, “I’m just looking.” They started texting, which escalated to four hours a night. “I was quite happy texting,” she says with a honk.

Did he know who she was? Fairly early on, she remembers feeling relieved when he texted her to say, “I don’t play guitar.”

“And I thought, ‘Oh, he knows,’ which was good because I didn’t have to go through all that explaining.”

After three weeks, he asked her out. There is not much Wood hasn’t done, but attending an England rugby game at Twickenham was a first. “So I had to say yes, didn’t I?”

They went for a drink in Richmond before the game and both ordered Guinness. A good sign. “And now it’s ‘our little thing’. It’s the strongest drug I do, with an occasional shot of tequila.”

Not long after they began dating, Douglas – “who has never taken a drug in his life” – asked her to take the “driver’s test”, a computerised personality test which he uses as part of his coaching work (he is currently working with the British Olympic sailing squad).

“I suppose he wanted to see what makes me tick,” she says. “I dunno.” It’s a sign of Wood’s optimism that she didn’t worry her score might put Douglas off. “I just want a happy life where everybody gets on.”

But she’s pretty wild at heart, cliché as it is. Even before she met Ronnie at a party, aged 22, as a young model she was going for it. She’d got engaged to a much older man when she was a 17-year-old (“Really flash. I was scooped up into this whole other world of restaurants and Bentleys and visiting the south of France”), had a baby at 19 (her son Jamie, later adopted by Ronnie), and then ditched him, after a year or so of marriage (Las Vegas). She woke up, she explains, and realised “he smelt horrible”. Then it was back to modelling (with her baby being looked after in Essex by her parents) and hanging around nightclubs such as Tramp. With a friend, for a laugh, they told blokes their names were “Phelia and Lickia Balls”. One man said to her, “Who’s ever going to go out with a mad woman like you?” She remembers thinking, “‘Oh no.’ But then I met Ronnie.” Ronnie, she says, was “mad as a hatter right until we split up. I have a real special place in my heart for Ronnie. I always will do.”

As it turns out, Wood and Douglas are motivated by the same things. The driver’s test revealed Wood to be a “hurry up” person. “Let’s get this done, let’s move on! Let’s do this … I am just, ‘Hurry up, move on.’ ” He is a “hurry up” person too, “mixed with something else. I can’t remember what now.” And the insight it gave him about her? “That I’m an impatient bird!” she says, smiling, her wide mouth and full lips (no filler) spreading from ear to ear.

They also both have lots of children. She has three of her own and Ronnie’s stepson, Jesse (married to Fearne Cotton), too. There are ten grandchildren. Douglas has four children, three boys and a 17-year-old daughter. “If we have a party, we don’t need to invite any guests. It’s mad! I love it.”

After standing on a mountain in Kenya a decade ago and shouting, “Ronnie, I forgive you,” Jo and Ronnie Wood have remained famously good friends. “Forgiveness sets you free. I wasn’t going to have that be the end of my life. Life is for living. To be defined just by my marriage is not what I wanted to be.”

As a result, she loves seeing his new wife and his two “beau-dee-ful little girls” at family parties (Ronnie remarried in 2012). Recently, it was Wood’s turn to introduce the significant men in her life to one another. Her daughter, Leah, said, “Pop by with Carl, Mum.” It was her granddaughter Maggie’s birthday party in a nearby restaurant.

Wood made no mention to Douglas that Ronnie would be there, or to Ronnie that she was going to pitch up with a new man. “When we walked in, I said, ‘Ronnie, meet Carl,’ and they were like, ‘Hey mate, hey mate, yeah yeah yeah.’ We only stayed ten minutes. It felt like a funny moment because I hadn’t told him. Carl said, ‘Thanks for that. You could have at least warned me.’ ” She honks with laughter.

Recently, too, Douglas sent Leah a birthday card. “To the best daughter-in-law ‘nearly’.”

“I thought, ‘Cheeky bugger!’ ” she says. But she is laughing as she recalls it.

Wood finding love again happened, ironically, during a period of her life in which she was immersed in looking backwards, not forwards. This month, she brings out a collection of photographs she took during the years she was on tour with the band. The book, called Stoned, is a distillation of four huge boxes of Polaroids and prints, notes and little diary entries that she collected during the mad, bad years (Los Angeles especially, where they lived for a while) and after, when the Stones tours were more professionally managed.

The band nicknamed her Shutterbug, because she always carried a camera. She calls Stoned “a love letter to my past”, and it does seem to be just that, a past loved but not mourned. “I’m grateful for all that time. I had a great time. I’m lucky I survived. You were either in the pard-ee or not in the par-dee,” she says, with a slight rock star intonation.

She was most definitely in the “pard-ee”, especially during that spell in LA, which sounds off-the-scale wild: up till 5am freebasing cocaine; bed till 2pm with a nanny looking after the children. She was often the only Stones wife there, mostly because Ronnie wanted her by his side. She had become pregnant just six weeks after meeting him. She would have terminated it, at the very beginning, she admits – “Sorry, Leah!” she shouts – but then changed her mind. But it didn’t matter, because Ronnie told her, “We’re going to have this baby.” The children went everywhere with them.

Back then, their nanny, Jaye, got the kids up and looked after them. “Even then I thought, ‘Jaye is looking after the children too much. I can’t go on like this.’ ”

She admits she can only date some of the pictures by how she is wearing her hair and how thin she is, which is to say the thinner she was (24in jeans), the bigger the coke bill. “I’m a coke girl, or should I say was,” she says. “I liked to have a line and clear up the whole house, that sort of thing ...

“I’d look at those pictures and realise how hot I looked. ‘Oh my God,’ I’d think. ‘You look bloody amazing there, Jo!’ ” (When Ronnie introduced her to his father, he said, “I’d give her one! I’d give her three!”)

Still, it was Wood who spent three decades fending off groupies trying to sleep with Ronnie. Once, she remembers, Ronnie disappeared for days when they were living in New York (a calmer time after the craziness of LA) during her pregnancy with Tyrone. “It’s the only time I know for sure that he was unfaithful to me.”

There are photographs in the book of Keith Richards’ father, Bert, who “had his own van and his own seat by the side of the stage”. There’s a picture of Doris, Richards’ mum; Jerry Hall (looking much like she does now); the Rolling Stones credit card; Jagger with a beard; stadium shots taken from behind the amps, looking out to the hundreds and thousands of fans; shots in the studio, where in the early days, Wood built “a little club room with a notice on the door saying ‘Jo’s Club’, and I’d have drinks and joints ready for Ronnie and Keith when they took a break”.

When her mother, Rachel, visited her in LA, Wood begged Richards to hold back. “ ‘Keith,’ I said. ‘My mother has never seen a drug in her life. Please don’t.’ ‘I’ll break her in gently,’ he growled.

“Rotten sod! Afterwards, my mum came to me horrified and said, ‘Josephine, Ronnie doesn’t take drugs, does he?’ ‘Of course he doesn’t, Mum,’ I said. ‘Not my Ronnie.’ And then she spotted the straw behind Ronnie’s ear.”

“Rotten sod! Afterwards, my mum came to me horrified and said, ‘Josephine, Ronnie doesn’t take drugs, does he?’ ‘Of course he doesn’t, Mum,’ I said. ‘Not my Ronnie.’ And then she spotted the straw behind Ronnie’s ear.”

In one picture, Ronnie is blow-drying his hair. “He loved doing his hair. He used lemon juice. He would just hack it off as well with a pair of scissors.”

Any retrospective wisdom? “So many people in the pictures are gone,” she says. Ronnie has recently seen off a cancerous lesion on his lung and Richards famously survived a brain haemorrhage. Nobody takes drugs any more. Wood gave up in 1991 after the Crohn’s misdiagnosis and then started taking a stove on tour to cook the Stones organic food.

Stoned is rock legend between hard covers. It has a very homemade feel about it. “I look at the pictures and I think, ‘That’s still me! I’ve still got that jacket.’ But it is another time of my life. I’d do it all over again.

“Somebody said to me the other day, ‘How does Carl feel about this book?’ And I said, ‘He’s so supportive.’ He had a life before me. I had a life before him, although mine was extraordinary. He’s fascinated because he’s never done a drug in his life. And he has enough confidence in himself ...”

Wood is currently in the middle of packing up her Camden house because she is moving on to a new chapter in a farmhouse in Oxfordshire. Perhaps it’s part of her “hurry up” personality profile, moving onwards, never emotionally dwelling on the past. Douglas currently lives in Market Harborough, Leicestershire, but she says she hopes that perhaps they might live together.

“I miss him,” she says. “I look forward to him coming here or me going there.”

She shows me pictures of the new house on her phone. The decor is plain, tasteful, middle class mum on the school run. “My daughter, Leah, said to me, ‘Mum, why are you buying such a white house?’ ”

By contrast, the Camden house is rock star meets vintage granny (which is pretty apt, given she was a granny at 44), a mixture of black wallpaper covered in skulls, oriental statues, vintage lace hung from the windows and modern art. But it’s all being shipped to Oxfordshire, including the large dark velvet sofas that no doubt could tell a story or two.

“When I read my old diary entries that say, ‘Went to Pistol Pete’s for dinner, had seven tequilas,’ I thought, ‘Oh God, that really is just like me now.’ ”

She might be clean and organic, a sane and influential voice for environmentalism, but I’d bet that Jo Wood is still the “par-dee” girl of yesteryear, albeit one who is about to have a very big vegetable garden and greenhouse. Watch out, Cotswolds, she’s coming for you. Daylesford is about to get a whole lot more rock’n’roll.


Jo Wood’s Stoned: Photographs & Treasures from Life with the Rolling Stones is published by Cassell on October 31 (£20)

Shoot credits
Styling Hannah Rogers Make-up Julia Wren at Carol Hayes Management using Emani Vegan Cosmetics. Jo Wood wears dress, £310, rixo.co.uk

[www.thetimes.co.uk]

Quote
Harlem Shuffler

Quote
Lien

Quote
Lien

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Harlem Shuffler
Does anybody know if Jo will have a signing session?

[www.eventbrite.co.uk]

And more dates ; [www.instagram.com]

Thanks, Lien.



Are you going to any of these signings?!

No , unfortunately not.. I'm from Holland . But I ordered the book from Bol .com

For anyone who can access BBCiPlayer, there's an interview with Jo at 2:58:00 here. Shows quite a lot of photos from the book.

[www.bbc.co.uk]

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Beast
For anyone who can access BBCiPlayer, there's an interview with Jo at 2:58:00 here. Shows quite a lot of photos from the book.

[www.bbc.co.uk]

That was good, thanks.
I suspect Mick is a bit huffy about the book though.
Also...she says she has recently met up with Keith and Patti. So maybe some studio work soon?

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Beast
For anyone who can access BBCiPlayer, there's an interview with Jo at 2:58:00 here. Shows quite a lot of photos from the book.

[www.bbc.co.uk]

The music playing when they showed the photos in this interview - seemed like a version of Biggest Mistake, but with no vocals? Anyone know where that comes from and who would give it the BBC - this is not an "official" Stones activity so no help from their archives I assume?

I know the address has been posted before here, but just to make it a bit easier to read, this is the announced dates of book signing:



Bjornulf

She's not very interesting. She's not even interesting like Anita or Marianne, so really she's just telling Keith stories.
Even most Ronnie stories are dull.

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thecitadel
The music playing when they showed the photos in this interview - seemed like a version of Biggest Mistake, but with no vocals? Anyone know where that comes from and who would give it the BBC - this is not an "official" Stones activity so no help from their archives I assume?

Biggest Mistake Instrumental is on UK Promo CD VSCDJ 1916

For anyone interestested in getting a signed copy but can;t attend one of the signing I can recommend Davids Bookshop.

I rang them and I have pre-ordered a copy which they will post out to me.

01462 684631

For anyone interestested in getting a signed copy but can't attend one of the signings I can recommend Davids Bookshop.

I rang them and I have pre-ordered a copy which they will post out to me.

01462 684631

Anyone going to the Chorleywood signing this evening?

Just me then. Any questions to ask Jo?

Jo's brother Paul died today ...

[www.instagram.com]

[www.southendstandard.co.uk]

Condolences to all of his family and friends. I remember him creeping up in Bill German's newsletters from time to time.

Jo's brother Paul died today ...


Condolences to all …. Paul's paintings inc
members of The Stones and he told some really
funny stories of his times shared with Keith ……..RIP



ROCKMAN

About a month ago I discovered the work of Jo's brother. He made some great art. He will be missed.

Jo posted on twitter that corona took his life ....