Ronnie Wood: ‘I was thinking, I want to be in the Rolling Stones. Then a car pulled up with Mick and Charlie'

Telegraph

17-05-2025

I meet Ronnie Wood in a private members' club in South Kensington called Nexus. Wood has had an interest in several clubs over the years. In the 1980s he had a club on Miami's South Beach called Woody's On The Beach. It was a time, he remembers, when 'they were still planting palm trees and getting rid of the crack dealers. Then after they'd gone, there was only old people's homes – and Woody's On The Beach. So everyone had to be careful leaving the club or they'd be arrested for noise abatement.' Now, he adds, 'South Beach is the rockingest area.'
At the same time there was a Woody's, New York, 'which actually I'd never been to. People would say, 'I went to your club,' and I'd say, 'Oh, really?''
Then there was a private members' club in London, which ended up costing him a fortune, but the less said about that the better. And now there is Ronnie's Bar at Nexus, a new private members' club in South Kensington that incorporates a restaurant, a gym, a games room for older children and a playroom for younger ones and toddlers.
As well as a place to drink and relax, Ronnie's Bar is also a gallery for his paintings. Art, as much as music, is Wood's passion. 'They said, 'We'd like to give you your own bar,'' he says.
'So I thought, put some paintings up, put a piano in – make it a piano bar. We've got a piano player called TJ Johnson, he plays like Dr John (the renowned New Orleans pianist, who died in 2019). I came in the other week and I bumped into Thomas Tuchel (the England football manager). We're buddies. I've been to two England matches since then.'
Wood paints landscapes, still lifes, abstracts – but here the walls are filled with his paintings of music stars, most notably The Rolling Stones. 'They're like diaries for me,' he says, pointing to a large, riotously coloured canvas. 'That's 1975, on a flatbed truck going down 5th Avenue.'
He laughs. 'That was my first live show with the Stones, on the back of a truck.'
Another canvas is 'how Caravaggio would have painted the Stones', all shadows and darkness. 'It's called Undermath.' On the wall beside where we're sitting are a series of pen-and-ink drawings of some of his earliest heroes from the world of blues, R&B and jazz.
Apart from Miles Davis and Robert Johnson (the king of the Delta blues, who inspired a generation of young British musicians, and who died in 1938), Wood has played with most of them.
'We were in Chicago,' he remembers. 'I got a call from Bill Wyman and he said, 'Woody, come to my room, I've got some people you might like to meet.' So I walked in and there's Muddy Waters (from whose song Rollin' Stone the group took their name), Howlin' Wolf and Junior Wells.' Wood recites the names like a prayer.
'So I'm just sitting there soaking up the atmosphere. It was mind-blowing. Muddy always put the emphasis on Rolling Stones. And he called Mick ' Micky Jaguar '.' Wood throws back his head and laughs. Little Richard, he says, would call him up whenever he was in London. 'He'd say, 'Hey, come and play with me.' I loved that. I thought that was the greatest honour.'
Then there was Chuck Berry. 'I was looking at some photographs recently that made me realise we were actually living together for a bit, somewhere, I can't remember where it was; we were just on this silly adventure. My mind erased all that time together.' He laughs. 'I think I was up in the clouds too much.'
Wood laughs a lot. He is the most affable of men. He is 77, pipe-cleaner thin, with deeply sunken cheeks, a beak of a nose and sharp eyes. He has, in his words, 'fought cancer twice – and won', undergoing punishing bouts of chemotherapy and radiotherapy. 'But I've still got my black hair' – in that upswept bird's nest that became the default style of so many rock musicians of a certain vintage, not least his bandmate Keith Richards.
His first bout of cancer, in the left lung, was in 2017. 'They said, 'You've got a supernova, burning away in there.' I said, 'Well, get it out!' The doctor said, 'What are you doing next Wednesday?' 'Getting it out!' So we did that.
'Then, in 2020, I found out I had the small-cell cancer. I battened down the hatches for that. If you don't catch that early it kills you straight away. So that was a real good one we caught early.' He carried on touring with the Stones between treatments. 'It was good timing,' he says, remarkably matter-of-factly. He was finally given the all clear only a few weeks ago.
Wood was born in London into a family of 'bargees', travellers who would ply the canals of England in narrow boats carrying salt and timber. He and his two brothers were the first to be born on dry land. 'They used to call me Young Timber. I remember my dad calling, 'Whoa, Timber!' A wonderful upbringing,' he says.
'I remember as a kid having condensed milk in the cabin of my dad's boat, called the Antelope, and my mum was born on the Orient. And they were both born on Paddington Basin, where I now live. If they were alive they would absolutely be in heaven to see that I'd done full circle, and gone back to the canal.'
He has his own narrow boat, the Muddy Waters, moored on the Grand Union Canal. 'I take it out for a poodle now and again to make sure the engines are running and the bilge pump's working. It's working really well.'
One brother, Ted, became a graphic artist. The other, Arthur, was a well-known singer on the British R&B circuit in the 1960s with his group The Artwoods. Wood rearranges the initials of all their names as a prophesy of his own future – ART. From the age of four, he says, if his brothers played music he would play, and if they painted he would paint.
After attending art school – the crucible for so many rock musicians in the 1960s and 1970s – he started playing guitar in R&B bands, first The Birds, then with the Jeff Beck Group and the Faces, with Rod Stewart, before finally joining The Rolling Stones.
Through the years, he has always been in the right place at the right time. It's an old story, he says, but he tells it none the less.
In 1969 he was at Hyde Park, where the Stones were playing a free concert following the death of Brian Jones, and introducing Jones's replacement, Mick Taylor.
'I was just a kid wandering around on the outside in dreamland thinking, I want to be in that band. And a car pulls up, and it's Mick and Charlie.' They knew him, he says, 'as a face' about town.
'In those days record companies had Christmas parties, and you'd bump into all the bands – the Stones, The Beatles, The Pretty Things – whoever it may be. Anyway, Mick and Charlie said, 'We've gotta play now. We'll see you soon.' And I said, 'Yeah – sooner than you think.''
He pauses. 'I'll never forget that.'
In 1974 he was 'on my death bed' in Los Angeles – 'I was really ill' – and he got a call from Mick asking if he wanted to join the band. 'And I thought to myself, I thought you'd never ask.'
He was, of course, a natural fit – he'd always looked as if he should be a Stone – musically and because he had the physical stamina, but most of all, perhaps, the right temperament. Emollient, easygoing, but when it was required, determined. Over the course of 50 years, Wood has been the 'diplomatic welding torch', as he puts it, between the strong and sometimes volatile egos of Jagger and Richards.
In 1984, as the group were preparing to record the album Dirty Work, relations between the pair were at their lowest ebb. Jagger was in the throes of recording his first solo album, much to the disapproval of Richards, who saw the singer's solo career as a threat to the unity of the group. 'That's why I got three songs on the album,' Wood says with a laugh, 'because no one was working too hard.'
With Richards and Jagger no longer on speaking terms, and the Stones in danger of falling apart, it was Wood who stepped in to act as the peacemaker and the intermediary.
'It was, 'OK, you're going to speak to one another on the phone.'
'He doesn't want to speak to me.'
'Oh yes he does! I've rigged it up – in 15 minutes he's expecting your call.'
'So I got Mick to ring Keith, and the other way round. Patching it up, talking, letting nature take its course. But the thing is, if I hadn't done that, they'd have grown further and further apart.
'They've been friends since the sandpit. They're like brothers — they may argue between them, but in the end it's family. That was the glue, the foundation of the band. I had to protect the institution, didn't I? It's the Rolling Stones! No way was this going to collapse.'
Notwithstanding his role as The Rolling Stones' diplomat in residence, there was a long period when it was Wood's addictions to drugs and alcohol that threatened to destroy the band and to kill him.
In an autobiography, Ronnie, published in 2007, Wood recalls the night in 1979 when he was living in California and the group's sax player announced that he had made 'the greatest discovery', freebasing cocaine (similar to crack). 'It saves your nose.' Wood was soon squandering a fortune on the drug. He recalls once managing to secure a $70,000 home-improvement loan. Receiving the cheque, he put Tarmac down on his driveway, painted the kitchen green, and in six weeks had spent the rest on drugs.
He was freebasing so much, he writes, that even Richards, no stranger to narcotics, 'turned into Mr Drug Enforcement Administration', on one occasion putting a ratchet knife to his throat and threatening to kill him. 'We haven't fought since,' Wood writes.
It was having passed through 'about 10' rehab centres – he's lost count of the exact number – that Wood says the penny finally dropped. 'It was that little voice inside me. I was bleeding out of every orifice. And I thought, f—ing hell, somebody's trying to tell me something, you know what I mean?
'And I had the wherewithal to listen to that voice, and say I'm going to get off the bus now, and doing it for myself. That's what it was.'
He has now been 'clean and serene' for 15 years, and it is nine years since he stopped smoking, having smoked for England for 50 years. 'I feel the best I've ever felt.'
An editor on this newspaper's obituaries desk once calculated that rock musicians of Wood's generation demonstrate the highest risk of early death, except for those who take part in dangerous sport or warfare. Wood raises his eyebrows.
'I went to Eric Clapton 's 80th the other day, and it wasn't, who am I going to meet there, but who is still alive that could be there. [Pete] Townshend was there, and Ringo…' He pauses.
'Oh, God. I missed Jimmy Page, he's still alive and a lovely guy. I'm trying to get him back into playing again. I know he can still play.'
His fellow Stone, and a close friend, Charlie Watts died from cancer in 2021, at the age of 80. They were both being treated in the Royal Marsden Hospital in west London at the same time. 'I was getting better as he was going down,' Wood says.
'I remember the last afternoon I saw him. We were watching Frankie Dettori on the racing on TV, and Charlie was going, 'I want to get out of here.'
And he said, 'While I'm getting better, if you want to tour, use Steve Jordan.' So Steve had Charlie's blessing, which was really nice.
'And sure enough, during rehearsals in Boston, Charlie passed away. It was a matter of a couple of months. We were rehearsing and got the news, and we thought Charlie wouldn't want us to stop everything, and mourn and every­thing. We all were mind-blown, and we had a day off and then carried on, with his spirit driving us.'
For Wood, going back on tour after finally coming off drugs was 'a white-knuckle ride'.
In the old days, I suggest, coming off stage would have been the moment when he would reach for the line of coke and the bottle of Jack Daniel's.
'Before going on,' he says. 'And during, and after. That's what it was for all those years. And then suddenly having to learn to fly.' He shakes his head.
'The boys were really supportive. Mick was really supportive of me. We did some small shows, and I'd be there thinking, oh, God, we've got to go on, and he'd come up to me: 'You'll be all right, Ronnie.' It helped me get through.'
In this regard, what he calls 'the fellowship' found in NA (Narcotics Anonymous) and AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) meetings has been critical in maintaining his recovery: 'The gathering of all those people, that street support, and that down-to-earth reliability and faith through people, the unity…
'It's a wonderful feeling to be able to rely on perfect strangers, from all walks of life. Suddenly we're all in the same lifeboat together, stranded at sea, and you pull together and come out the other end, if you're lucky. And that's what happened to me.'
If he has a faith, he says, it is in the 'higher power' that is always inspiring him to 'raise the bar. I'm always looking to improve my attitude, and improve my character, and never lose ambition, you know? That's where that faith and hope comes in.
'And I think my higher power is my painting, which I can get lost in, and get inspired by, and music. Without music I would be totally lost. And to be part of a group of people whose higher power is that music, and to be on that plane together – the unspoken plane, you go there and you're lifted and you're speaking through the music. So with those two things, I'm blessed.'
'Oh look!' he interrupts himself. 'Here's my wife!' As if on cue, Sally Wood walks through the door, pausing to give a friendly wave – 'I won't interrupt' – before passing through to the bar. She has a lovely, open smile and a straightforward manner, and she looks like someone who wouldn't have indulged Wood's worst excesses of years gone by.
Wood has been married three times. First, in 1971, to Krissy Findlay, by whom he has a son, Jesse. That marriage ended in 1978, and Krissy died in 2005. 'She was a wonderful spirit, but she got carried away and sadly we lost her,' Wood says. In 1985 he married Jo Karslake, who is the mother of two of Wood's children, Leah and Tyrone.
That marriage ended in 2011 – 'Josephine is still cruising… on and on. She's fine. We're still friends' – and the following year he married Sally Humphreys, an actor and theatre producer.
'Sally is my blessing. She is so supportive and such a good mum.' She is the mother of eight-year-old twins, Alice and Gracie. 'The novelty of my twin girls, watching them grow up. They've been such an inspiration too, and such a blessing.'
Wood is currently working with Rod Stewart on a documentary about the Faces, and a new album by the group. And later this year he will be back working with Jagger and Richards, planning the next Rolling Stones album. It will be their 32nd studio album (not to mention the 39 live albums, 28 compilation albums and 51 video albums).
No other group in history has maintained such an enduring, productive and successful career. One reason the Stones have survived, Wood says, is that they don't, as he puts it, 'over-socialise'.
'We're not on the phone to each other every five minutes. When we're not touring we keep in touch, just to keep the feelers in each other's camp, but we don't over-familiarise – we run on faith and truth. We have faith in our music, and we always have hope that people will keep turning up, and sure enough they do.'
The group's last album, Hackney Diamonds, was widely acclaimed as their best in decades, and the best selling. Although Wood says he has long lost track of the music business.
'In the old days we used to have the charts, and you'd be able to plot things and feel a part of it. You'd look at the Melody Maker and say, 'Look! We're number 50!' or whatever. And then you'd creep up the charts. It gave young bands so much ambition and something to look forward to. I've no idea where we are on the charts now.'