The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Ronnie Wood: on the couch
Hellraiser, art lover, pensioner, new father. Who is the real man underneath the famous thatch? Chris Harvey asks
Ronnie Wood steps into the room with a crackle of wiry, crow-haired warmth. There’s a wild energy to the Rolling Stones’ guitarist – in live performances, on record, and in person – and within seconds he’s showing me a shirt on a rail he likes with a sushi pattern on it, making a quick call to his son Tyrone, and then settling, like a fly, on the sofa. We’re in central London to discuss his second career, as an artist. That energy is in his paintings, too, with their expressive lines and vibrant colours. Where does it come from? “Risk,” says Wood. “I love the element of risk… all the time.”
It’s caused him some difficulties over the years, especially with alcohol, but most perilously when he got himself into trouble at the end of the Seventies with freebase cocaine, a purer form of crack cocaine, which is smoked as crystal rocks in a pipe. Wood’s illustrated timeline of his life, which is included in a new book of his artworks, notes simply, “took three years to stop”.
But that addiction was ultimately what led to Wood taking up painting – which he had studied at art college – in a more serious fashion, when he turned to it to help restore his battered finances. “The drug habit and the houses that I was living in were way beyond my means… and what I was spending on dope was far more than any houses.”
Also, he notes, the Stones didn’t tour between 1982 and 1989. “You don’t get a wage, you only get paid when you work,” says Wood.
He may be the lesser-known Stone – he only joined the band in 1975, a mere 42 years ago – but one is never too far from the sound of Wood’s music. That’s Ronnie singing “I wish that I knew what I know now, when I was younger” when Ooh La La by Faces appears in adverts and on film soundtracks; that’s him playing guitar and bass on Rod Stewart’s Maggie May; and that’s him adding the dirty raunch to Keith Richards’ riff on Start Me Up by the Stones.
Richards playing guitar is one of the subjects that Wood returns to repeatedly in his paintings. Their friendship goes back to the mid-Seventies, when Wood was recording his debut solo LP I’ve Got My Own Album To Do in the studio he had installed in the basement of the enormous Georgian house in Richmond that he bought in 1971 with his riches from his earlier career with Faces. (It’s now owned by Pete Townshend.) The house had become a locus of the A-list party scene, frequented by an ever-changing crowd that included the Beatles, the Pythons, Keith Moon, Peter Cook, Mick Jagger and David Bowie. Musicians would turn up to take part in jam sessions and play on album tracks, but some also arrived bearing gifts.
“[Producer] Gary Kellgren had just made the Bangladesh concert album with George [Harrison] and Bob [Dylan], he came over from LA with his bag of tricks, his THC” – the active component of marijuana, which can be extracted or synthesised – “everyone who came through the door had some of that for a start.” It was Wood’s first wife, Krissy, who invited Richards back there from a London club. He stayed for four months, sending home for clothes and bringing his then-girlfriend and fellow heroin addict Anita Pallenberg with him, to escape the increasingly harsh public glare of life in Chelsea.
For Wood, it was a relationship that fell into a familiar mould: Richards was a couple of years older and Wood had always been the little brother in his family. His brothers Art and Ted, 10 and eight years older than him respectively, both went to Ealing Art School and both had bands. “If they painted, I would paint and if they played music, little Ronnie would copy.”
Wood’s family had been “bargees”, water gipsies who had worked the London canals for generations. “I remember being in the cabin on my dad’s longboat on the Grand Union Canal eating condensed milk,” he says, “Some of my earliest memories are being down in that little cabin.” Recently he moved close to Little Venice. “I’ve come full circle,” he says, “back by the canal.”
One of the early works in the book, Ronnie Wood: Artist, is a lovely line drawing of his mother, Lizzie, from 1979 – “That was when my mum came to Paris. I had to pretend I had my whole family over because we drank the local pub out of Guinness, but it was just me and my mum.”
Music was always part of family life. Wood had played washboard on stage with his brothers aged 11, formed his own band, the Birds, at 15, was touring the UK and in the top 50 by 17, before joining the Jeff Beck Group. With Rod Stewart as singer, they toured the States while Wood was still a teenager.
Two years later, he and “Rod the
‘My mum came to see me in Paris and we drank the local pub out of Guinness’