Holy smoke! The peril of a papa who’s a Rolling Stone

PICTURE EXCLUSIVE: FROM JO WOOD’S PRIVATE ARCHIVE

WHEN your daddy is a Rolling Stone, it’s never too soon to practice your rock ’n’ roll pout for the camera.

But don’t be too alarmed – while guitarist Ronnie Wood puffs away in this striking image from the early 1980s, the cigarette in his toddler daughter Leah’s mouth remains unlit.

Taken by Jo Wood, Ronnie’s wife at the time, the previously unpublished photo is one of hundreds from her revealing new memoir, Stoned, exclusively previewed today in The Mail on Sunday’s Event magazine. Jo says of her snap: ‘Leah was fascinated with her father’s cigarettes. She doesn’t smoke now – thank goodness.’

The book documents life on the road with the band and the extraordinary drug-fuelled debauchery of the rock world in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In it, she recounts how she met Ronnie at a party in West London when she was 22.

She recalls: ‘He said, “Do you know who I am?” and then whipped out a copy of the Stones album Black And Blue, pointing himself out on the cover. I just thought, “Oh my God, this guy deserves to be put in his place for being so full of himself.” ’

And in a startling passage, she describes her first encounter with Keith Richards. ‘ He pulled out a silver spoon, a bottle of pills and a lighter. In a few seconds, he’d filled a syringe and i njected himself straight through his jacket.

‘There was a tiny pause while the drugs hit his system and then he looked up at me and said, “How very nice to meet you, my dear. I’ve heard such a lot about you.” ’

One photograph, taken at Jo’s 23rd birthday party in 1978, shows her with a drink and cigarette in hand and an arm round a pouting Mick Jagger. The party was meant to be a ‘Punk gathering’ but Jo says in her book: ‘No one is dressed up and my only contribution was my plastic trousers.’