Being raised by a Rolling Stone nearly killed me
Ronnie Wood son’s bombshell drug confession
GIGGLING in the long grass in their carefully co- ordinated outfits, twins Alice and Gracie Wood celebrated their fourth birthday last month with a visit to a stately home with their doting parents.
Just a few years ago such a trip would have been unthinkable for their father, the Rolling Stones’ guitarist Ronnie Wood, now 73.
Rock’s wild man was once more likely to be found taking cocaine and heroin on a drugfuelled bender than strolling in the grounds of Henry VIII’s Ashridge House in Hertfordshire with his family. His older offspring remember a far more unconventional childhood — one where their hard-partying parents would only get up when they came home from school — than the one his daughters with third wife Sally Humphreys, 30 years his junior, are enjoying.
His eldest son, Jamie, 45, says: ‘Drugs were normal in my family. It was part and parcel of my upbringing. No one would let their children come to my house after school.’ But Ronnie changed around a decade ago when he gave up partying and ‘got clean’. Since then, he’s become almost unrecognisable, extolling on Twitter the virtues of fresh air and walking, helping raise cash for the NHS and doting on his daughters.
Jamie — son of Jo Wood and her first husband but brought up as Ronnie’s own since he was a toddler — is the first to admit Alice and Gracie’s memories of their childhood will be very different from his own and those of his siblings Jesse, Tyrone and Leah.
‘I’m sure he will do a better job this time round!’ says Jamie. ‘I’m really happy for Ronnie. Sally is an awesome mum and the twins are great.’
It’s a magnanimous attitude given that the drug habit he developed aged just 14 — using heroin and cocaine until he was 20, and smoking cannabis and cigarettes until recently — nearly killed him three years ago.
In October 2017, he found himself being rushed by ambulance to hospital for emergency surgery following a heart attack at just 42.
‘It was shocking,’ says father-of-four Jamie, speaking about his ordeal for the first time. So shocking, in fact, that he didn’t realise it was a matter of life and death until doctors refused to wait for his wife Jodie to arrive before operating.
‘I was in the ambulance, taking selfies. I felt fine,’ says Jamie. ‘Then, when we got to Bart’s Hospital in London, there were ten people waiting for me saying: “Sign this for if we have to do a bypass.”
‘I said: “I can’t have an operation without my wife here.” But they said: “There’s no time.” ’
WITHIN
minutes he was undergoing life- saving surgery to insert two stents into his heart. In all, he spent five days in hospital and now faces a lifetime on statins. He was also forced to totally overhaul his lifestyle.
The 20-a-day cigarette habit is no more. He hasn’t touched cannabis in years, either. The heart attack, he says, came out of nowhere.
‘I’d started boxing and weighttraining trying to get fitter,’ says Jamie, ‘and one day I lifted a load of weights, I was doing great, and I went upstairs to get ready for work and it was like a dull ache in my lungs. I was worried I had lung cancer.’
This was at the forefront of his mind because Ronnie had recently been diagnosed with the disease. After an operation to remove part of his lung, Ronnie is now cancer-free.
‘I asked my wife Jodie to give me a massage, then I threw up and I thought I must be ill, so I had a Lemsip and lay in bed for two days.
‘Then I felt OK and I got up to go to work and my wife said: “I’ve booked you into the doctor in Harley Street, stop off on the way in.” I told the doctor I thought I had lung cancer, and he did an ECG. It went “boom” and I said: “Do it again — I’ve got a hairy chest, it might not have connected.” He did it again and said: “You’ve got to go to hospital.” ’
A few hours later Jamie was regaining consciousness in St Bart’s with his family — including sons Charlie, now 20 and from a previous relationship, Leo, 14, Kobi, 11, and Bo, four — at his bedside.
‘They were crying on the bed, it wasn’t nice,’ he says. ‘Then the doctor came in and said I had to make some life changes and give up smoking. I’d always been a heavy smoker. But there’s nothing like four kids crying to shock you into being a good boy.’
He hasn’t smoked cigarettes or cannabis since. It was perhaps inevitable that Jamie, whose father is clothing boss Peter Greene, would develop a taste for drugs.
While it is easy to romanticise the wild rock ’n’ roll lifestyles of legendary figures like Ronnie Wood, there is all too often a stark human cost to be paid by those closest to them. Jamie’s story illustrates this all too clearly, for the no-holds-barred indulgence that surrounded him introduced him to drugs while he was still a child, and ended up very nearly killing him.
He says: ‘Mum and Dad [by which he means Ronnie] used to party a lot and you could always smell cannabis in the house. It would waft up the stairs and when I was nine or ten, I’d run downstairs and find ashtrays full of joints and help myself, then stash them behind the microphones.
‘ It was part and parcel of my upbringing. Drugs were normal in my family but outside they were demonised — no one would let their children come to my house after school.’
Perhaps predictably, Jamie went off the rails in his teens.
With hindsight, he recognises the link between his behaviour and his family’s globe-trotting lifestyle.
‘The problem was, I went to 17 different schools in three or four different countries. Whenever I had friends, they suddenly got taken away.’
It was when the family moved to Wimbledon, South-West London, that he fell in with the wrong crowd, who introduced him to harder drugs. Despite their bad influence, for the first time he felt part of a group.
He admits ruefully: ‘I took heroin and cocaine. I was bad. I was partying hard.’
His first job was as a roadie for rock