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from today's Sunday Times. Many thanks to Scooby on IORR for copying and pasting it from the subscribers-only online edition
Ronnie Wood has given up booze and drugs — but he can’t put his paintbrushes down. Bryan Appleyard tackled the “junior” Stone on his current addiction.
Ronnie Wood is explaining what happened when, a few years ago, Keith Richards fell out of a tree in Fiji. He is standing up with his back to me, gesturing with his arms. “The sea was over there, there was rock-hard sand and he was like a monkey swinging underneath the tree and talking to me. Then I heard this thump. He’d landed head-first and we were laughing. He was saying, ‘Oh, my teeth are bleeding,’ and they were. He ended up a few days later in a foetal position and had to be rushed into hospital. Sorry, I’d better get that.”
His phone is ringing. He fishes an i-phone out of his cream-and-grey checked jacket and stares at the screen that says “Jo”. “Oh, it’s my ex-wife.” I’m all ears. A few days earlier, Jo told a newspaper that the picture of Ronnie tattooed on her bottom had been removed, so this could be one scratchy call. Sadly, he does not take it.
So you get on OK?
“Yeah, we keep in touch, quite pally.”
I ask him how he feels about the tattoo removal. “I forgot it was there! No, don’t print that! I’m not sad about it. I didn’t paint it. It was the little cartoon man I put on my autographs.”
The Fiji fall finally persuaded Keith that the late-sixties might be a good age to ease up. By his epic standards — he could, it is said, eat nails and piss rust — he is pretty sober these days, though probably not as sober as Ronnie, who says he hasn’t touched booze, his primary “issue”, for four years. He’s also clean drug-wise, though he is still an enthusiastic smoker, a habit of which Charlie Watts and Mick Jagger both disapprove. “They say ‘get that thing out of here!’ when I light up... Charlie’s been clean for many years. Mick might have a glass of wine, Keith is in and out, but basically he’s as clean as I’ve ever seen him.”
Jo was his second wife. His first, Krissy, died of a suspected valium overdose in 2005; they split up in 1978. Krissy blamed the break on Ronnie’s affair with Jo. They married in 1985 and broke up in 2008 after Ronnie, then on two or three bottles of vodka a day and in and out of rehab, ran off to his place in Ireland with one Ekaterina Ivanova, aged 20 at the time. To nobody’s amazement, probably not even Katya’s, it didn’t last and, last year, Ronnie married Sally Humphreys. “Yeah, it was on 21/12/12, all the ones and twos. According to the Mayan calendar it was the day the world would end. For me, it was the start of a new era.”
Sally is not crazily young — only 31 years younger than Ronnie — and she has her own theatre-production company that could suggest long-term stability. We’ll see.
'Damien Hirst had an interest in keeping me alive. He saw I was wasting myself'
Ronnie is the work-experience Stone. He joined the band in 1975, the three others are all founder members, going all the way back to ’62. He didn’t become a full partner, in the business sense, until 1990, which meant that in the 1980s he sometimes found himself in the unusual, for a Stone, position of needing money, which is why he started doing more painting, but I’ll come back to that in a moment.
All his life he has been the junior partner. He was eight and 10 years younger than his two brothers, both now dead, and, at 66, he is between three and six years younger than the other Stones. “It’s followed me all through my life. I’ve always been the youngest.”
He wears the years well, though strangely. Rakes would look obese in his presence. He’s 5ft 9in tall and has never weighed more than 10 stone. He is currently 9½. He claims to eat, though there is no evidence of it. His hair is thickish and darkly dyed, and his face... well, where to begin? Think architecture. The high cheekbones are cantilevered out below the eyes and are supported by two columns running up from his chin which each splay out into angled shores, forming the striking Y shapes which are one’s first impression of the man. “Gaunt” would not be the right word as the skin is very smoothly and finely (possibly artificially) tanned. He looks, in short, outrageously well, considering the life he has led. But he seems a touch deaf — no wonder — and he is very fidgety which, perhaps unfairly, suggests to me he could easily fidget his way into more bad behaviour.
Being the youngest has at least meant that he has often been able to play the role of Ban Ki Moon to the warring nation states of Mick, Keith and Charlie. “Oh yeah, especially in the ’80s, that was a really bad period, we were about to fold a few times. I like to think I got them talking again. That was the big problem: they refused to talk.”
And what about Keith’s autobiography, which upset Mick, perhaps because he called him “unbearable” and referred to his “tiny todger”? Ronnie laughs. “I did my best but that healed itself. I had my fingers crossed that it would.”
But to business. Like me, I’m sure you’ve often wondered what goes on behind all those rich, dark, high Mayfair windows. The answer is, in one case, that a Rolling Stone paints, sleeps and plays snooker. You see, Ronnie is now the artist-in-residence at Castle Fine Art in Bruton Street. He has a big exhibition called Raw Instinct there at the moment and they’ve handed over a whole floor to him where he can chill, paint, sleep, whatever. There are pictures everywhere, hanging or leaning on the walls. The snooker table is the biggest I have ever seen, there’s a giant leather bean baggy thing, a Stones- themed pinball machine and so on.
On one table is a glass vase full of big, unwrapped brushes. These, it turns out, were part of a giant present package given to him in 2007 by Damien Hirst in an attempt to get Ronnie to paint rather than drink. “He just had an interest in keeping me alive. He saw I was wasting myself and said, ‘Do you want to get better, to stop drinking?’ ”
Ronnie was living in Belsize Park — his London place is now in Holland Park — and had, he recalls, just come out of one of his many rehabs, this one was at the Life Works centre in Woking. Hirst shipped in enough equipment to fit out an art college and told Ronnie: “You’ve no excuse now.” Has Hirst been an influence?
“I admire his art machine and the way he puts it into action. He doesn’t give much away, but I learnt quite a lot from his organisation, going round to his office, just seeing how the wheels turned over.”
Ronnie was not new to art, far from it. He’d been an art star as far back as primary school and had even appeared as a competition winner on TV art shows. In fact, for all three brothers, art and music ran side by side. They were a family of “water gypsies” who worked on the Thames out west near Heathrow. They drank and sang at the pub, then drank and sang at home — this was Ronnie’s first experience of “after-parties”, dangerous, life-threatening events, as he was to learn. “When I was growing up everybody drank, it’s just what they did.”
All three brothers ended up going to Ealing College of Art, but Ronnie soon swerved into rock’n’roll, starting with the Birds (not the Byrds), moving on to the Jeff Beck Group, the Faces and, finally, the Stones. He was drawing all the time, but nothing too serious. “Before the ’80s I didn’t make much use of art. I’d sketch in my spare time. Then, when things hit rock bottom when I was in New York, I had to generate some money, so I thought, ‘Hang on, I can paint, why don’t I do more of this?’ I started to make some monotypes, silk screens, to see how it would go. I never lost the art touch but it became necessary to exploit it more in the ’80s to pay the weekly running, supporting my family.”
Art is now a very nice little earner. In 2005 he sold one picture of the Stones — Beggars Banquet — for $1m. The paintings on show at the gallery go for £300,000; even small drawings are priced at £10,000, about what it would cost you to buy a drawing by a decent Old Master. OK, Ronnie’s said to be worth £70m, but this is still real money.
'You should live your life to the full, knowing it's not going to last'
Does he think these prices are because he’s a rock star? “That’s always at the back of my mind. It’s only short-lived, though. Once people see I can actually paint, they ease up.”
He's had some serious names endorse his work — Brian Sewell, Peter Blake, Edward Lucie-Smith — a South Bank Show has been devoted to his art and he has proper collectors. There are, in particular, two American rock stars manqué — a “cancer doctor” in Florida whose wife pleads with Ronnie not to let him buy any more or they’ll have to move house, and Bernie Chase, who owns hundreds of Ronnie originals and is constantly finding lost works going all the way back to his childhood. “Bernie does connect with a lot of dodgy people who say they’ve got a Ronnie Wood. He says, ‘I’ll buy it and I want to see it,’ then he shows it to me and says, ‘It’s yours,’ and nine times out of ten they are mine. I’ve found some early stuff I thought was lost for ever: stuff from art school, some stuff I did when I was 12. At least I can see I can draw, it’s like looking at somebody else’s work.”
Startlingly, Ronnie is a patron of the English National Ballet. He paints their dancers and he is going to paint the dancers of the Royal Ballet and the Bolshoi.
This is art as real work. But, at another level, art is therapy, as Damien Hirst plainly saw. The problem with being a Stone, you see, is twofold: it’s not a full-time job and, even when you’re working, it’s a bit, well, stressful. After the end of their 50th-anniversary tour, they went back to their separate lives. Stones seldom communicate unless there’s business involved, Mick especially. There’s something comical about these dispersed not-Rolling Stones, seeking other identities at various points on the map. “Mick’s never happy unless he’s on the road. I’ve been trying to get him to come up to London and see us but he’s got all these gardener problems where he lives. There’s very little communication. We’re always on top of each other during a tour. With important things like birthdays we stay in touch but, in general, Charlie goes about his life down in Devon, you never really know when Keith’s in town and Mick flits everywhere.”
So they all have to think of other things to do. Ronnie seems to have dispersed himself and his art — he has homes, all with full studios, in Barcelona, Ireland and London. Painting, for him, is the exact opposite of being a Stone. “I’m quite an action painter, a lot of energy goes into it but it’s channelled from me. When I’m with the band that’s a group effort and you’re giving and taking and listening and putting ideas forward. But when you’re painting, it’s very much a personal thing and a great way to relax.”
Then there is the stress when they are being Stones. It’s not easy just stopping after sweating your way through a show in which you are expected to live up to the title of greatest ever rock band. “Drink, drugs and girls take the edge off the adrenaline, but they take their toll, especially when the tour ends. Suddenly you go from the big kerfuffle of touring to, bang, nothing. I think drink and drugs were the way to combat it and it worked for a while. Obviously it all backfired and luckily enough I got out of that way of life, and now I’m channelling my time much more creatively.”
In fact, his new after-show strategy is what he calls “murder mysteries”, mainly TV shows. It started with CSI but he’s moved on to more sophisticated stuff. “Now I’m more into Spiral and The Killing and Wallander. I think the best thing I come up with after the music and the tangibility of a concert is a good blood-and-guts murder mystery.”
Retreating to his hotel room to watch DVDs is not very rock’n’roll, but, then again, what now is? More importantly he has taken on a meditation regime. Every day he reads from a book published by Hazelden, an American addiction treatment-and-recovery institution. He spends a year going through five books with titles like Promise of a New Day and Wisdom to Know and then he starts the whole process again with the same books on January 1.
“They’re little affirmation books, I swear by them. They’re daily diaries of people through the years, putting their experiences down, how they’ve managed to get by in a new way of living without alcohol and drugs. There may be a quote from Tolstoy or John Lennon or whoever it may be. They just give you a little wake-up call. If I feel really awful one day and think, ‘Oh f*** it all,’ they hit exactly the mood and give you a way out of it. It’s the same books every year but they take on a totally different meaning.”
'I look back and think, "Ouch! I won't do that again"'
This is the heart — and, indeed, the art — of the matter. To be a rock star is, as David Beckham would put it, to “live the dream”, but it never seems to be enough. They want some kind of salvation, some kind of meaning. The smart move is to die at 27, as did Kurt Cobain, Jim Morrison, Amy Winehouse, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, the Stones’ own Brian Jones and many others. To live past that fateful year is to find yourself thinking of ways to parlay your way past the adrenalin and into credibility if not immortality. No Stone rolls for ever.
Ronnie isn’t the only rock-star painter. Paul McCartney, Patti Smith and David Bowie have been at it, and there’s a Bob Dylan display at the National Portrait Gallery this month. The big thing about paintings is they physically outlast the performance, the virtual trace that recorded music has now become, and that grimmest of all reapers, fashion. They go beyond death and Ronnie has seen a lot of death in his life — his brothers and Krissy as well as the casualties of the 1960s he remembers walking around to stop them falling into drug-induced comas. “Death is part of everyday life. None of us get out of here alive. You should live your life to the full, knowing it’s not going to last. It’s evident in painting. When I paint I’m thinking it will outlast me. I’ve learnt to live with the thought of it.”
But he is cool with his life so far, perhaps too cool. There is little sense that he feels he should atone for the sins alcohol and drugs made him commit. “I look back and smile and think, ‘Ouch! I won’t do that again,’ but I wouldn’t change anything because life’s not perfect.”
What about guilt? He has a lot to be guilty about. Jo, his second wife, wrote an autobiography — Hey Jo — that portrayed him as a drugged and alcoholic monster, threatening at one point to throw acid in her face, and a coldly unfaithful man. He may be better now, but such a past does not easily go away. Unless you are a Stone. “If you address it and make your amends with the people that maybe you hurt, that’s good. But hurt is a two-way thing and I don’t take on a lot of guilt because I wasn’t guilty of a lot of it. I address it and let it go. You have to look after yourself at a certain age, you have to put yourself first. I’ve been pleasing too many people.”
They are the words of a very spoilt man. I’ve met recovered alcoholics who hide behind the claim that they have a disease and are, therefore, not really at fault. For the very famous, this no-fault attitude is endorsed and magnified by their fans and hangers-on. Film stars, footballers and rock stars are spoilt out of the possibility of shame. We want celebrities, so we must have monsters.
But Ronnie, though spoilt, is clean and cool now. He’s working on more art projects than I can list. He seems happy but, as I said, fidgety. Being slightly deaf, he hasn’t heard the distant thunder of another Stones tour.
“Something will happen before the end of the year,” says Sherry Daly, the mighty, motherly manager who had been watching over us, taking notes. She seems mysteriously confident.
“Really?” says Ronnie, perking up slightly.
Art is never enough, not for a Stone.
Ronnie Wood’s Raw Instinct exhibition is at Castle Fine Art, Bruton Street, London W1. He is the gallery’s artist-in-residence until late 2014. Visit: castlefineart.com
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