Bill Wyman: the Rolling Stone airbrushed out of history
He played in the band for 30 years — so where is he in the BBC documentary about Keith, Ronnie, Mick and Charlie?
From 'The Times' 23rd July 2022
It was a lot of rock’n’roll, a dash of drugs and only a smattering of sex. Over 240 minutes the BBC documentary series My Life as a Rolling Stone told the stories of the three remaining members of the “greatest rock’n’roll band in the world”, and of Charlie Watts, who died last year at the age of 80.
The officially sanctioned Stones film had Keith Richards and Watts talking about their heroin years and Ronnie Wood on the “lovely” girls who followed the band around. Mick Jagger even muttered about life in tax exile while Tina Turner, Rod Stewart, Chrissie Hynde and Sheryl Crow rhapsodised about the Stones’ music.
But someone was glaringly absent. Where was Bill Wyman? The band’s bassist was there from the start and his departure from the band in 1993 after three decades marked the end of an era. Never mind that Wyman, 85, and Watts were partners in a rhythm section described as “the greatest of all time” by the veteran producer Glyn Johns, who has worked with the Beatles, the Who and Led Zeppelin, as well as the Stones. Or that in his role as the Stones’ unofficial archivist Wyman has amassed one of the world’s largest collections of memorabilia. He was not interviewed and no one mentioned his name. Save for a handful of on-screen glimpses of Wyman in concert and recording studio footage, it was as if he had been airbrushed out of the Stones story. Which prompts the question: why?
It wasn’t always like this. When, at the age of 52, Wyman married the 18-year-old aspiring model and singer Mandy Smith, with whom he had allegedly been in a relationship for five years, all his bandmates and their wives attended the wedding. “She took my breath away,” Wyman wrote, indefensibly, in his memoir, Stone Alone. “She was a woman at 13.”
At the wedding reception in 1989 the band apparently had no issue with the relationship, despite the huge age difference between Wyman and his bride. Some have speculated that Wyman’s absence from My Life as a Rolling Stone is down to a belated pang of conscience in the wake of #MeToo. That or concern about the public uproar that forced the sudden cancellation of a screening at the Sheffield Film Festival of The Quiet One, Oliver Murray’s 2019 film about Wyman. Yet Murray also co-directed the BBC series. As ever with the Stones, the air is never murkier than when you attempt to clear it.
The Quiet One devotes mere minutes to Wyman’s relationship with Smith and their four-year marriage. “It was from the heart,” he claims in the film. “It wasn’t lust, which people were seeing it as. I was really stupid to ever think it could work. She was too young. I felt she had to go out and see life for a bit.”
The film fails to mention a bizarre consequence of the pair meeting — that Stephen, Wyman’s then 30-year-old son from his first marriage, was briefly married to Smith’s mother, Patsy, who was 46 at the time.
Smith, who endured well-publicised issues with physical and mental health, is now 51 and a single mother living in Manchester. A devout Catholic, she has given counselling to adolescent girls who are in difficulty and distress. Twelve years ago she launched a campaign to have the age of consent raised to 18, commenting: “People will find that odd coming from me, but I think I do know what I’m talking about here. You are still a child — even at 16. You can never get that part of your life, your childhood, back. I never could.”
In a perhaps unintentionally poignant Sliding Doors moment in her 1993 memoir, It’s All Over Now (co-written with the former Downing Street director of communications Andy Coulson), Smith revealed that, after meeting Wyman for the first time at an awards ceremony, she and her sister contemplated trying to set him up with their divorced mother.
After his divorce from Smith in 1993 Wyman married the actress Suzanne Accosta, 22 years his junior, with whom he has three daughters. He and Accosta have homes in London, the south of France and Suffolk — a 15th-century moated manor house he bought in 1968 from an acquaintance of the Krays. Nine years ago he revealed that he had approached the police, volunteering to be questioned by them about his relationship with Smith. “I went to [them] and said, ‘Do you want to talk to me? Do you want to meet up with me or anything like that?’ And I got a message back, ‘No.’ I was totally open about it.”
Another divorce would occur in the same year as his split from Smith — this time one that was costlier to Wyman’s bank balance than to what was left of his reputation. Wyman had told his bandmates that he was thinking of quitting three years earlier. There are conflicting accounts of the conversations that occurred before his departure was officially announced in January 1993. Richards has occasionally been spiky on the subject, implying that they were thinking of letting Wyman go anyway and suggesting that he, Jagger and Watts were the true heart of the band.
The writer and broadcaster Paul Sexton, whose authorised biography of Watts will be published in September, cautions against reading too much into such sniping. “From the moment when [Bill] first began to hint that he might not want to do it for much longer to the point where he actually announced it was at least three years. In the time between they spent ages trying to talk him out of it. They really didn’t want him to leave because it was uncharted territory, something they didn’t want to have to address.”
In his formal letter of resignation, dated November 30, 1992, addressed to Jagger, Richards, Watts and Ronnie Wood and cc’d to the band’s lawyer and financial manager, Prince Rupert Loewenstein, Wyman wrote: “Next month it will be 30 years since I joined the Rolling Stones. I am proud to have been part of the band over all these years, and proud of the fact that we have stayed together all that time. I wouldn’t have missed any of those 30 years for anything, but I also don’t want to risk spoiling them by going on too long.”
Then, hilariously, given that the Stones are on their 47th tour and Mick’n’Keef both turn 80 next year, he wrote: “It’s not just feeling tired at the end of a tour, I’m used to that. What’s different is that I am seven years older than Mick & Keith, and they’re both 49 this year. Ask yourselves if you will really still want to be playing when you are my age.”
So what is the state of his relationship with the remaining Stones? Wyman continues to add to his memorabilia and lent many pieces to Exhibitionism, the retrospective at the Saatchi Gallery in London in 2016. He joined the band at the 02 Arena ten years ago. In 2020 he published a collection of his photos, Stones from the Inside, which suggests enduring affection.
Yet Wyman has made it no secret that he knows he timed his departure badly; in the years since he left tours by the Stones have brought in sums that dwarf anything he earned during his time with the band. Seven years ago he admitted: “The big money wasn’t there yet. I had a small nest egg and I can live nicely, but I can’t rely on Stones royalties to support me. I’m not in the same league as the boys who stayed on. But I wanted to have fun.”
Sexton says that Wyman, to whom he last spoke in the spring, misses Watts keenly. Watts was apparently so (happily) disengaged from the Stones circus that he would often be completely unaware that album X or Y had been reissued and had little interest in going back over the past. At Sexton’s suggestion he once played an old track, saying afterwards: “I listened to it and it occurred to me just how good Bill was. I’d never really thought about it before.” Relations between Wyman and the surviving Stones are better than people think, Sexton believes. “They all still send each other Christmas presents. And when Bill turned 75, the others sent him 75 roses.”
There have been occasional signs of lingering friction. Wyman voiced anger about a blue plaque erected at Dartford station, where Jagger and Richards had their fateful reunion meeting in 1961, which stated that they “went on to form the Rolling Stones” — that would have been news to Brian Jones and Ian Stewart, the real initiators of the band.
Questions remain about songwriting royalties; Wyman has long argued that he deserves a co-credit for Stones tracks such as Paint It Black, Jumpin’ Jack Flash and Miss You. And the sleeve for the 2005 compilation album Rarities 1971-2003 bore a well-known photograph of the band from which Wyman had literally been airbrushed, which must have rankled. Yet few were surprised by his omission from the commemorative stamps the Royal Mail issued this year to mark the Stones’ 60th anniversary.
But Wyman, alongside Watts, was always the odd Stone out. Older than the others, appalled by the thought of drugs and what they might do to him (“The emptiness underneath me terrifies me,” he says in The Quiet One), and a man whose hobbies — predatory behaviour notwithstanding — have always been decidedly un-rock’n’roll. Still, at least metal detecting and archaeology keep you out of trouble.
My Life as a Rolling Stone is available now on BBC iPlayer
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