| March 25th, 2005 09:38 PM |
|
|
| Ten Thousand Motels |
No stone unturned
LUCY CAVENDISH
FORMER Rolling Stone Bill Wyman is a pretty odd fish. On the one hand he looks like an archetypal rock star. He wears dark shades even though it’s 9am on a not particularly bright day. He smokes copious amounts of cigarettes. He has strange, dyed sort-of-fluffy hair that makes him look as if a small animal has taken up residence on his head. His face is craggy and lined, just like his former Rolling Stone bandmates Keith Richards and Mick Jagger. He speaks in a rough sarf-London-meets-mockney accent. He says things like: "When we woz in Hamburg everyone woz riotin’ and pullin’ down the curtains and that and we woz larfin’ about it the other day."
Then again, Wyman always claims not to be the archetypal rock star at all. He always says that he is different from Keith and Mick. He left the Rolling Stones in 1993. He has, apparently, found peace with his Californian dress-designer wife of almost 12 years, Suzanne Accosta. Before then life was much more ropey.
There was what seemed to be his permanent ostracism from the band; he didn’t drink or take drugs and always seemed out of kilter with Richards and Jagger. Then there were his marriages: one to his childhood flame, Diane Cory; the infamous, ill-advised one to the teenage Mandy Smith; and then - and still now - Accosta. Not that he’s going to get overexcited by any of this. He must be the only person who was there in the Sixties and remembers it. He’s a massive collector of everything, so, in many ways, he has lived his life as an outsider, reading about what the Stones did rather than being involved.
This, unfortunately, makes a rock‘n’roller who slept with bucketloads of young groupies seem oddly, well, tedious. He tells me that in his restaurant, Sticky Fingers in Kensington, he has over 500 pieces of Stones memorabilia on the walls. "Do you want me to list them?" he says. "I can, you know."
I bet he can. "Brian Jones used to call me Mr Matter of Fact, but for me facts matter," he says. His former manager used to call him Mr Formica. The other band members called him Old Stoneface. All this rootling around seems miles away from the days when, as he describes in one of his books, Stone Alone, he used to bed hundreds of young fans. In one year alone, he managed more than 200.
Keith Richards, apparently, called him a man who only ever "thinks with his dick", and he was famous for silently mouthing his hotel room number to fans he picked out from the crowd. But maybe this relentless bedding of women and signing his name on their breasts, admittedly many years ago, is just another aspect of his obsessive nature.
He says he found touring lonely and that he was happy to get out of the whole rock-star thing. "I was never any good at it," he says. "When I was with the Stones it was like living in a goldfish bowl, but now I do my work projects and potter around. I’m always doing something. That’s how I am. I like to keep my brain busy but I’m happy now because I’ve got my wife and my kids." There are four of the latter: Stephen, 42, from his first marriage, and three girls - Kate, 10, Jessie, nine, and Mathilda, six - with Accosta.
That’s what has always made him different, he says, the fact that he’s happily married. The fact that he has these children. "It’s not me that’s always trying out different things and not being able to settle," says Wyman referring, I imagine, to Mick Jagger
"I’ve been enjoying life since I left the Stones. When I was in the band I always had to be on call. We were either recording or touring or whatever. There was no time to do anything but that, and half the time Keith and Mick were rowing, so I never knew what I was supposed to be doing."
So he left and now he’s had plenty of time to be getting on with his stuff, which all turns out to be pretty eclectic. There was, initially, a bit of an iffy time with Jagger and Richards - they said he hadn’t made any contribution to the Stones, and weren’t bothered about him leaving - but that’s all blown over, he says: "I’ve got a thick skin. Charlie [Watts, the drummer] and I have always been mates and my wife sees a lot of Jerry [Hall]. We all send Christmas cards."
Does he regret leaving the Stones? "Only coz of the money," he says. He claims that he never earned much during his 30 years with the Stones. "Well, that’s true," he says. "Charlie and me were paid for doing a job so, if we wasn’t working, we wasn’t paid. There was a period, before I left, when I hardly got anything at all because Mick and Keith kept disagreeing. That’s part of the reason why I left. After that, though, they’ve kept on touring and making a few records. I would’ve been about £20 million better off if I’d stayed."
But a recent biography has estimated his worth at $25 million (£13.3 million), greatly boosted by his books. Wyman tells me he’s an award-winning author. "Ironic, that, isn’t it?" he says. "I never wrote songs for the Stones and, as a band, we never won any awards. It just never happened for us. But I’ve won a national book award."
His books include Wyman Shoots Chagall, a set of photographic portraits, on Marc Chagall, the painter Wyman lived near to in Vence, France, many years ago with long-time former girlfriend Astrid Lundstrom. "People keep saying I lived next door to him but I didn’t! I lived nearby. I hate things to be incorrect," he says.
The rest of the books are on the Stones. There’s Stone Alone, his autobiography written just as he left the band, and Rolling With The Stones, a book packed full of photographs and memorabilia. Wyman followed those two with an extensive book charting the history of the blues called Blues Odyssey. "They’re all coffee-table books," says Wyman. "I like the breadth of that visual form."
His latest is a bit of a departure. It’s called Treasure Islands and is, essentially, a trainspotter’s guide to the treasures found in Britain and Ireland. It’s full of illustrated maps, timelines and loads of facts and lists. "I took up metal detecting when I left the band," says Wyman. "I didn’t really know what to do and we had some builders in and they found a marvellous 16th-century jug. It turns out I’ve got a whole Tudor compound in my grounds! I’ve also found over 300 Roman coins in the area. Someone misquoted me and said I’d found 300 coins, but that’s wrong. It’s Roman coins that I’ve found."
God, he’s such a stickler! He must be pretty impossible to live with, everything having to be done the correct way. He must be the only person to ever have said: "Metal detecting is more interesting to me than the new Rolling Stones record."
He tells me he has kept a diary since he was a child. He has also kept press cuttings, magazines, posters, diary pieces, books... everything about the Stones since they first started. It’s all documented, cross-referenced, leather bound and filed away in a vast barn. Why does he do it?
"I just love it," he says. "I’ve got that kind of brain. Now, whenever people want to research a book on someone like Sinatra they come and look at my old magazines."
It must be worth a fortune, I say. Will he eventually donate it to a library? "I haven’t thought about it," he says. "I suppose I’ll leave it to the kids."
Unlike his own children, Wyman, who was born William Perks in 1936, grew up in spectacular poverty. His parents - Bill, a builder, and Molly - had six children between them and William was the eldest. He tells stories of how they lived: no privacy, shared toothbrushes, one (tin) bath a week in front of the fire. But William was the first Perks to get into grammar school, in Beckenham. "I was so proud," he says. But, just before he was about to take his O-levels his father took him out of school.
"He didn’t want me to get too big for my boots," Wyman says .
Even the most controlled of people have their weaknesses. His turned out to be the pre-pubescent Mandy Smith. She was 13 when Wyman, then 48, met her - a pretty girly strutting her stuff at the Lyceum in London. It was a sorry saga that almost ended happily: Wyman and Smith did marry when she was 18 but it lasted less than a year.
The break-up forced Wyman to look at his life. The upshot was that he called up Accosta, whom he’d known for some time. "I thought about all the girls I knew, and wondered if there was anyone I could live happily with for the rest of my life. Suzanne’s name came into mind."
How typical of him to pick someone in an almost analytical way. But he is faithful for the first time ever. She’s happy being the chatelaine of the Suffolk house, the Chelsea apartment and a bolthole in the South of France. So, good on them, really.
As for the future, Wyman tells me he’s working on a book about his Suffolk house. "I’ve got all the records," he says. "I’m just putting it together now."
But before I leave he says I really must try a bit of metal detecting. "I’ll tell you something interesting," he says lugubriously. "You can find wonderful things but do you know what makes the best noise? Ring pulls. "They give out this loud, well-rounded sound and you get all excited. And it turns out to be nothing but trash. That," he says, "is a bit like life really, isn’t it?"
• Bill Wyman’s Treasure Islands, Sutton Publishing, £25.
|
|
CHAT
ROOM aka THE FUN HOUSE] [
RESTROOMS]