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Topic: Bill Wyman Return to archive
25th September 2007 07:17 AM
Ten Thousand Motels Intimate profiles from the side of the big stage
JAN FAIRLEY
Sept 24,2007
The Scotsman

BILL Wyman is telling me how his family came back early from holiday this year, so he could take his three daughters to the final London concert of the Rolling Stones' A Bigger Bang world tour. The family found themselves seated among the crowd, unrecognised until the show was over, when suddenly he was surrounded by people shaking his hand and asking for autographs. Then everyone was standing up, cheering and clapping him. "It was really extraordinary," he says in his soft south-east London accent, "I never expected it after all these years, but it meant a lot to me."

Actually it was only 1993 when Wyman swapped his fretless bass guitar ("I've been told I invented the fretless bass") not just for family life and restaurant-owning but for the camera, archaeology and history. On 1 October, an exhibition of Wyman's early photographs of the Stones and other musicians - including John Lee Hooker, BB King, John Lennon, Ringo Starr, Eric Clapton, and Elton John, and of the artist Marc Chagall - opens at the Eastgate Theatre in Peebles.

The Stones stayed at Peebles Hydro following a Glasgow gig back on 6 October 1965, but Wyman's choice of off-the-beaten track venue for this latest exhibition is a result of his long-term friendship with Richard Havers, who lives in the Borders and has co-authored various books with him.

In mid-October Wyman and Havers will co-present a "Blues Odyssey" day, illustrated with location footage from Memphis and Mississippi. Together with Rhythm Kings cohort Terry Taylor, Wyman will demonstrate different blues guitar styles to an audience of secondary school students. Wyman will probably indulge his love of metal detecting at some point too.

Wyman dates his love of history to growing up during the Second World War at his grandmother's house in Penge in south-east London. "My Gran was a great reader and got me into history, feeding me Dickens, Robinson Crusoe, The Last of The Mohicans, and these illustrated volumes on the South African War," he says. "We got through the war in shelters hiding from doodlebugs, watching propaganda films with bombs hitting the neighbouring streets. That made a huge impression on me: I dreamed about it for years."

Wyman's passion for archaeology began back in the 1970s, when workmen discovered a 16th century water pot in the grounds of his 15th century Suffolk manor. He started digging with a spade, going down six feet, finding old walls and numerous relics. Later, he got permission to dig in his local village, discovering a hitherto unknown Roman site. Over the years he has registered more than 6,000 finds, identified with the help of museum experts, and he has just completed a book on the history of the inhabitants of his house from the year 1150 onwards.

Wyman's love of photography dates back to his childhood when his anti-aircraft gunner uncle, home on leave from fighting with the Eighth Army in North Africa, gave him a camera.

"He swapped his cigarette allowance with a mate for a Leica camera and he gave me his Box Brownie. Strangely enough, from the start I never took family snapshots: I took things like churches, almshouses, metal gates, trees, history things."

Wyman's love of the blues, meanwhile, came from hearing Chuck Berry, Fats Domino and other black R&B artists on American Forces radio while doing National Service with the RAF in Germany. "A mate brought Lonnie Donnegan's records out and I bought an acoustic guitar and formed a camp skiffle group." When he got out in 1958 he organised a local skiffle band while listening to the jazz of Chris Barber, Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday. Three years later he joined the Stones, his home-built amplifier, 18" speaker cabinet, age and experience adding to his credibility.

He bought his first blues discs while on tour with the Stones in Germany and Holland, later meeting many of the artists he respected, such as King and Hooker. His stage-side shots of them are the kind only an insider could get. "That's how I like to take photos: backstage in dressing rooms, in buses, planes, airports, recording studios. I just take pictures when people are not posing or anything. I've never set up a picture or posed anybody."

So when did he get his first serious camera? "Sometime about 1965-6 when I was in Paris on tour, I had a bit of money so I bought myself a Nikon and then bit by bit lenses and filters. I'm still a Nikon man: I bought a new digital a few days ago. I've tried Hasselblads and they produce wonderful pictures but they don't have the variety of possibility you can get with a Nikon and a 135 lens."

In 1998 Wyman published a photo book about Marc Chagall. "I had this house then near his in St Paul de Vence, and we met through a mutual friend. I remember he asked me why I had long hair and told me to change it as it wasn't original. And I said I thought the band I was with was one of the first to have long hair, and he said, 'OK. Keep it if it is original!'

"By then Chagall was 89 and I knew it wouldn't work if I stuck a big lens in front of him. I never do that anyway, I like to watch from a distance. So I went across to the other corner of the room and shot him while he was chatting with his wife. He had these big eyebrows and bright eyes and such amazing expressions: one minute he looks like a turtle, the next totally different."

Apart from losing film to Boots ("I never took my film to specialist shops") and mistakenly storing his first digitals at reduced file size, Wyman tells me he's kept all his negatives since he started, with over 20,000 images organised in books safely stored in a cold attic. He takes photographs wherever he travels, mentioning visits to German and Scandinavian fortresses and - his most recent favourite - Mexico City's National Museum of Anthropology.

"I should have been a librarian or a curator," he says. "I'm always reverting back to the past. As well as my collections of Stones stuff I've got coins, postage stamps, cigarette cards, and autograph albums of old music hall artists my parents loved."

A choirboy in childhood, today he helps care for the grounds of his local church, where he already has his burial plot marked out alongside previous owners of his manor house. Explaining how he's not really into organised religion, but does believe in a superior guiding intelligence, and how serendipity and fate come together, he tells a marvellous story: "My dad and his mate went to Penge Empire in the mid-1930s to see Marie Lloyd or Harry Champion, and they sat up in the sixpenny Gods next to two girls. And they got chatting and asked if they could see them home. They tossed a coin and my Dad got tails and that was how he met my Mum. They didn't make up their minds: if he'd called heads I wouldn't be here. I love those accidents of history."

• Bill Wyman's Photography is at the Eastgate Theatre and Arts Centre, Peebles, 1-31 October. Blues Odyssey Day is on 17 October. An Audience with Bill Wyman is on 18 October. For further information see www.eastgatearts.com or tel: 01721 725777.
25th September 2007 07:42 AM
Gazza
quote:
Ten Thousand Motels wrote:
The family found themselves seated among the crowd, unrecognised until the show was over, when suddenly he was surrounded by people shaking his hand and asking for autographs. Then everyone was standing up, cheering and clapping him. "It was really extraordinary," he says in his soft south-east London accent, "I never expected it after all these years, but it meant a lot to me."



The reporter hasnt got that quite right. I saw Bill walking to his seat before the show started and he got a standing ovation then.

Nice to read that it meant a lot to him, although its surprising to read that he seems to think he'd be forgotten
[Edited by Gazza]
25th September 2007 07:48 AM
glencar Strikes me as false modesty. He was an integral part of the band for 30 yrs. Could we have forgotten him so soon? And it's not like the crowds are that young these days.
25th September 2007 08:59 AM
gimmekeef Bill's in the press more often than Mick..Me thinks he likes his ego stroked.....
26th September 2007 02:05 AM
Lethargy Bill ain't much of a rocker, is he?
26th September 2007 07:44 AM
glencar No but he sits in one an awful lot these days.
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