The qualities that made Bill Wyman ‘the boring one’ in the Rolling Stones have served him well in his other role – as the group’s archivist. But his new scrapbook is far from dull, finds Nigel Farndale.
It is midmorning and Bill Wyman’s Sticky Fingers burger restaurant in Kensington is empty. Almost. Then a tourist walks in and takes a photograph of a photograph that is hanging on the wall. It is of the Rolling Stones, circa 1968. The man hasn’t realised that one of the rock stars in the picture is sitting a few feet away, watching him. It’s a scene that can only be described as postmodern.
Apart from the black-rimmed glasses he is wearing today, Wyman doesn’t look that different from how he did back then. He was never a tall man (5ft 7in) and his hair is still collar length, if greying now. But he is older: 76.
Indeed, when he orders a vodka and tonic which seems quite rock and roll, given the time of day, he explains that it is, in fact, because he has backache.
The photograph is one of hundreds of items of memorabilia exhibited here in the restaurant, including gold discs, Brian Jones’s guitar and Wyman’s bass (the two instruments together are worth about half a million pounds).
“The stuff here is only a fraction of my collection,” Wyman says. “I’ve got trunks of it at home.” Indeed he is about to publish Scrapbook, a limited-edition volume presented in a clamshell box. It features tickets, posters, programmes, letters, photographs, and much more besides. There’s Wyman’s birth certificate, letters to – and from – fans, a list of expenses for the Stones’ accountant, and even his Japanese work visa application form. In another life he would have loved to have been a librarian, he says, what with all that indexing and cross-referencing. The next best thing was to become the band’s archivist.
Did the other Stones think he was eccentric for collecting all the time?
“Oh yeah, they thought I was mad, they’d say, ‘Why are you bothering to – excuse my language – collect that crap?’ It was quite hard to collect anything because you had to leave a venue so quickly, what with the kids attacking you and jumping over police vans.”
Wyman’s letter to a UK fan. 17th January 1965
Wyman’s letter to a UK fan. 17th January 1965
He says the Stones always went out of their way to be nice to their fans – which must be difficult when, as regularly happened, they attack your car and force you to be helicoptered away under police escort. “There was always stacks of mail waiting for us at venues and we would sit down and start answering it,” says Wyman. “Me, Brian, Charlie and Keith took turns doing the autographs and we learnt to do each others’, because there were so many to do. When the autographs come up at Sotheby’s these days I can often tell they aren’t real.”
But it wasn’t just autographs the female fans were after, was it, Bill?
A grin. “Well, that was Brian and me mostly, the others weren’t that interested, really. But we are digressing.”
Are we? In a way, we are still on the subject of collecting. By Wyman’s own estimates he slept with around 1,000 women. Yes, he says, but it wasn’t how people think. “Before I joined the Stones, a workmate gave me a piece of advice. Always treat a woman like a lady, and I always did that, even when I broke up with one. There are some who I still write to, a friend in Australia who I used to go out with in ’63, ’64. She has grandchildren now. And I’m still in touch with a girl I used to go out with in ’64, ’65. I never treated them like s— and threw their clothes out.”
Presumably he couldn’t remember all their names. “It was a bit of a blur at times. But I can remember a lot of them. I was married so I couldn’t write about them in my diaries. I had to remember when and where. They weren’t one-night stands, though, because I would see the same ones again. Whenever I went to New York there were two black girls I would see. Every tour.” Bill Wyman’s address book: it should be in a glass case in the British Museum. “Yes,” he agrees with a laugh. “But I had it stolen in Spain in 1999. It was in a suitcase they nicked. Never seen again.” What does he make of the current trend for celebrities such as Russell Brand to put their promiscuity down to “sex addiction” and book themselves into clinics for treatment? “Don’t know who that is,” he says.
Michael Douglas, then. “Oh yes, I know Michael. OK, I suppose I didn’t have a sex addiction in that case. I always thought of it as having company when I was lonely and bored on the road. Touring is not a romantic life. It’s exciting for two hours every other night when you’re on stage, the rest is a nightmare of packing and unpacking. So female company helped to pass the time. I didn’t go searching for women, they came to me and were very nice and sweet.
“I was always very careful who I went with. Didn’t go with groupies or anything. Never had any problems with sexually transmitted diseases, as a lot of people did in those days,” He trails off. Looks uncomfortable. “But come on, we shouldn’t be talking about girls all the time.”
Guests Gina Lollobrigida and Suzanne Accosta at the Sticky Fingers Cafe’s 4th Birthday Party. 6th July 1993
Guests Gina Lollobrigida and Suzanne Accosta at the Sticky Fingers Cafe’s 4th Birthday Party. 6th July 1993 Credit: Alan
It’s obvious why not. He says he usually stayed in touch with his old flames, but not with his second wife Mandy Smith, presumably? “Not after we broke up, no. Since the settlement I haven’t spoken to her.” I’m 48 and it is sobering to think that Wyman was my age when he first slept with her. That was in 1985, when she was 14. They married in 1989 when she was 18 and he was 52. With no irony whatsoever, Hello! magazine called it a “fairy-tale” wedding, a headline it would not get away with in the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal. In the past year, indeed, Wyman’s name has been cited in several newspaper reports as an example of a celebrity who had sex with a minor.
Brave of him to include a snapshot of Mandy Smith in his Scrapbook, I note. “Yes, that was before we broke up. I have many wonderful pictures of her, but I didn’t want to dwell on it because it’s a sore point in my life. People have always treated it badly, when it wasn’t bad. I don’t want to talk about it because it upsets my [third] wife and my [three] daughters, who are the age she was.” He trails off again.
“We all have a skeleton in the cupboard, it’s just if you’re a taxi driver in Halifax no one ever hears about it. But if you are a celebrity everyone does. In my case it was publicised to the world and that wasn’t really fair, I don’t think. No, it’s a tough one. Thirty years ago.”
Does he still feel nervous about prosecution? “There was never a complaint so…” Again, the trailing off. Then he says, “I went to the police and I went to the public prosecutor 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.”
His affair with Mandy Smith was “a heart thing”, not “a lust thing”. “It was very emotional and special at the time. It wasn’t how it was reported, and the only time it ever happened in my life. A lot of people understood, but a lot didn’t. The media certainly didn’t. They treated me like crap.”
The heart can make a fool of a middle-aged man, is that how he sees it? “That was why I married her, but it didn’t work out, by then she was changed, but we mustn’t talk about this any more because my wife will get upset.”
OK, let’s talk about the Stones, then. I know he has said he has no regrets about leaving the band in 1993, but when he sees the kind of money they are still making from touring it must give him pause for thought. “When I said I wanted to leave they told me I was probably giving up £20 million for the next two years. But I had three great houses and some nice cars.” He felt he had enough? “Yes, and I got married again and worked on books, and started a band to subsidise my living expenses. And I don’t regret it because I’ve never been happier.” He looks over my shoulder at something.“I’m sure I’m happier than they are in their lives, I really do.”
Wyman seems a likeable man, about as far removed from a one-time rock legend as you can imagine. He was, after all, always characterised as “the boring one” in the Rolling Stones. Indeed, when he left the band Mick Jagger claimed not to have noticed. “How hard can it be to play bass?” he said. “I’ll do it myself.” Certainly Wyman didn’t do drugs; his main requirement on the road was Marmite and Branston pickle. In conversation he uses quaint expressions such as “hark at me”, and when he swears he apologises. His main passion these days is metal detecting.
And his comments can seem quite Eeyorish. It still rankles with him, for example, that his contributions to the Stones were unacknowledged with writing credits. “None of us got them, Brian, Mick Taylor. If you came up with a riff that turned an ordinary song into something special it was never acknowledged.” Would Mick and Keith acknowledge the riffs privately? “No, not really. The riff on Miss You was mine. And the one for Jumping Jack Flash. There was one interview where Keith acknowledged that ‘that was Bill’s song’. Then about 10 years later he denied he’d said it.”
He sighs. “I don’t push it. You have to swallow your pride and let it go, otherwise you get knotted up. I went away and had the biggest solo success of anyone in the band with (Si, si) Je Suis Un Rock Star. A world hit.” You get the feeling there is little love lost between him and Jagger: “He can start a sentence by saying Yes and by the end of it you realise he has said No.”
But they do have a passion for cricket in common, I say, trying to act as go-between. “Except I play it and he only watches it.”
He’s feeling distracted now, he says, because he keeps noticing that a picture of Jagger on the wall behind me is on a skew. “I’m a bit OCD,” he explains. “Have you noticed I’ve been straightening these serviettes and forks as we’ve been talking.” As I get up to straighten the picture for him, he asks the waiter if the music can to be turned down “because it’s a bit ’orrible”. His wife Suzanne arrives.
Time for one last question. He played bass on Satisfaction and Brown Sugar. He was on stage at the legendary Hyde Park concert in 1969. For some fans, the Stones without Bill Wyman are not really the Stones at all. Do people still think he is in the band? “Yes, taxi drivers still say after all these years, ‘When are you touring with the Stones again?’”
Actually, he did rejoin them briefly on stage at the O2 last November for their 50th anniversary. What was it like?
“Bit disappointing, really,” he deadpans. “They only let me do two songs.”