Alcohol courses through this autobiography like a stream: even as a nipper, Ronnie Wood was partaking – under the kitchen table during the rowdy parties that seem to have been a nightly occurrence in the Wood household. “If there was a little drop of Guinness left in a glass on the table,” the guitarist writes, “we’d have it.” Wood boards the booze bus as a member of the Jeff Beck group, the Faces and, eventually and not altogether fortuitously, the Rolling Stones. Drugs join the nonstop party, too, and Wood spends much of the 1980s and 1990s in a stupor, building his own pub on his country estate in Ireland, and perfecting, with his partner-in-crime Keith Richards, what he describes as “the ancient form of weaving”. Initially, this phrase referred to their shared musical prowess; later, it became shorthand for an activity of a more mind-bending nature.

In view of the amount he has put away (including a five-year period in the early 1980s spent freebasing cocaine in Los Angeles), it’s a miracle that Wood was able to dredge his memory for this entertaining and often unintentionally revealing book. If reading it is rather like being pelted with anecdotes by a London cabbie as he yanks you down short cuts and sudden turns, the memoir packs in enough anecdotage to keep you pinned to the page even as you shudder at its style.

He evokes with vividness his youth as part of an extended family of “water gypsies”, who worked the barges in Paddington basin before fetching up on dry land near Hillingdon. These early chapters are the most effective, capturing the first stirrings of Wood’s love for painting, bands, booze and girls. The London music scene of the 1960s and early 1970s is, in his version, a closed shop of inter-band rivalries, bed-hopping and betrayal. He shares a house in Holland Park with Jimi Hendrix, and runs after him, on an impulse, to say goodbye outside Ronnie Scott’s, the night before Hendrix dies. He pinches Krissie, his first long-term girlfriend, from Eric Clapton, who steals Pattie Boyd from George Harrison, who has a fling with Krissie, who misbehaves with Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, while Wood is carrying on in secret with Boyd. He buys a huge house in Richmond and invites Richards to stay the night; Richards moves out four months later. He does the rounds of the record-label Christmas parties on Oxford Street, bumping into the Stones, the Small Faces, the Kinks and the Beatles, which sounds rather more exciting than today’s velvet-roped envelope-openings. Somehow, too, amid all this debauchery, great music is being made.

When Wood first meets Rod Stewart (in a pub, naturally), the latter says, simply: “Hello, face, how are you?” People clearly love him. Mick Jagger – sitting loyally by Wood’s side for 15 hours in an LA hospital while the guitarist’s wife, Jo, gives birth to their first child – is one such fan. Wood’s gift for friendship (he is still blood brothers with both Stewart and Richards) has carried him through a life of extraordinary highs and wretched lows. His story is a reminder that addiction doesn’t discriminate. When Wood describes his stepson’s attempts to sort out his chaotic financial affairs (“Gradually, he saved us £2m a year”), the temptation is to think: did-dums. Yet, if the quality of the wine he swigged and the quantity of the drugs he took increased with fame and fortune, in some sense Wood was just playing out a pattern of behaviour he’d first observed from beneath that kitchen table.

Towards the end of the book, he seems to acknowledge this. The people and the passions – his parents and brothers, his wife and children, his band, his art, his friends – who had to share Wood for so long with addiction have, he says, finally got him to themselves. Even Richards, he writes, has accepted that he’s clean. For now at least, he is weaving no more.

RONNIE by Ronnie Wood
Macmillan £20 pp358

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