Ronnie Wood

• 1. Introduction

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  Ronnie Wood was born on the 1st of June 1947 in the London Borough of Hillingdon, into a family of English river barge operators known as bargees, or sometimes "water gypsies." His generation was the first in the family to be born on dry land. It is a detail that says something about the man: rootless by heritage, yet somehow always in the right place at the right moment. By the time Wood was officially declared a member of the Rolling Stones on the 23rd of April 1976, he had already played on landmark albums with the Jeff Beck Group, co-written some of rock's most enduring songs with Faces, and recorded his first solo LP in the basement of his own home near London. The questions that trail him are not simple ones. How does a boy from Yiewsley, Middlesex, end up handing Bob Dylan his guitar on the stage of Live Aid? How does a man twice inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame also earn a Sony Radio Personality of the Year award? And what does a Rolling Stone do when he needs to recover from addiction? He takes up stamp collecting.

• 2. A Family of Artists

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  Wood grew up at 8 Whitehorn Avenue in Yiewsley, attending St Stephen's Infant School, St Matthew's Church of England Primary School, and St Martin's C of E Secondary Modern School West Drayton, where one of his drawings was chosen for the BBC Sketch Club programme. That early recognition he would later call his "awakening to art." His elder brothers, Art and Ted, were both graphic artists and musicians, and all three brothers studied at Ealing College of Art. Freddie Mercury of Queen and Pete Townshend of the Who also passed through Ealing in the 1960s. Ted Wood died in 2004 and Art Wood in 2006, making Ronnie the last of the three artistic brothers. The family's creative streak ran deep enough that Wood's artwork eventually appeared on the cover of Eric Clapton's 1988 box set Crossroads, and several of his paintings, including a work commissioned by Andrew Lloyd Webber, were displayed at London's Drury Lane Theatre. Art critic Brian Sewell described Wood as "an accomplished and respectable artist," and the South Bank Show devoted an entire programme to his work. Wood and his sons Jamie and Tyrone co-own a London art gallery called Scream.

• 3. Blues Apprenticeship

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  Wood began his professional music career in 1964 as lead guitarist with the Birds, a rhythm and blues band based in Yiewsley, Middlesex. A popular live act with a considerable fan base, the Birds released several singles in the mid-1960s, and Wood wrote or co-wrote nearly half the songs the group recorded. Before the Birds disbanded, Wood briefly joined a project called Santa Barbara Machine Head, which included Jon Lord, who would later co-found Deep Purple. By 1967, Wood had moved to the Jeff Beck Group, initially as rhythm guitarist and later as bassist after the original bassist Jet Harris and his replacement Jeff Ambrose both departed. Alongside vocalist Rod Stewart, Wood recorded Truth in 1968 and Beck-Ola in 1969, touring internationally with Beck. On his radio show on the 14th of November 2011, Wood and Alice Cooper both claimed that Wood had played bass on the Crazy World of Arthur Brown's number one hit "Fire"; however, a biography of Arthur Brown notes that the recording contains no bass guitar at all, only bass pedals, and suggests Wood may have confused it with a BBC session from the 8th of April 1968. That gap between legend and fact would follow Wood throughout his career, making the careful tracing of his early contributions both necessary and rewarding.

• 4. The Faces Years

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  In 1969, after Steve Marriott left the Small Faces, Wood began working with the group's remaining members, returning to the guitar. A short-lived formation called Quiet Melon, including Rod Stewart, former Bird Kim Gardner, and Wood's brother Art, made a handful of recordings in May 1969. After the Jeff Beck Group's fifth US tour in July, Wood and Stewart joined those former Small Faces members full-time, and the band became Faces. In the first half of the 1970s, Faces released four studio albums and were among the top-grossing live acts of the period. Wood contributed guitar, harmonica, vocals, and bass, and co-wrote many of their songs, including "Stay With Me" and "Ooh La La"; he also co-wrote Rod Stewart's "Gasoline Alley" and "Every Picture Tells a Story." In 1972, Wood and Faces bassist Ronnie Lane composed the soundtrack to the film Mahoney's Last Stand, a record that also featured Pete Townshend and Ric Grech. Wood performed alongside Townshend, Grech, Steve Winwood, Jim Capaldi, and Eric Clapton at Clapton's Rainbow Concert in 1973. Faces found success in the UK and mainland Europe from their early days, but only reached major fame in the US during their last year together, 1975. In December 1973, Wood had collaborated with Mick Jagger on "It's Only Rock'n Roll (But I Like It)," an encounter that planted the seeds for his next chapter.

• 5. Joining the Stones

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  In 1973, Wood asked his old friend Mick Taylor, whom he had known since the early 1960s, to help with his first solo album. He recorded that album, I've Got My Own Album to Do, at his private studio in the basement of The Wick, his home near London. The sessions brought in Ian McLagan, George Harrison, and Keith Richards, who had become a longtime friend. Following Taylor's departure from the Rolling Stones in December 1974, Wood participated in the band's March 1975 recording sessions for Black and Blue. While still a Faces member, he toured North America with the Stones in 1975; Faces announced their break-up in December of that year, and Wood was officially declared a Rolling Stone on the 23rd of April 1976. His guitar work with Richards developed into what Richards himself dubbed "the ancient art of weaving" - a practice borrowed from Chicago blues in which lead and rhythm roles blur into each other. Wood also brought slide guitar, lap steel, and pedal steel to the band, and he appears on bass on the single "Emotional Rescue." He has been credited as co-writer on over a dozen Stones songs, among them "Dance," "Black Limousine," "One Hit (to the Body)," and "Had It With You." Wood was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the Rolling Stones in 1989, and again as a member of Faces in 2012.

• 6. Life Between the Setlists

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  At the 1985 Live Aid Concert in Philadelphia, Wood and Keith Richards performed in the penultimate set with Bob Dylan. During "Blowin' in the Wind," one of Dylan's guitar strings broke. Wood handed Dylan his own guitar to keep the performance going and played air guitar until a stagehand arrived with a replacement. The moment captured something essential about Wood's role in rock music: always present, rarely front and centre, instinctively useful. Beyond the Rolling Stones, he collaborated across decades with Prince, Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Eric Clapton, Bo Diddley, Ringo Starr, and Aretha Franklin, among others. On the 11th of August 2009, he joined Pearl Jam on the stage of Shepherd's Bush Empire in London for a performance of "All Along the Watchtower." Wood was also a horse breeder of note; one of his best-known horses, Sandymount Duke, was aimed at the Grand National at Aintree in January 2019, though a training setback prevented the horse from running. On the 9th of May 2009, he performed at the fifth annual MusiCares event honouring Anthony Kiedis, playing under the name "the Insects" alongside Red Hot Chili Peppers members and Ivan Neville. Since the 9th of April 2010, he has hosted a Saturday-night radio show on Absolute Radio, and in May 2011 he won the Sony Radio Personality of the Year award.

• 7. Sobriety and Survival

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  Wood has spoken openly about his struggle with alcoholism. Reports between 2003 and 2006 had suggested he had been sober since the Rolling Stones' 2002-03 tour, but in June 2006 it was reported he was entering rehab. Mick Jagger was supportive of his efforts; Keith Richards was initially sceptical. By July 2008, Wood had checked himself into rehab a total of six times, with a seventh admission planned. He had also taken up stamp collecting as part of his recovery. The same month, he left his second wife Jo for Katia Ivanova, whom he had met at a London club. On the 3rd of December 2009, Wood was arrested in connection with a domestic incident and cautioned on the 22nd of December 2009. On the 21st of December 2012, he married Sally Humphreys, 31 years his junior and the owner of a theatre production company. Their twin daughters, Gracie Jane and Alice Rose, were born on the 30th of May 2016, just before Wood's 69th birthday. Wood was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2017 and underwent partial removal of a lung. He refused chemotherapy, saying he did not want to lose his hair. In 2020, he was diagnosed with an aggressive small-cell cancer; after treatment at Royal Marsden Hospital in west London, his doctors gave him the all-clear in April 2021. On the 12th of October 2025, Wood appeared on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs and recalled the loss of his childhood sweetheart, Stephanie de Court, who died in a car accident on the 31st of May 1964, the eve of his seventeenth birthday. In his 2007 autobiography Ronnie, he wrote that her death, along with that of her two friends, contributed to his subsequent addiction as a way of dealing with grief. By 2025, he stated he had been clean for 15 years and smoke-free for 9.