Rob Blackhurst

Wednesday 9 July 2008

The Saddle Room, The Shelbourne Hotel, Dublin

12 Clare Atlantic Oyster – 33.00

Sea Food Platter

½ lobster tail, 4 Jumbo Prawn, 4 Oysters and Lobsters and Crab Cocktail

– 44.00

3 Espresso – 13.50

Total due: £90.50

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Keith Richards once famously said that "if you are going to get wasted, then get wasted elegantly". At sixty-one, his fellow Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood is a similar embodiment of this creed of stylish excess. As he arrives in reception of the Shelbourne Hotel, cutting a path through huddles of overly nourished Dublin politicians and businessmen, he's wearing the same size 28 super-skinny jeans that he's been wearing for 30 years, a pair of space-boots that may once have belonged on an alligator's back, and a tight black shirt undone to the chest: the fruits of a recent trip to Prada before his daughter Leah's wedding last month.

But as he greets me with a warm handshake and naughty liquorice eyes, it's the luxuriant jet black Barnet, flecked with only the tiniest hints of grey, that mark him out as a Stone from fifty paces. I can't resist asking him if the Stones struck some deal with the Devil to gain access to the springs of eternal youth: "I don't dye it either" he says proudly; "We're all the same build as well. It's a good thing I didn't join Fleetwood Mac".

We take our place in a booth in the newly refurbished Saddle-Room upholstered in a hideous boudoirish Gold. There's a curtain that can be pulled across for cloak-and-dagger assignations – but we opt to leave it open. Ronnie squints uncomfortably at the décor. "Christ, it looks like Rod Stewart's trousers".

The Georgian Claremont, most famous for being the place where the Irish Constitution was drafted in 1922, is Ronnie's favourite Dublin haunt. "I've a good old affiliation with this hotel. When we played the Point Depot years ago we were based here. It was like the Stones coming home to my town".

Ronnie looks at the menu uninterestedly: "I'm kind of excited today. I'm not really hungry at all". We opt for a rock star diet of twelve County Clare Oysters followed by the Seafood Platter and an espresso to kick-start the conversation. Our lunch is alcohol-free – but Wood, away from his family in Ireland, is going through a period of drinking heavily again: "My friend Julian came over last night – I hadn't seen him for years. We had a few drinks. It ended up being seven in the morning and I got woken up by a car at one a clock. And they said photographs. I said PHOTOGRAPHS!! Nobody told me about fucking photos".

Though there's Vodka on his breath, he's lucid and utterly charming. Conversation turns to his latest art exhibition, Ireland Studio, a six-week exhibition at the Scream Gallery in London featuring water-colours and pen-and-inks produced – mostly through the night - at his Country pile in County Kildare. He's left his family behind at their main home in Kingston, West London, and free of tour commitments, can spend more time in Ireland with his two Great Danes there than he's been able to for years. "Luckily they are sisters and hang out together. If it was a single dog it would die of boredom because I am hardly ever there".

Wood has been painting ever since Art School in the early Sixties, but took it up commercially for "grocery money" to get himself out of one of his periodic financial crises in the mid-eighties – after blowing his Stones fortune on cocaine and disastrous management. He flicks through images of the front garden of the Priory – where he occasionally goes for rehab- moonscapes from the West of Ireland at night, and his prize horses racing on the Irish turf. Sir Peter Blake, and Lucian Freud are fans, according to Ronnie: "He [Freud] told Mick that that he loves my landscapes. That's a compliment from the greatest living artist". Tracey Emin, too, is a friend: "She's like my Aunt. She always rings me up every day to ask how I'm doing. "Are you looking after yourself – miaow". He pauses and confides mischievously: "Tracey thinks she can draw".

But most of his collectors are Stones fans in the US: "The leading cancer curing doctor in Florida – much to his wife's chagrin – spends most of his money on my paintings. She says: "oh please don't sell the house and buy another Ronnie painting". As a cottage industry relying on a regular stream of orders so wants to keep his prices keenly competitive: "Prices in this day and age have gone crazy. I don't want to overprice my paintings either – but for this new exhibition it will be price upon application. We'll talk about it and give people a deal"

The collection of abstracts and landscapes in his latest show are more outré than the portraits of the famous that usually adorn the walls of his gallery. He's become a kind of official painter to the court of celebrity over the last decade. Andrew Lloyd Webber commissioned him to capture the contemporary social scene by painting the famous patrons of The Ivy. Now, a Ronnie Wood commission has become as much a cachet of the upper-reaches of stardom as a Hello! Wedding deal. He has an illustrious waiting list of sitters, including the Stones-mad Nicholas Sarkozy: "I met him and Gordon Brown and he was desperately trying to put me on the phone with Carla Bruni. There are all these people like Scorsese, Clinton, Beckham. It's a matter of getting to LA" But he sounds bored of the fame whirligig: "I'm trying to get away from the commissions so that I can do what I want. This new exhibition is more the stuff that I want to do – landscapes, dogs, horses"

The plate of Oysters finally arrives. "They've got everything you need – all the vitamins and minerals. I always leave one for the Gods. An old habit of mine", he says, with a hint of Rolling Stone voodoo.

This year is a Stones sabbatical after they spent two and a half years on the road. There's "talk in the air" of another tour next year, though they haven't yet been summoned to the grand meeting with Mick where such plans are discussed. In spite of the Strolling Bones jibes, he thinks that the Stones have never sounded better in their forty-five year history than they did on the final dates of their tour at the O2 arena last August. Martin Scorsese captured their recent scorching live form in his concert film Shine A Light. When I mention the film Ronnie strikes a rare note of indignation: "Where is Shine A Light Anyway?" I tell him that I've tried to see it without success. " I've not seen it in any cinemas" he says "The one copy I did have was Mick's copy and it jumped on my DVD player. After a few minutes it seized up". There is something so haplessly in character about him not having a copy of his own film.

I ask whether age has becalmed Keith Richards – who once held an arsenal of guns and knives that would be drawn during band frictions. "It's still on the verge you know. Murder is still quite an easy option. You have to be on your toes all the time".

But he feels more appreciated now by the band than he was when he left the Faces – his band with Rod Stewart – to join the Rolling Stones in 1975. For years he had to negotiate his fee on a rising scale for every tour and album. And it was decades before he was allowed a full share in the bands profits – after the intervention of his band-mates: "There was a seventeen year apprenticeship. I've been with them thirty years now – you think I would have got glued into it a long time ago. Charlie and Bill stood up for me. Nice of them to do that because they could have carried on looking the other way. I'm part of the Empire finally"

The twelve months since the Stones tour finished have been difficult. He's filling his time on the rock aristocracy circuit – making guest appearances with younger bands like the Charlatans, Stereophonics and Starsailor, writing a country and western song for Jerry Lee Lewis called What the hell did you have to go and do a thing like that for, and incessant painting. But in spite of plans to record with Jack White from the White Stripes and a short Faces reunion tour in November, he feels lost. It must feel odd, I say, to go from playing in front of a crowd of a million in Rio to sitting at home.

Ronnie seems momentarily melancholic. "I'm more lost when I'm not on tour. I'm in a bit of a muddle at nine o clock – Where's the stage?. On tour there are people directing and supervising you – here, there and everywhere. During the whole tour I did really focus. And then when you finish it's like 'sit down and watch tv'. Sometimes I get so bored I think fuck it – I'll have a drink. I don't mean any harm but I just go off the rails". He did though manage to catch himself and check into the Priory before Leah's wedding so that he didn't miss the day.

A torrent of alcohol runs through his life from childhood. His upbringing in a Council House in Yiewsley Middlesex, the third son of "water gypsies" who had left their barges for dry-land, sounds like a preparatory school for a rock star career. His father, Timber, played in a 24-piece harmonica band that toured the race tracks of England. At home, there were nightly singalongs around the piano when the pub shut that go so boisterous that a crack appeared in the middle of the house. When the family lawn was dug up 1700 Guinness bottles were discovered. It sounds impossibly romantic. But his relationship with drink turned darker when, while he was still a teenager, his girlfriend was killed in a mini travelling to one of his first gigs: "When Stephanie got killed I sort of drowned my sorrows – and I suppose I've never looked back since".

Having seen many of his friends – from George Harrison to Keith Moon – die prematurely, I ask whether he worries about his own health. He's dismissive: "Here I am at sixty-one and I've never felt better. I've never had a cleaner bill of health. I was just in the Mayr Clinic in Austria. They said 'we want to use you as an example of how we want people to end up. They said I had a body of a forty-year old".

As the Sea Food platter arrives, Ronnie dips straight into the crab claws. "These are really cool. I don't know which sauce you put on them". As he plumps for the Shallots and vinegar, conversation moves on to another close friend who died young, Jimmy Hendrix. They shared a flat together in London during the early seventies: "He didn't think he was any good as a singer. I used to say don't worry about that voice. He used to obliterate real life by being Stoned all the time – and he couldn't handle it. He didn't realise how good he was". His last memory of seeing Hendrix alive, the night before he died, is haunting. "He was leaving Ronnie Scotts. He had his arm around a girl and he looked really sad. I went out after him and said 'Jimmy, you didn't say goodnight".

Aware that the mood is darkening, I ask about the Wood clan – who all seem to have found jobs in the family business. His wife Jo, aside from running her organic beauty products business, is on the Stones payroll as his dresser and assistant on tour. One of her tasks is shooing girls away. ("They get swiftly, very nicely put aside") His stepson Jamie is his manager, and his youngest son Tyrone is curating his latest exhibition. Even his new son in-law, Jack, is working on "different little investments and property for him".

As we head outside for a Marlborough Light, Ronnie's Little Red Rooster ring-tone sounds. He seems agitated. The call brings, news, he tells me, of The Sun door-stepping his family home in London. A few days after our lunch I realise that he had been given news that the Sun had discovered that he was holed-up at his Irish home with an eighteen year-old Russian waitress.

He is soon is back to his clubbable self - talking about his house -guests that sound like a compendium of rock history. Bob Dylan and Van Morrison often stay with him – and he's looking forward to Chuck Berry coming over later this year. He suggests that we finish off lunch with a drink elsewhere. It feels like an ethical dilemma – it would be such fun. But then I realise that the pipe cleaner limbs that make him look unnervingly like a teenage rock star are also limbs wasted by alcohol. It's a relief when his Press Officer turns up to steer him to his next engagement to save me from making the decision. As we leave the hotel, the kitchen staff raise their ladles and knives in salute, horns honk, and he lines up for an endless round of photos with passers-by, loving every second of it. "That's always been a big problem with me" he says with a grin that fades to exasperation: "I find it hard to get old and hard to say no".

Ireland Studio will be exhibited at Scream, 34 Bruton Street, London for five weeks. It was established by Ronnie Wood two years ago as a space to showcase established and emerging artists.

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