Bill Wyman says he should have left Rolling Stones earlier

(Image credit: Judy Totten)

Former Rolling Stones bassist Bill Wyman has revealed that he should have left the band much earlier than he did and that he, guitarist Ronnie Wood and drummer Charlie Watts often struggled financially.

Interviewed at length in the new issue of Classic Rock, Wyman – who left the Rolling Stones in 1993 – is asked if he departed at the right time.

"Well, I should’ve done it a lot earlier… in the eighties," he says. "I hung on for a three-tour ending across ’89 and ’90 [three legs of the Steel Wheels/Urban Jungle tour], after seven years of nothing, and I’d ended up with a bank overdraft of £200,000, because we weren’t earning anything.

"Mick and Keith were totally wealthy, so they weren’t bothered, but me, Charlie and Ronnie were scraping by. Ronnie started to do art to feed his family. Anyway, I only started playing with them again in the hope it’d only be a couple of years, because I had all these other things I wanted to do."

Wyman also addresses the criticism levelled at the band after they left the UK in the spring of 1971 to become tax exiles.

"We had no fucking money," says Wyman. "[Stones Manager ’68-’70, Allen] Klein had all the money, and when you wanted anything you begged him to send you some money. You’re in the red with your bank, so you weren’t partying all the time, you were worrying about how to pay your bills. It was a nightmare.

"And then [Prime Minister Harold] Wilson comes in, and puts tax up to ninety-three per cent, it was absurd. So we left. We had to leave because we owed the Inland Revenue so much money that, with ninety-three per cent tax, we could never make enough to pay it back. So we had to leave, and then we were accused of being multimillionaires, leaving because we didn’t want to pay our way, but we weren’t.

"When Brian died he was over thirty thousand pounds in debt. When I bought that manor in Suffolk I had a thousand pounds in the bank, had to scrape together a mortgage and hope I could continue to make enough money to keep it.

"That’s how bad it was. Mick and Keith were wealthier because they had songwriting and publishing royalties, but me, Brian [Jones], Charlie and, eventually, Ronnie had only about a tenth of what they were getting."

Elsewhere in the interview, Wyman speaks about his childhood, the rise of the Rolling Stones, Altamont, Charlie Watts' death, metal detecting, new solo album Drive My Car and much more.

Artists

Online Editor at Louder/Classic Rock magazine since 2014. 40 years in music industry, online for 27. Also bylines for: Metal Hammer, Prog Magazine, The Word Magazine, The Guardian, The New Statesman, Saga, Music365. Former Head of Music at Xfm Radio, A&R at Fiction Records, early blogger, ex-roadie, published author. Once appeared in a Cure video dressed as a cowboy, and thinks any situation can be improved by the introduction of cats. Favourite Serbian trumpeter: Dejan Petrović.