Bill Wyman has opened up about his time in the Rolling Stones, revealing that he and some of his bandmates were struggling financially.
In an interview with Classic Rock, Wyman was asked if he left the band at the right time – he left in 1993 – and replied that he should have left earlier.
“I hung on for a three-tour ending across ’89 and ’90, after seven years of nothing, and I’d ended up with a bank overdraft of £200,000, because we weren’t earning anything,” he explained.
Wyman continued: “Mick [Jagger] and Keith [Richards] were totally wealthy, so they weren’t bothered, but me, Charlie [Watts] and Ronnie [Wood] 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.”
He also discussed the criticism the band received after they left the UK in 1971, becoming tax exiles in the south of France. “We had no fucking money,” he said. “[Former Stones manager 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.”
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He went on to say that former Stones guitarist Brian Jones was over £30,000 in debt when he died in 1969, and added: “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.”
He explained that Jagger and Richards had greater wealth due to their songwriting and publishing royalties, but that he, Jones, Watts and Wood were only making about a tenth of what Jagger and Richards were.
Watts died in 2021 at the age of 80, and at the time Wyman shared a heartfelt tribute to his old bandmate. He wrote on Instagram alongside a photo of Watts: “Charlie, you were like a brother to me. In the band and in life. Rest in peace.”
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Earlier this year, Wyman – who briefly returned to the Stones to record a track for their album ‘Hackney Diamonds’ in 2023 – spoke about his decision to leave the band.
He said about his bandmates: “I left in 1991 but they would not believe me. They refused to accept I had left. It was not until 1993, when they were starting to get together to tour in 1994, when they said, ‘You have actually now left, haven’t you?’ And I said, ‘I left two years ago’. They finally accepted it, so they say I left in 1993.”
He explained that he’d “had enough” and wanted to do other things, from writing books to playing charity cricket to indulging in his passion for archaeology: “I used to read about ancient cultures while I was on the road and take photos as well. I just had this whole other life I wanted to live.”
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Meanwhile, the Stones have “cut back” on their backstage rider requests, according to bassist Darryl Jones. The band no longer make bigger requests, like for large gaming rooms, but do request plenty of food – including Richards’ favourite shepherd’s pie.