Mick Jagger braces himself for Bill Wyman's memoirs

Bill Wyman is to publish a warts-and-all account of his years with the Rolling Stones

 

Sir Mick Jagger took a dim view of Prince Rupert Loewenstein, the Rolling Stones’s former business manager, seeing fit to write about the group’s “financial dealings” and other “personal” matters in his memoirs.

“It just goes to show that well brought-up people don’t always display good manners,” the singer harrumphed.

Now, 69-year-old Sir Mick must brace himself for still further revelations as Bill Wyman, the group’s former bassist, admits to me that he is to publish a warts-and-all account of his years with the Stones.

“I’m going through my old diaries and boxes full of stuff I collected over the years, but it’s finding it all that’s the problem,” says Wyman, 76, who was a founder member of the band. “I’m only up to 1972 at the moment.”

Wyman left the band after their 1989-90 world tour amid rumours that he had fallen out with Sir Mick and Keith Richards. There was further evidence of a chill in relations when Wyman criticised the decision to airbrush his image from archive photographs on the sleeve of the Stones’ 2005 album, Rarities.

He also expressed his anger that he wasn’t given sufficient credit as a songwriter and described Sir Mick as an “egomaniac”. Wyman later withdrew from supporting an exhibition celebrating the Stones as “cultural icons” that was going to be staged at the Victoria & Albert Museum.
Of Jagger’s knighthood, Wyman had, in 2003, told me tartly: “I know they would never give me a knighthood, even though, unlike Mick, I do live in this country, and, like [the drummer] Charlie Watts, do a lot more charity work than him. I also think to give it to Mick and not to Keith Richards, the
co-founder of the band, is a bit unfair. Maybe John Lennon did the right thing when he sent his MBE back.”
Still, last November, Wyman was willing to join the Stones on stage at a London concert.

By Tim Walker

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk