The bassist Bill Wyman was a member of the Rolling Stones from 1962 until he decided to retire in 1993. He did a lot of things outside music but also recorded with other artists during the following years and even with the Stones a few times live. But it was obviously not an easy decision and his bandmates Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts and Ronnie Wood tried to convince him to continue in the band.
He recalled in an interview with Classic Rock how they reacted when he told them he was leaving the band.
Bill Wyman recalls how the Stones’ reacted when he left the band
“Well, I should’ve done it a lot earlier… In the eighties. 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. I wanted to do archaeology, write books, do photography, I wanted to play charity cricket, I wanted to do all these other things. And thirty years on I’m still wanting to do them, to tell the truth.”
He continued:
“So I was so happy to leave in the end. Which they absolutely didn’t like, and refused to accept. They said: ‘You have not left.’ When they were doing the plan for the coming year, I said: ‘Well there’s no point me discussing it, because I’m leaving.’ And they went: ‘You’re not leaving.’ I said: ‘I am leaving, I’ve left.’ And they wouldn’t believe me. Two years went by, and they were putting the band together again to make a new record in ’94. They said: ‘Are you still in the band?’ I said: ‘I left two years ago.'”
“Mick and Charlie tried to talk me out of it, bless ’em, but I didn’t want to. I just dropped everything. Cleared the air. Gave up a career, a terrible marriage… Got married again and formed the Rhythm Kings with Georgie Fame and Gary Brooker, just for fun,” Bill Wyman said.
In 2024, at the age of 88, the original Wyman released his ninth solo studio album, which is called “Drive My Car”. It is his first album in nine years, since the most recent one “Back to Basics” was released back in 2015.
