High Rollers

When Ronnie Wood, the Stones and some A-list mates holed up at his house to help with his solo album, it sparked a days-long party, a Rolling Stones hit and the last album by arguably their finest line-up.

- Mick Wall

Our story begins one ass-freezing night in January 1974, in the soundproofed basement of The Wick, a splendid Grade 1-listed Georgian townhouse in Richmond, London designed in 1775 for Lady St Aubyn. Two centuries later its owner was 26-year-old coolas-fuck Rod Stewart/Faces guitarist Ronnie Wood, hawk-nosed member of a new English aristocracy: old-money rock stars.

At the time he bought The Wick, in 1971, Woody was coddled in cash from the doublewhammy success that year of Rod's Maggie May solo single and Every Picture Tells A Story album both going to No.1 in Britain and America simultaneously. Ronnie played guitar and bass on both and cowrote the title track to Every Picture. He bought it for a suitcase of cash and began filling the basement with recording equipment. "I didn't do it with any sort of plan," he later told me. "It started with somewhere to put my guitars, then a piano, pool table, some drums..."

With time to kill until the start of a Faces Japanese tour, Woody spent the first weeks of 1974 corralling every muso that wound up at The Wick with a joint in their hand to help come up with material for his own forthcoming solo album, I've Got My Own Album To Do. Chief among them was Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richard (still sans 's' back then). Keith and his 'old lady', the witchy Anita Pallenberg, had moved into The Wick's coach house. Busted for drugs and guns at their Chelsea abode the previous summer, Richard was convinced "the cops were out to get me", after the judge gave him an unexpectedly lenient sentence of a £250 fine. Woody's coach house "was a good hideout". Other basement regulars included Mick Jagger, George Harrison, Eric Clapton, Rod Stewart, David Bowie, Ringo Starr, Mick Taylor, and various other 'vibemerchants' such as rising acting star John Hurt and the crew from Monty Python. "Before any of us knew it we'd be up for days drinking, getting stoned and making music," Ronnie recalled with a beaky grin.