BILL WYMAN

WW2 evacuee, RAF airman, Rolling Stone, hit solo artist, bandleader, author, restaurateur, archaeologist, cricketer... Even just his time in The Greatest Rock'N'Roll Band In The World is storied, but there's been much, much more to his life than that.

- lan Fortnam

Former Rolling Stone Bill Wyman was born in 1936, a turbulent year of three kings, that saw Adolf Hitler's alleged master race significantly whupped by Jesse Owens at the Berlin Olympics. Not being a man widely renowned for his sportsmanship, Germany's sulking Führer duly unleashed a World War that saw four-year-old Wyman (still known by his birth name of William George Perks or, less formally, Billy), evacuated from a modest, blitz-lashed three-up/three-down family home in Penge, South-east London to the relatively leafy enclave of Mansfield Woodhouse, 15 miles north of Nottingham.

Relocating to the countryside had a profound effect on young Bill. But after playing truant from school to experience more of it, he was packed off, back to London, from a pregnant mother (reluctantly inattentive thanks to Bill's two younger siblings), to a truly inspirational grandmother, Florence Jeffery, who profoundly influenced the man that he became.

Coerced into leaving school early by an unimaginative authoritarian father, who'd found him a job as a bookmaker's clerk, Bill was then called up for National Service with the Royal Air Force, and while serving in Germany he discovered skiffle and, via a finger-shredding, tea-chest-and-broom-handle baptism of fire, the bass.

Upon returning to civilian life, Bill married in '59, formed the Cliftons in '61, and while just warming to fatherhood joined Brian Jones's blues band, the Rolling Stones, in '62. The Stones, as they came to be known, created quite the stir with their long hair, iconoclastic demeanour, penchant for urinating on garage forecourts and finger-snapping brand of no-holds-barred rhythm and blues. In fact they conquered the known world. You might have even heard of them.