Giggling in the long grass in their carefully co-ordinated outfits, twins Alice and Gracie Wood celebrated their fourth birthday last mont...
Giggling in the long grass in their carefully co-ordinated outfits, twins Alice and Gracie Wood celebrated their fourth birthday last month with a visit to a stately home with their doting parents.
Just a few years ago such a trip would have been unthinkable for their father, the Rolling Stones' guitarist Ronnie Wood, now 73.
Rock's wild man was once more likely to be found taking cocaine and heroin on a drug-fuelled bender than strolling in the grounds of Henry VIII's Ashridge House in Hertfordshire with his family.
Ronnie Wood (second right) was seen strolling in the grounds of Henry VIII's Ashridge House in Hertfordshire with his family, including twins Alice and Gracie Wood (first and second left) third wife Sally Humphreys (far right)
Wood's twins (both pictured) celebrated their fourth birthday last month - but memories of their childhood will clearly be different compared to the ones remembered by Wood's older offspring
In a revealing interview, Jamie Wood (pictured left with mum Jo), Ronnie's eldest son, remembers live growing up in the Wood household when it was dominated by the rock and roll lifestyle
His older offspring remember a far more unconventional childhood — one where their hard-partying parents would only get up when they came home from school — than the one his daughters with third wife Sally Humphreys, 30 years his junior, are enjoying.
His eldest son, Jamie, 45, says: 'Drugs were normal in my family. It was part and parcel of my upbringing. No one would let their children come to my house after school.'
But Ronnie changed around a decade ago when he gave up partying and 'got clean'.
Since then, he's become almost unrecognisable, extolling on Twitter the virtues of fresh air and walking, helping raise cash for the NHS and doting on his daughters.
Jamie — son of Jo Wood and her first husband but brought up as Ronnie's own since he was a toddler — is the first to admit Alice and Gracie's memories of their childhood will be very different from his own and those of his siblings Jesse, Tyrone and Leah.
'I'm sure he will do a better job this time round!' says Jamie. 'I'm really happy for Ronnie. Sally is an awesome mum and the twins are great.'
Ronnie (pictured) looks completely different now he is 'clean'. Everything changed for the Rolling Stones rock and roll star ten years ago when he tried to change his ways
Jamie describes the young twins as 'great', while he believes current wife Sally (right) is 'an excellent mum'
It's a magnanimous attitude given that the drug habit he developed aged just 14 — using heroin and cocaine until he was 20, and smoking cannabis and cigarettes until recently — nearly killed him three years ago.
In October 2017, he found himself being rushed by ambulance to hospital for emergency surgery following a heart attack at just 42.
'It was shocking,' says father-of-four Jamie, speaking about his ordeal for the first time. So shocking, in fact, that he didn't realise it was a matter of life and death until doctors refused to wait for his wife Jodie to arrive before operating.
'I was in the ambulance, taking selfies. I felt fine,' says Jamie. 'Then, when we got to Bart's Hospital in London, there were ten people waiting for me saying: 'Sign this for if we have to do a bypass.'
'I said: "I can't have an operation without my wife here.' But they said: 'There's no time."'
Within minutes he was undergoing life-saving surgery to insert two stents into his heart. In all, he spent five days in hospital and now faces a lifetime on statins. He was also forced to totally overhaul his lifestyle.
The 20-a-day cigarette habit is no more. He hasn't touched cannabis in years, either. The heart attack, he says, came out of nowhere.
'I'd started boxing and weight-training trying to get fitter,' says Jamie, 'and one day I lifted a load of weights, I was doing great, and I went upstairs to get ready for work and it was like a dull ache in my lungs. I was worried I had lung cancer.'
This was at the forefront of his mind because Ronnie had recently been diagnosed with the disease. After an operation to remove part of his lung, Ronnie is now cancer-free.
Though Ronnie's eldest (pictured far left) recognises that the twins' lifestyle is going to be very different to the one he experienced as the child of Ronnie and Jo
'I asked my wife Jodie to give me a massage, then I threw up and I thought I must be ill, so I had a Lemsip and lay in bed for two days.
‘Then I felt OK and I got up to go to work and my wife said: “I’ve booked you into the doctor in Harley Street, stop off on the way in.” I told the doctor I thought I had lung cancer, and he did an ECG. It went “boom” and I said: “Do it again — I’ve got a hairy chest, it might not have connected.”
He did it again and said: “You’ve got to go to hospital.”’
A few hours later Jamie was regaining consciousness in St Bart’s with his family — including sons Charlie, now 20 and from a previous relationship, Leo, 14, Kobi, 11, and Bo, four — at his bedside.
'They were crying on the bed, it wasn't nice,' he says. 'Then the doctor came in and said I had to make some life changes and give up smoking. I'd always been a heavy smoker. But there's nothing like four kids crying to shock you into being a good boy.'
He hasn't smoked cigarettes or cannabis since. It was perhaps inevitable that Jamie, whose father is clothing boss Peter Greene, would develop a taste for drugs.
While it is easy to romanticise the wild rock 'n' roll lifestyles of legendary figures like Ronnie Wood, there is all too often a stark human cost to be paid by those closest to them.
Jamie's story illustrates this all too clearly, for the no-holds-barred indulgence that surrounded him introduced him to drugs while he was still a child, and ended up very nearly killing him.
He says: 'Mum and Dad [by which he means Ronnie] used to party a lot and you could always smell cannabis in the house. It would waft up the stairs and when I was nine or ten, I'd run downstairs and find ashtrays full of joints and help myself, then stash them behind the microphones.
Jamie (not pictured) remembers his parents hosting huge parties involving cannabis, claiming that drugs 'were normal in his family'. It was a far cry from the usual romanticisation that people believes surrounds the wild rock 'n' roll lifestyles of legendary figures like Ronnie Wood (pictured in 2010)
The party lifestyle took hold of Jamie (pictured right) and he went off the rails as a teenager
Jamie (pictured left) would go on to have a heart attack at the age of 42, as the lifestyle that came with being the son of a rock legend took its eventual toll
'It was part and parcel of my upbringing. Drugs were normal in my family but outside they were demonised — no one would let their children come to my house after school.'
Perhaps predictably, Jamie went off the rails in his teens.
With hindsight, he recognises the link between his behaviour and his family's globe-trotting lifestyle.
'The problem was, I went to 17 different schools in three or four different countries. Whenever I had friends, they suddenly got taken away.'
It was when the family moved to Wimbledon, South-West London, that he fell in with the wrong crowd, who introduced him to harder drugs. Despite their bad influence, for the first time he felt part of a group.
He admits ruefully: 'I took heroin and cocaine. I was bad. I was partying hard.'
His first job was as a roadie for rock producer Harvey Goldsmith — the organiser of Live Aid — before doing tours for bands including Guns N' Roses and Nirvana.
A promotions assistant job followed with the Stones, then he began managing his father's art business. Jamie's hard partying may have ended more than 20 years before but could it have been responsible for his subsequent heart problems?
'Did partying contribute? I certainly damaged myself. What do you expect? I grew up in that environment. I thought it was natural for me to take drugs.
'Mum and Dad always knew about the drugs but were pretty aware that I was going to make my own decisions.
'I remember being 16 years old when we went on this holiday to Antigua. At this point I was doing drugs every day. I was sitting in my room and I get this knock on my door and it's Dad, who's come to chat to me about drugs.
'He said: "Do what you gotta do and have fun doing what you do but don't let the drugs control your life. You control the drugs!"
Jamie (pictured right) revealed that Ronnie (middle) encouraged him to 'do what you gotta do and don't let the drugs control your life'
'Stones band member Keith Richards also was aware of how hard I liked to party. He pulled me aside once and said: 'Jamie, there is a difference between itching your a*** and tearing it to pieces.'
'I definitely had a few accidental slight overdoses as a kid. Although having plaque build-up in my artery and it causing a heart attack was probably more due to consistent smoking.'
Another symptom of his bohemian upbringing was a liking for cannabis, which at its worst became a daily habit, although he's now been forced to give up.
Ironically, it was cannabis that became a source of friction with his famous father — despite the Stone's own hell-raising
They had patched up their relationship after falling out when Jamie took his mother's side when she split from Ronnie in 2008 following his affair with 21-year-old Russian Ekaterina Ivanova.
But it fell apart again around four or five years ago after Ronnie had cleaned up his act.
Jamie claims that after his father 'went full AA', he 'liked to preach'.
He admits: 'I got upset with him — the biggest drug-taker in the world was telling me what to do. I didn't take too kindly to it.'
He sees things rather differently now: 'I did recently apologise and tell him he was probably right and that I was in denial about the cannabis, but I thought he could have handled it better.'
Like many rock stars' children, Jamie has flitted from job to job not really knowing what he wanted to do, often working with his parents. He was Ronnie's manager for several years before selling his dad's paintings.
Ronnie's eldest son (pictured left with his mum) admitted that he jumped from job to job not knowing what he wanted to do with his life.
Just before his heart attack, he had won the British franchise for an American gourmet hamburger restaurant, BurgerFi.
But his ill health meant he couldn't work for six months and 'by then, the business landscape had changed. It was a tough time for me. Most of the money had been spent on staff wages, Jamie Oliver had just gone into administration and no one wanted to invest. I had to watch my business disappear.'
It was a low point. He adds: 'I was quite depressed. I can understand now how people struggle with mental health. For a couple of weeks I wasn't suicidal but you can see how.'
Salvation came out of the blue. While staying in Miami with his family, Jamie discovered electric weed pens — vapes made with CBD (cannabidiol), a part of the cannabis plant which doesn't get you high but is said by some experts to be therapeutic.
It has been touted as a way to tackle a wide variety of health issues and may help with some forms of epilepsy and multiple sclerosis, although most fans swear by it to help relieve insomnia, anxiety and pain.
After his heart attack, Jamie began researching CBD and set up his own laboratory to experiment with it, launching his new company, Woodies, last November. The website sells CBD oils, flavoured vapes and even hand-sanitiser.
While his mother has welcomed the venture — he says the products have helped her migraines — his father is less enthusiastic.
'I texted Dad not so long ago and sent some products but he's not impressed.' Not that that particularly bothers Jamie.
He says: 'For the first time in my life, this doesn't involve him. I haven't asked him for money or to put his name to it. That is liberating for me. Maybe if I hadn't had the heart attack, I wouldn't have found my true niche.'
His enthusiasm is clear: 'I make every product myself. Every cream and every oil, from extraction to the final product,' he says.
The hand-sanitiser was inspired by his wife, a former model.
'It was at the beginning of coronavirus in January and February when everyone started washing their hands a lot and Jodie's hands were getting sore.'
He has good reason to join the fight against coronavirus: the disease claimed the life of his uncle Paul — his mother's brother — while her sister Lize was also hospitalised with the virus but thankfully survived. 'Mum's in absolute bits,' says Jamie. 'My uncle was a good man, an amazing artist.'
The lockdown hasn't hit Jamie's business too hard.
He adds: 'Maybe I was a bit greedy before — I wanted nice things, Ferraris and stuff. Then the heart attack happened and I don't want any of it. Money's not the be all and end all. I just want my business and family.'
Probably not sentiments shared by the Jamie of old who took selfies in the ambulance on the way to have a heart operation. But then his priorities have been given something of a jolt since then.
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