Review: Hey Jo – A Rock and Roll Fairytale

by Jo Wood (Harper Collins)

The fact that Jo Wood’s turbulent marriage to Rolling Stone, Ronnie Wood, lasted 26 years, must be a tribute to her stamina and a cast-iron constitution.

Okay, she “passionately” loved her “creative genius” warts and all (and crikey there were many warts…), but, as Jo freely admits, over the years, (with Ronnie doing the lion’s share of the imbibing), the couple drugged their way through a mountain of cocaine and other sundry “recreational” tipples and snifters…

During one of Jo’s pregnancies, the father-to-be spent almost the whole nine months in their bathroom, “freebasing”.

Ronnie had lost it – to the point where at one time he banned meringues in the house, because meringue crumbs looked like cocaine…

Hence, he had often found himself scrabbling around the floor mistaking the sugar and egg white concoction for a shred of the drug…

It is astonishing when one ponders the amount of money that, over the years, flowed up noses and elsewhere. One drugs arrest, on an island holiday, sees the couple incarcerated in separate cells for a few days, until a fixer gets them sorted.

Fortunes come and go. At one point, Ronnie ends up broke, from spending on drugs, and having to borrow money from band members, (he, Jo and Keith Richards have always been the best of mates), to pay his children’s school fees.

Not that Ronnie paid the fees – he blew the lot on a Rolex watch! Two days after the birth of their son, Tyrone, Ronnie brings Jo, still in hospital, a maternity present – a packet of cocaine, to get her “back on track”.

She was not impressed.

The children were loved, but as Jo admits, as far as their well-being was concerned, she is ever thankful for a couple of extraordinary women – a few sterling nannies and her mother.

Her parents lived in a picturesque old vicarage in Essex.

While Jo lived the high life… her children spent much of their young years to-ing and fro-ing between her home with Ronnie and the comfort of their grandparents’ home.

The latter, a home with an interesting South African connection.

Jo Karslake, grew up in the “Swinging Sixties” London and, at 16, the leggy blonde, with the voluptuous looks was the Sun newspaper’s “Face of 72”.

The daughter of a South African mom and British dad, Jo’s maternal grandmother was a Xhosa speaker “from the Pondo tribe”.

Rachel, Jo’s mom, was born in the Eastern Cape in a “tiny village called Tsolo”.

Jo writes that just before leaving for England, her mother had been working in her aunt’s store in Mthatha.

“One of the local lads would come by every week on the pretence of buying a few bits and pieces so he could stare at her. Then one day he handed her a love letter. It was a shame she didn’t keep the letter as it was signed ‘Nelson Mandela’.

If true, it is a good story.

As a full-on rock chick, Jo certainly lived the life. One loses count of the number of times Ronnie threw his affairs in her face, with little or no apology to his wife, once the women had been cast aside. The final straw for Jo was Katia, the woman who ended their marriage.

Katia was a rough-looking Russian bleached blonde, who, after she and Ronnie broke up, commented that he had “the mentality of a 15-year-old”…

Reading this biography, (co-written with Catherine Woods), where the couple’s “wild cocaine-fuelled lifestyle” constantly comes to the fore, one cannot help being judgemental.

How could she offer her own children drugs? Why didn’t she kick the narcissistic Ronnie in the proverbials years before? He so often treated her like dirt.

But, I like this woman. She has substance, a lot of heart, she has lived, laughed and – what staying power!

Now in her late 50s – and still very attractive – Jo has turned herself around. She has her own company, Jo Wood Organics, and it is no more drugs – just plenty of clean, family living.

And, hurrah! Deservedly, this former wife picked up a cool lump sum of £11.5 million in her divorce from the Rolling Stones guitarist.

And she earned every penny.