The text from the paywall australian is here
http://retrainyourbraintohappiness.blog ... rgave.html
eventually his penis stopped talking and the brain took over
Wyman was always an odd fit. Older than the others, he rarely hung out with them and he was never interested in drink and drugs. He did, however, enjoy phenomenal success with women. He didn’t have the dangerous sensuality of Mick Jagger, nor the ragged charms of Keith Richards, yet Wyman, unhappily married to his first wife Diane from 1959 to 1969, slept with hundreds of female fans throughout his time with the band. What was his secret?
He tackles the question with sober consideration, as if being asked about the inner workings of the Bill Wyman Signature Metal Detector. “When I first went to work in 1960, as a clerk at a diesel engineer’s in Streatham Hill, a friend of mine took me back home and showed me how to develop film,” he explains. “He also said, when I told him I wasn’t getting on well with my wife: ‘I’ll tell you one lesson to take with you through life. With women, no matter who they are, no matter what they do, always treat them like a lady and you won’t go wrong.’ Since then I’ve been respectful to every girl I met. I was never rude. I never kicked them out like I heard other people did. I was always nice to them, even when they weren’t quite what I thought they might be.”
Despite such niceness, Back to Basics does feature a song called Seventeen, about a model who tries to break into acting and finds herself being described by Wyman as “a has-been” at the tender age of the title.
“That’s a rewrite of a song I did in 1980. We had a birthday party at the restaurant and this American model came along, I was introduced to her — I won’t mention names — and she wasn’t as attractive as I thought she was on screen. Seventeen is a bit cruel. It’s about moving on from being a model — I had loads of model girlfriends — to being in movies and how sometimes it’s not successful. Kelly LeBrock was one of my girlfriends and for her it was great, but most of them fail. My wife Suzanne [Accosta] was a model and she always talks about how badly they were treated by photographers. They’d go and do a shoot and be treated like a piece of shit, basically.”
Having a song on the album called Seventeen seems to be asking for trouble, considering Wyman found himself in something of a scandal when in 1989, aged 52, he married 18-year-old Mandy Smith. They were rumoured to have been together four years previously. Wyman appears to read my thoughts. “At least I called the song Seventeen,” he says, before Smith’s name has a chance to be mentioned.
The womanising days ended many years ago. Married to Accosta since 1993, living with her and their three teenage daughters in their houses in Chelsea and Suffolk, Wyman has matured into a faithful family man with age-appropriate interests, including metal detecting and archeology. Does he have any regrets about leaving the Stones?
“I’ve never regretted it,” he says, bringing an hour’s conversation to an end. “The past 20 years have been the most prolific of my life. I found two Roman sites they never knew existed. I’ve found Iron Age coins. I’ve opened events for the British Museum. I’ve opened the Castle Museum in Norwich, one in bloody Newcastle. Done photographic exhibitions around the world. Now it seems like this album might do quite well.”
