The Rolling Stones Members Admit To Going Broke

Bill Wyman recently recalled his time in the Rolling Stones and revealing that he and some of his bandmates were struggling financially.

Bill Wyman talks about his struggle

During an interview with Classic Rock , Wyman was questioned if he left the band at the right time and he left in 1993 – and replied that he should have left earlier.

“I hung on for a three-tour ending across ’89 and ’90, after seven years of nothing, and I’d ended up with a bank overdraft of £200,000, because we weren’t earning anything,” he explained.

Wyman continued: “Mick [Jagger] and Keith [Richards] were totally wealthy, so they weren’t bothered, but me, Charlie [Watts] and Ronnie [Wood] were scraping by. Ronnie started to do art to feed his family. Anyway, I only started playing with them again in the hope it’d only be a couple of years, because I had all these other things I wanted to do.”

He also opened up on the criticism the band received after they left the UK in 1971, becoming tax exiles in the south of France.

“We had no f***ing money,” he said. “[Former Stones manager Allen] Klein had all the money, and when you wanted anything you begged him to send you some money. You’re in the red with your bank, so you weren’t partying all the time, you were worrying about how to pay your bills. It was a nightmare.”

“And then [Prime Minister Harold] Wilson comes in, and puts tax up to ninety-three per cent, it was absurd. So we left. We had to leave because we owed the Inland Revenue so much money that, with ninety-three per cent tax, we could never make enough to pay it back. So we had to leave, and then we were accused of being multimillionaires, leaving because we didn’t want to pay our way, but we weren’t.”

He further stated that former Stones guitarist Brian Jones was over £30,000 in debt when he died in 1969, and added:

“When I bought that manor in Suffolk I had a thousand pounds in the bank, had to scrape together a mortgage and hope I could continue to make enough money to keep it. That’s how bad it was.”

He explained that Jagger and Richards had greater wealth due to their songwriting and publishing royalties, but that he, Jones, Watts and Wood were only making about a tenth of what Jagger and Richards were.

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