(Credits: Raph Pour-Hashemi)
Mon 19 January 2026 15:00, UK
Performing on Jools Holland’s New Year’s Eve ‘Hootenanny’ isn’t the hippest gig in the world these days, but if you happened to have the TV on during the final bleary-eyed minutes of 2025, that was indeed Ronnie Wood up there on stage, still doing what he’s been doing for the past 60 years.
Once upon a time, Wood, now 78, was the young buck of the London rock scene; in 1964, at just 17 years old, he was singing and playing guitar in a popular band called the Birds, and while that outfit had no direct connection to any other similarly named, avian-themed bands, Wood certainly wasn’t oblivious to the blues-inspired group generating a lot of attention around town: The Yardbirds.
“The Yardbirds was one [band] that I used to follow a lot,” Wood recalled in a recent social media post, “and I used to go and see them in the Richmond Athletic Grounds in the Crawdaddy Club. Very important. And people were swinging from the rafters in there, and sweat dripping from the ceiling, and it was so incredible, the atmosphere, with the crescendos they used to do.”
The Yardbirds are probably best remembered less for their own music these days and more for their role as a sort of guitar god academy in the mid-1960s, boasting Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Jimmy Page, the top three guitarists of all time in many people’s minds, as Yardbird graduates.
Fortunately, for the people who were actually there at the Crawdaddy Club watching the band’s ascent, the direct impact of The Yardbirds as a live band is still vivid, and no one was thinking of them as a stepping stool or a footnote in their own time. “They used to do a Muddy Waters song called ‘I’m A Man’,” Wood remembered, “They did a fast version. Everybody would go crazy. Those were the days. It was fantastic”.
Wood was well aware of The Yardbirds during the Clapton era (1963 to 1965), but he got to know the band members more personally during Jeff Beck’s time as the lead guitarist in ‘65 and ‘66. Mutual interest soon emerged in a collaboration between the two guitar players, but Wood would never join the supergroup, and Beck didn’t leap to the Birds. Instead, when Wood caught wind that Beck was thinking of going solo, he offered to work with him on a future project.
It might have been wishful thinking on Ronnie’s part, who still hadn’t celebrated his 20th birthday, but, true to his word, Beck did give him a call, and in 1967, Wood reported to duty as the second guitarist in the Jeff Beck Group, later converting to the bass.
“When we went to America, Jimi Hendrix used to come and jam with us,” Wood said in his social media video, “He used to say to Jeff, ‘Hey Jeff, let the bass player have a solo!’ He loved my bass playing, so that was a feather in my cap. And I ended up sharing a flat with him in Holland Park for a couple of weeks when we were early gigging… It was great fun.”
It’s not necessarily surprising that Ron Wood was at the centre of everything, playing with Jeff Beck and splitting rent (and getting evicted) with Jimi Hendrix, but considering his most famous jobs were still ahead of him—playing guitar for the Faces and the Rolling Stones—those early days were clearly special in a unique way. It’s clear when Wood describes his memories, with a boyish enthusiasm, that nothing quite beats the “discovery” period.
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