By RONNIE WOOD

Last updated at 20:00 29 September 2007

My fellow Rolling Stone Keith Richards is my brother and mate but it's fair to say our relationship has had its ups and downs.

During a period in the early Eighties, I was freebasing a lot of cocaine.

Scroll down for more...

Freebasing is a hazardous way of chemically preparing cocaine so that it can be smoked in a very pure form.

It's crack, basically.

Everybody was angry with me around this time and after a row with Keith one day, he stormed off to get his gun.

In those days Keith and his guns and his knives were inseparable.

Not so much today because of airport security but he always had weapons on him then.

He used to threaten people with his piece, which was pretty scary, but he rarely fired it.

On one occasion at a hotel in New York though Keith was terrorising his friend Freddie Sessler and squeezed the trigger and shot through the floor.

There were a bunch of pensioners in the room below and Keith's bullet broke up their party.

I also had a gun, a .44 Magnum, which was a present from Don Johnson from the set of Miami Vice,but I didn't have any bullets for it.

After my row with Keith, I warned everyone to "clear the decks".

He returned with his Derringer, pointed it at me and yelled: "You f****** b******, Woody."

I calmly pulled out my .44 Magnum. And that was the last time Keith drew his gun on me ... until the next time.

Iwas born in 1947.

My parents were water gypsies, born on the barges in Paddington basin in West London.

My brothers and I were the first in the family to be born on dry land.

We lived in a two-up, twodown council house in Yiewsley, near Heathrow airport.

My brothers Art and Ted shared one bedroom, my parents, Arthur and Lizzie, the other.

I had a tiny storage room.

The most vivid images I have of my childhood are happy ones.

There were parties every weekend.

When the crowd got turned out of the pub my dad would shout: "All back to Number 8!"

Everyone would bring as many bottles of beer as they could carry and then the singalong would begin.

I would sneak downstairs and dive under the table.

If I spotted some Guinness left in a glass on the table, I would drink it.

At school I won prizes for my drawings and art was my main passion --after music.

Everybody in the family played music. Art sang in a rhythm and blues group that had one Charlie Watts on drums.

In 1962, Charlie told Art he had an offer to join a then unknown group, the Rolling Stones.

I learned how to play various instruments but the guitar became my favourite. I played in various bands but it was during this exciting time that I was stopped in my tracks by one of life's brutal trials.

Stephanie de Court was my childhood sweetheart. It was all very innocent - talking, holding hands after school, the occasional kiss.

On May 31, 1964, Stephanie and some girlfriends were coming to see my band play but were killed in a car crash on the way.

Stephanie's parents didn't want me at the funeral.

Some friends took me to the pub and got me drunk because it was the only way I could accept the fact that she was gone from my life forever.

In the bottle I discovered a way not to think about it.

By the time I was 18, I was in a successful R&B band called The Birds.

One day, I was hanging out at a Soho pub when a man walked in wearing a big chequered Coco the Clown jacket, with his hair sticking up like mine.

He walked up to me and said: "Hello, face, how are you?"

It was Rod 'The Mod' Stewart.

We turned out to be kindred spirits and became great mates.

Rod had hoped to be a footballer. He had a trial with Brentford but didn't make it as a professional - not that it's stopped him dreaming.

Today he has his own pitch to practise on, just in case Brentford ever ring back.

A few months later I got a call from Mick Jagger.

I knew him slightly through Art and by then the Stones were a big band, having already had their first number one hit.

The line-up at that time was Mick on vocals, Charlie on drums, Brian Jones and Keith Richards on guitars and Bill Wyman on bass.

Mick asked if I would play on a record he was producing. I was there in a flash.

Keith was at the studio - we hadn't been introduced before so I grabbed a drink and went over to say hello.

But just as I approached him, I stumbled and poured my drink over him. Luckily he saw the funny side of it.

In July 1969 I attended the Stones' famous Hyde Park concert.

As I walked along the perimeter road before the gig, a car pulled up alongside me and someone shouted: "Hey, Ronnie." It was Mick and Charlie.

I had never met Charlie before although I once saw him in Oxford Street in his chauffeur-driven Mini.

Charlie doesn't drive because he suffers from some bizarre fear of engines but that hasn't stopped him buying cars.

He bought a 1936 Alfa Romeo because he loved looking at the dashboard. He also owns a burgundy Lagonda - and wears a matching burgundy suit while sitting behind the wheel in his drive.

We chatted for a few minutes and as we parted I wished them well. "Nice to see ya - see ya soon," they replied.

"Yeah, sooner than you think," I said.

But it would be another six years before I actually joined the Rolling Stones.

By the end of 1966 The Birds were finished, although I still receive royalty cheques - I think the last one was for £17.06.

I joined the Jeff Beck Group as bassist and my friend Rod Stewart was vocalist.

We spent three years in the band and after it split in 1969, Rod and I joined the Small Faces, which quickly became The Faces.

Rod described us as "five blokes who shared the same haircut but only one hairdryer".

For a while in the early Seventies, The Faces were second only to the Stones as the most successful British rock group.

We were hellraisers because most of the time on tour we were either bored or homesick.

In 1971, I bought a beautiful house in Richmond from the actor John Mills and built a music studio in the basement.

I would entertain my mates there for days - Mick, Keith Moon, Ringo Starr, George Harrison, Paul McCartney, the Monty Python crew and John Hurt.

Eric Clapton spent ten days there rehearsing before his 1973 comeback concert at the Rainbow Theatre. And Keith Richards liked it so much he moved into a cottage at the bottom of the garden, despite having his own country estate and a big house in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea.

One night, late in 1974, I was at a party at my manager Robert Stigwood's Berkshire house sitting between Jagger and Mick Taylor, who had been hired by the Stones after Brian Jones's death in 1969.

Taylor leaned over and told Jagger: "I'm leaving the group."

Mick looked at me and said: "Will you join?"

"Of course I would," I said, "except I'm with The Faces and I can't let them down. I don't want to split them up."

"I don't want to either but if I get desperate can I ring you?"

"Sure," I said,and we shook hands on it.

Mick got desperate a few months later and asked me to come out to Munich to audition.

The band were looking at other guitarists, including Clapton and Jeff Beck. Jeff was a great guitarist but he's choosy where he turns up so he wouldn't have worked out.

Eric said to me: "I'm a much better guitarist than you."

"I know that," I responded,'but you've gotta live with these guys as well as play with them.

There's no way you can do that."

When it was my turn I walked into the studio and announced: "We're gonna do Hey Negrita. Let's cut it." Charlie said: "He's only just walked in and he's bossing us around already."

I joined the band on their 46-show tour of America in the summer of 1975.

Soon afterwards The Faces came to a natural end and in February 1976 I joined the Stones permanently.

Prior to that first tour I had several weeks in which to learn 200 songs but I actually knew more about those numbers than they did because I'd grown up with them.

Even these days while rehearsing for a tour, Mick or Keith will play something and I'll tell them, "It doesn't go like that, it goes like this.

Come on guys, you wrote the f****** thing," and Keith will shout back, "Just because I wrote it, that doesn't mean I know it."

So for me, the music was the easiest part of becoming a Rolling Stone.

The steep learning curve was living like a Rolling Stone. With The Faces, we just walked on and played. With the Stones every show was an extravaganza.

We had a private Boeing 720, dubbed Starship, which had a bedroom, lounge, library, showers, a bar and, occasionally, naked girls running up and down the aisles.

We would be provided with a police escort as we made our way to the hotel in a fleet of luxury cars.

The Stones had bodyguards and a huge number of behind-the-scenes staff.

The band members were given set-lists, so we knew the order we were going to play the songs in, the tempos, the keys and the guitars we were going to use.

There were even newsletters shoved under our hotel room door at night so we knew exactly what we were going to do that day.

The homesickness that I had lived through with other bands didn't happen with the Stones.

When I mentioned it to Keith, he said: "That's because you're in a proper rock'n'roll band now."

I discovered quickly that there's a lot of talking on stage.

Mostly it's Mick shouting: "What the f*** was that?" if someone has hit a bad note.

Because Bill Wyman used to stand way off to the side during gigs everyone thought he was just watching the crowd, but he was actually playing a game called Spot The T***. He'd come over to me and start a conversation with the words: "Nice pair over there."

Clapton did a guest spot with us on that US tour, and so did Carlos Santana and Elton John, although Elton overstayed his welcome.

In Colorado, Elton was supposed to do one number, Honky Tonk Women, but he was having so much fun that he pushed our keyboard player, Billy Preston, into the background and stayed on stage .

Keith kept shouting, "Get the f*** off" but Elton wouldn't leave.

Naturally, living like a Stone took its toll.

I had married my first wife Krissie in 1971 but by 1977 the relationship was coming to an end.

There were also a lot of drugs around and one night in 1979 while I was living in Mandeville Canyon, California, Bobby Keys, the band's saxophonist, arrived and said:

"Hey man, I've made the greatest discovery. It's this thing called freebase. It saves your nose. You smoke it instead."

He showed me how to make freebase cocaine and that was it for me for years.

The first hit is totally euphoric but you never get back there so you're always chasing that first time.

It got to the point where I would be on my hands and knees looking for crumbs that might have fallen out of the pipe.

I even banned my children eating meringues in the house after I ended up smoking sugar, believing it to be cocaine.

When Bobby and I were freebasing, we were the worst company to be around.

Things got so bad for me that I convinced my insurance company to let me have a $70,000 home improvement loan.

When I received the cheque, I put Tarmac down on a new driveway, painted the kitchen green, and spent the rest on dope in just six weeks.

Things got even worse when we were touring the US around this period and Keith decided he was going to kill me.

I was using the freebase pipe a lot and Keith had turned into Mr Drug Enforcement Administration.

He found me shacked up in my hotel room and went on the warpath.

"Nobody does freebase," he yelled. "It's a waste of time."

I said: "Yeah, sure Keith."

I walked past him, went downstairs to the front desk and rented a second room so that I couldn't be found.

But it didn't take Keith long to track me down.

He barged in, broke the glass bowl of the pipe and came straight at my face.

I turned around and punched him in the face and then in the stomach.

He was serious about hurting me and I was serious about hurting him.

He smashed a bottle and cut me with it. I stormed out and went to find Mick and Charlie, who were working on a song in a room along the corridor. While I stood there bleeding all over the carpet, Mick looked up and asked: "Have you got any ideas for the middle eight?"

I left, pumped up with adrenaline, and went back to the room where Keith was.

He pulled out his huge ratchet knife, put it to my throat and warned: "I'm going to kill you."

"All right, then, go ahead." He glared at me for a long time before he said: "I'd f****** cut your throat but your girlfriend would never forgive me for all the mess it'd make."

That was the end of that. A stare-out. We haven't fought since.

In the early Eighties Jo and I moved to New York and I started selling my paintings to make some cash.

I was broke after some bad business decisions and a long period in which the Stones didn't tour.

The New York years involved lots of alcohol, lots of pills and lots of smoking, including a few "dirty cigarettes" laced with heroin.

And Jo and I were always having people over to party with us.

On one occasion, our son Jamie came downstairs in the morning and noticed someone on the sofa who was completely out of it.

When Jamie eventually realised it was Christopher Reeve, he ran into our room crying: "You've destroyed Superman."

When the Stones met in Amsterdam in October 1984 to discuss recording a new album that would be called Dirty Work, there was real tension between Mick and Keith.

Mick was in the middle of recording his first solo album and Keith didn't approve, telling Mick that none of us should go outside the Stones.

While in Amsterdam Keith took Mick out for a drink and when they eventually returned to Keith's room at 5am, Mick decided to call Charlie, who had been fast asleep.

"Is that my drummer? Why don't you get your a*** down here?"

Charlie got up, shaved and put on a beautiful Savile Row suit.

He entered Keith's room, walked over to Mick and punched him into a plate of smoked salmon.

He then pulled him up and nearly punched him out the window.

Keith managed to grab Mick's leg and saved him from falling 20 storeys into the canal below.

"Don't ever call me your drummer again," said Charlie. "You're my f****** singer."

While recording Dirty Work in Paris in early 1985, the studio time was organised so that Mick and Keith wouldn't be there at the same time.

They had stopped talking to each other and were saying it was the end of the Stones but I never believed it.

Mick is right when he says that he and Keith are brothers born by accident to different parents.

Eventually I got my chance to make things right.

As Keith and I were talking on the phone one afternoon, the other line rang - it was Mick in New York, saying Keith wouldn't take his calls.

After our conversation finished, I told Keith: "Mick really wants to talk to you. He's going to ring you right now."

Half an hour later Mick was on the line again and said: "We're talking again. It was nothing at all, just some exaggerations in the Press."

I was seriously relieved - The Stones were back on track, but my drinking and drug-taking were getting out of hand. My biggest test was yet to come.

Ronnie, by Ronnie Wood, is published by Macmillan on October 12 priced £20. To order your copy at the special price of £18 with free p&p, call the Review Bookstore on 0845 606 4213.