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While Mick shuffle-shakes about on stage. And Brian thumps a tambourine for all he’s worth. And Keith runs backwards with his guitar.. Bill just stands there and grins through it all!”
Holding his guitar so erect that it is almost always parallel to his body, Bill seems oblivious to the pandemonium that is breaking out all around him. Even when a gift, hurled by an ecstatic fan, hits him on the head, he shows no sign of noticing it. But that’s just the way Bill is. He takes his work as seriously as being a Rolling Stone allows. Yet he has a sense of humour that at times breaks out and sends people into fits of laughter. That is a typical Stone — always doing the unexpected.
Perhaps the most unexpected thing Bill ever did was to join the Rolling Stones in the first place. It wasn’t a thing that he set out to do deliberately from the moment he first heard of them. And if you had told his employers that he might one day be a member of the group whose album was going to shift the Beatles from the No. 1 spot, they would have laughed at you.
“When I left Beckenham Grammar School, I hadn’t the faintest idea what I wanted to do,” he admitted as we listened to a recording of the Stones playing Carol. “I didn’t excel at anything, except Maths. Funny that, being good at maths. I went to a firm in Lewisham and started as nothing in a little office job. I really was nothing. I got all the odds and ends that other people didn’t want to do. Then things began to happen. Bill got promoted to a storekeeping job with the same business. Everyone was happy, and things were going well. Then Bill left. I’d been there two years when I decided to pack it in,” he went on.
“I left and went to work for a big department store in Penge. That was okay, and for a time both he and the bosses got on fine. Then one day Bill left. The first place asked me to go back for about £3 a week more, so I agreed. I was soon in line for the manager. I had a good future, and they all asked me not to leave when I began to get on the Rolling Stones kick“
For some time Bill had been interested in the Stones and the kind of music they were producing. That was his sort of music, and he was glad to find a bunch of youngsters who played it the right way, his way. His hair got longer and longer. Visitors to the firm where he was working often threw curious glances at “the boy with the hair,” as they called him. Eventually, it got so bad with his hair that the management said I would have to make up my mind between my hair and the Stones. I chose the Stones. That surprised the boss, he exclaimed. I was playing with a rock ’n’ roll group in Leeds before I saw the advert for a lead guitarist with the Stones…
…I went in for an audition. It wasn’t a real audition. I went through loads of tunes and messed around. It wasn’t a real audition, so I failed it. They didn’t like me, but I had a good amplifier and they wanted it. So they kept me on. Later, when they needed another guitarist, they asked me to join. I must have just fitted in. You’d better understand that I had been listening to Bill’s records. I thought they were good. Bill smiled, then spoke about his double life,” which he led until just a few months ago. “Even though I was playing with the Stones, I hadn’t left my other job by then,” he began. “I was nearly dead, though. I’d be working with the Stones until 4 a.m., then I’d go home and have to be up again at 6 a.m. to go to the other place. Half the time, I didn’t know where I was…
…So in the end I left my firm and concentrated on the Stones.” But even after he joined the group full-time, he didn’t find it all easy going. “R-and-b clubs were dead in those days,” he said. “Sometimes we’d get hardly any people coming along to listen. It was more a gradual building up of interest. Now, it’s better known and the r-and-b clubs get packed ages before we start. We’ve still got those people who don’t want to know us. They pretend we don’t exist and just ignore us. They don’t like us because we don’t conform. But why should we?”
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