Rolling Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood reveals he thought he was given a death sentence when he was diagnosed with cancer. “I had this thought at the back of my mind after I gave up smoking a year ago: ‘How can I have got through 50 years of chain-smoking – and all the rest of my bad habits – without something going on in there?'” the guitarist said.
The impact of Bowie’s death had a profound impact on Wood – not least because they were precisely the same age. For Wood, the news acted as a reminder of life’s fragility. (Farout mag)
Bowie and Wood began to fully appreciate how much impact their decadent lifestyles had had on their health. “I smoked heavily for 50 years, and I thought, there’s got to be some price to pay. I hadn’t had a chest x-ray for 16 years, and when I did, sure enough, there was a big shadow there on my lung, a supernova. I thought ‘fucking hell’”.
But Woods bill of clean health was contrasted by the news that Bowie hadn’t been so lucky. “It especially affected me with Bowie because we were the same age – both 1947 models,” Wood told The Guardian in 2017. “David and I, we never saw a lot of each other, but when we did, we had a lot in common. With the cancer, he pulled the short straw. I knew he had a stroke as well. Since he hadn’t been doing concerts or public appearances, I knew something fishy was going on with his health. I knew something was up. I was lucky, I got the long straw with the cancer”.
Bowie and Wood had grown up in parallel. They were both Londoners through and through and had both attended art school: Bowie at the Bromley School of Art, Wood at Ealing Art College. With the news of Bowe’s death, Wood came the stark realisation that maybe he wasn’t so invincible after all.
