Bill Wyman: “Mick and Keith were totally wealthy, but me, Charlie and Ronnie were scraping by” at height of The Rolling Stones’ fame

nme.com:

Rolling Stones, revealing that he and some of his bandmates were struggling financially.In an interview with Classic Rock, Wyman was asked if he left the band at the right time – 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 discussed the criticism the band received after they left the UK in 1971, becoming tax exiles in the south of France. “We had no fucking 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.