Ronnie Wood and Sir Rod Stewart are again working on songs together before a potential Faces reunion, the Rolling Stones guitarist has said.
Wood told BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs that “absolutely nothing has changed” since the band came together in the late 1960s.
He told host Lauren Laverne that the only thing different from before is that Stewart no longer allows amps on stage.
The Faces were formed in 1969 by members of the Small Faces after singer Steve Marriott left.
The band’s biggest hit was the song Stay With Me, and Wood joined Stewart to play it during his set at the Glastonbury festival this year.
In Desert Island Discs, broadcast on Sunday, Wood said: “We would love to do that. We’ve got these songs that we’re working on from back in the day, but it’s hard to make our times tally.
“When we do get a chance to get in the studio again, we will finish off these songs. We’ve got a good body of songs going.”
He went on to recall tales of when the Faces would tour, which led to them being “banned” from the Holiday Inn hotel chain.
Instead, the musicians would have to book pretending to be another rock band. “We weren’t allowed in any hotels. We used to have to check in as Fleetwood Mac,” he said.
“It came to a head in Detroit. Ramona her name was, behind the desk, reported us to the police and everything just because we made the hotel room out in the corridor, we just quietly arranged all the furniture out in the corridor.
“And then the manager came up and the elevator door opened, and there was this room there with all the pictures on the walls, settees and slippers.
“And he said, ‘It’s very nice but it better not be here when I come back’, and he got back in the elevator.”
He said the standard of music being produced keeps getting higher, as the Stones prepare to release a new album. The band have released more than a dozen studio albums. The most recent, Hackney Diamonds, came out in 2023.
He said: “We’re always raising the bar, and miraculously, the bar keeps going up and up. We just finished a new album, which is very exciting and we’re at the mixing stage … so I’d say by the end of the year, early next year.”
He went on to say he gave up drugs and alcohol in 2010 but not without support from other people.
“There’s a period of white knuckling where I needed encouragement and I didn’t know which way to turn and it takes a while to be able to see yourself in the light of getting better, for want of a better phrase, of staying on the path, it’s quite difficult,” he said.
“And encouragement and a hand on the shoulder just before going on stage, like from Mick [Jagger] or something, saying you’ll be OK, and to let it go. And OK, let’s go for it.”
