Ronald Frederick Lane was a star but he never took his stardom that seriously. “I like showing off, doing a song and shaking a leg on stage, but I don’t want to play all those silly games that go on, any more,” he said in 1975. Sixties rock icons, of which he was one, didn’t float his boat: “As far as I’m concerned, if half of them had never been stars they would have done something better; it’s totally stardom that’s fucked them up. Or this illusion of stardom – it’s not even real. Alright, let the little girls’ magazines say it’s glamorous and all that, but Christ, we’re grown men aren’t we? We should know better. But no. All the ‘stars’ think it’s glamorous too…”
He was a man of his word. Two years earlier, Ronnie had walked away from his gig as the bassist with The Faces, the boozin’, carousin’ reprobates who had risen from the ashes of his earlier band, the Small Faces. But the man who his old muckers called both ‘Plonk’ and ‘Three-Piece’ didn’t just quit his band – he quit the rock’n’roll world, upping sticks and moving to a rundown farmhouse on the Welsh borders, where he put together a new band, Slim Chance, and lived out his nomadic dreams.
