For Hackney Diamonds, their first album of new material in 18 years, the Rolling Stones recruited a number of bassists to fill in for the absent Darryl Jones.
Aside from Stones guitarists Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood, the four-string seat was also filled by the album's producer, Andrew Watt, Paul McCartney, and, in an interesting twist, their former bassist, Bill Wyman.
Wyman appears on Live by the Sword, one of the two Hackney Diamonds tunes to also feature drummer Charlie Watts, who died in 2021.
Though pleased by the invitation to contribute, Wyman wasn't particularly impressed by Live by the Sword upon first hearing it.
“When the Stones had that one track with Charlie on it [Live By The Sword], Mick [Jagger] and the producer, Andrew Watt, called to ask me to play on it,” Wyman explained in a recent interview with Louder, “and I was quite happy to do it, actually. Just the one.”
However, Wyman went on to explain, “I wasn’t crazy about the song, and I wasn’t crazy about the way they’d done it. It was just full of guitars, and there was no air in it. No spaces, no gaps. There are probably eight guitars on there, instead of two.
“It could have been done so much simpler. But that’s the way they do it, bless ’em. It was hard for me to put a bass in because there wasn’t a lot of room.”
Intriguingly, Wyman added that he actually contributed to a second song that has yet to see the light of day.
“After I’d finished my part, and was happy with it, I said, ‘Have you got any other songs that I could do while I’m here?’ And they said, ‘Yeah, there’s another one.’
“So they set it up, and I played bass on it, and they said, ‘We’ll save that for the next album.’”
In the interview with Louder, Wyman also reflected on building his first bass, a proto-fretless model of sorts.
“I’d seen Gibson and Fender bass guitars in pictures of Little Richard’s and Fats Domino’s bands, so I drew a shape like one of those on the back of my bass and I had my next-door neighbor saw it down. I bevelled the edges, took off all the paint, and put in a new Baldwin pickup,” Wyman said.
“Still, it rattled with every note because the frets were so worn. I figured I’d just pull out all the frets and put in new ones when I could afford some. But when I pulled them out, it suddenly sounded really good! So I never put frets back in.”
