Ronnie Wood is furious the Covid-19 pandemic is delaying a new Rolling Stones album and tour.
The rock legends were forced to postpone their No Filter tour in March, and scale back work on a new album - only being able to complete a single, Living in a Ghost Town, remotely from old recording sessions.
Raging about the pandemic, and governments' failures to take control, he told British newspaper The Times he doesn't understand why live music has been hard hit by regulations.
"This Covid is not a joke," he fumes. "It's really p**sing me off. Nobody seems to know about it, nobody seems to be its boss, everyone seems lost. You could go to a restaurant and it was packed and yet you weren't allowed to go to a concert. What's that about? I've lost faith in not having any direction from people who should know. So yes, I'm impatient to get going."
Discussing how the pandemic has delayed the album, he adds, "It's just on the front burner, it was almost there when lockdown happened," going on to say that the group miss being together in the studio and touring as they do not see much of each other socially.
"We are a touring band. And we miss it. We miss being together as a band," he explains. "But right now, until we can get going again, we are staying in contact and just hanging in there doing our own things."
However, he does put the Stones' longevity down to rationing their time together.
"We don't try to overexamine too much of the magic that goes on. We never see a lot of each other between tours," the 73-year-old reveals. We enjoy getting together to rehearse when it happens, but we don't saturate - that's probably why we get on. We don't overexamine the magic of our relationship."
