Jesse Wood: The son of a Stone who swapped rehab for baking banana bread

Model parent: Jesse Wood opens up about life as a parent
Adrian Lourie Evening Standard Only
Laura Craik16 June 2016
The Weekender

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Jesse Wood has the universally appealing good looks that would have opened doors in the modelling or music worlds even if his father hadn’t been Rolling Stone Ronnie.

We meet at his model agency, Storm: he has modelled on and off for 20 years, though music is his passion.

If his wife, Fearne Cotton, is Barbie, then Jesse is Ken, a brown-haired, square-jawed six-footer with an easy laugh and a horizontal demeanour.

Like Ken, he worships Barbie-aka-Fearne, the TV presenter, DJ and latest-celebrity-to-publish-a-cookbook whom he met in 2011 and married in 2014.

Gok Wan is godfather to their nine-month-old daughter Honey.They also have a son, Rex, aged three.

It’s nice when husbands gush about their wives, and speak fondly in a way that isn’t just for show. Wood met his “beautiful, lovely wife” in Ibiza.

“She was on holiday with friends and I was on holiday with a friend and we met at a nightclub. It was wonderful. Love at first sight. That sounds really corny but it was beautiful,” he says.

“I didn’t really know much about her. I just thought she was absolutely beautiful. I was sitting at a table and I looked up and she was right in front of me.”

He looks misty-eyed. You can see celebrity offspring as over-privileged, silver spoon-toting bastions of entitlement or as people you wouldn’t want to be for all the trust funds in Chelsea, depending on your worldview.

I would pick love and stability over fame and money any day, and Wood seems to feel the same.

Fearne Cotton and Jesse Wood at the BAFTAs 
Stuart C. Wilson/Getty Images

He’s keen to emphasise that he’s a family man: a hands-on dad who changes nappies (“love doing all that”) and does the early morning shift without complaint.

“It sets your day,” he claims. “If it’s really early, like 5am, it can wobble me. But I’m very committed. I love them all, and I make sure I do my best for my kids and my missus.”

It’s all a far cry from the wild-eyed Wood who once dated Kate Moss, Kate Hudson and the model Jasmine Guinness. “I used to like to party; I’m not going to lie to you. And I’m not saying I had bad times.

"I had lots of good times. But you can leave the chaos and still be…” he trails off. “Everyone likes a drink and a party. It’s good fun. But I guess you get a bit bored.”

Now 39, he has been sober for four years, and if 35 sounds like an advanced age at which to get clean, it’s positively nascent when compared to his dad, whose eighth (and final) attempt at rehab occurred when he was 63.

Ronnie and Jesse went through this stint together, in 2011, and it has stuck for both of them. “One of the best decisions I ever made,” is how the younger Wood describes it now. “I’m good.”

If life is good then June is extra-good, since it sees Reef, the band Wood joined in 2014 (he plays guitar, having been persuaded by friend and longtime member Dominic Greensmith to audition when the original guitarist left) play a number of significant gigs including the Isle of Wight Festival and Glastonbury.

Reef have been around since 1993. Wood almost didn’t audition for them at all, he says. “It wasn’t that I didn’t want to. It’s because when I was growing up Reef were up there as one of my top three bands.

"So I was a bit freaked out. But in life, you have to step towards the…” he trails off.

BAFTA TV Awards 2016

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They will also support Coldplay for two nights at Wembley. “It’s a dream come true thank you, Coldplay,” smiles Wood, adding that Chris Martin is “a lovely guy”.

When he’s not on band duty or dad duty, Wood likes to do “a bit of yoga, and keep fit and healthy. I like to eat good food, I like to cook… you know, boring dad stuff.”

Not that there’s much need to cook when your wife is such a dab hand in the kitchen. Barbie-level beautiful she may be but that’s where the similarity ends: it’s clear Fearne Cotton has a super-sharp business brain as well as being, by all accounts, as amiable as her husband.

In her new cookbook (released last week), she includes a recipe for Jesse’s roast chicken, so I ask him for some tips.

“I picked up a few little moves from different people, my mum being the main one, and just threw it all together. It’s pretty tasty,” he says.

Great! I say, enthusiastically. Tell me more! Talk me through it! “Erm. It takes quite a long time. Quite a short time, I mean. Sorry. It’s quite quick.”

"Right, so just butter under the skin? “Um. I think they’ve done that. I think they put herbs inside it. I’d have to double check. Get loads of herbs and oil and just bung it in at 200 degrees celsius. I think. I’d have to check the exact temperature in the book.”

I’m beginning to feel uncomfortable about mentioning the chicken, normally so safe a subject, but happily the situation is rescued by Wood fishing something out of his bag.

“I didn’t bring a roast chicken, but I did bring this for you.” He slides an object wrapped in tinfoil across the table. “A bit of banana cake,” he says triumphantly. “Fearne and Rex made it this morning. Little snack.”

I sample Fearne and Rex’s banana cake. It is good: moist, not too sweet, and with a hint of coconut. I tell him I’m going to save some for my kids, since banana cake is their favourite.

“You can have all of it,” he assures me. “I brought it for you. I thought we could have a chat and eat some banana cake. There’s loads of it. It’s all good stuff.”

Sally Humphries, Ronnie Wood, Fearne Cotton and Jesse Wood 
Dave Benett

Maybe, if I eat enough banana cake, I will become filled with laid-back positivity like Wood. Maybe it has a secret ingredient, like St John’s Wort. I ask him how he feels about turning 40, a source of angst for some.

“I don’t really think much about ageing, to be honest. Grow old gracefully comes to mind.”

Will he be celebrating? “I’m not having a big old hoo-haa, that’s for sure. I’m not really bothered, to be honest. Forty is a lovely year to reach, but it’s just another year. I just want to be with loads of mates, have something to eat, be with the kids…”

His own dad has just become a father again (Ronnie Wood’s third wife, Sally, whom he married in 2012, gave birth to twins Gracie Jane and Alice Rose on May 30).

“Oh yes!” he exclaims. “I was wondering when this question would come up.” It’s coming up right now, I say. Has he met his half-siblings yet?

“I went up and met them, I won’t lie to you,” he says, somewhat perplexingly. “Went up there three days after they were born. Had a lovely time with them. Very exciting times with my family.”

I ask him whether there is any truth in the story that Ronnie’s former wife of 24 years, Jo, will help out with the new arrivals, and had “even cut short a holiday in Spain to fly home for babysitting duties”, according to one paper.

“I think that’s probably a load of old rubbish, to be honest.” It does sound a tad unlikely, I say.

“I don’t know for sure, but I think, you know... I think someone’s definitely... fabricated that slightly… because why would they want…” he trails off.

I ask how he would describe his own family (in addition to Rex and Honey, Wood has another son, Arthur (14) and daughter, Lola (10), with his ex-wife, Tilly Boone).

“Oh. Everybody gets on,” he says. “It’s as good as it can be. I feel lucky. The kids are all right, as The Who said.”

What values does he think it’s most important to instill?

“Not too many. I’m very laid-back. Anything to do with lying is not great. To be as honest as possible. I’m not going to pressure them in any way.

"You just guide them, don’t you. ‘Come to me if you need anything’. That sort of thing.”

Is there anything he thinks he’ll do differently from his own parents? [He is Ronnie’s eldest child of eight, the product of Ronnie’s seven-year marriage to Krissy, who passed away in 2005.]

“I grew up with my mum — I didn’t grow up with dad,” he says. “My dad would have been ‘Yeah, guitar playing, la la la, whatever’.

My mum was very sweet. She was a great mum. Very loving. I’m just going to give them lots of love, in answer to your question, I’m not going to take things from them. Except love. I’m just a very loving dad.”

And a very nice bloke as well. Good luck to him.

The album Reef: Live at St Ives is out now; reefband.com

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