Ronnie Wood retracts Rolling Stones studio announcement & makes apology to band

Rolling Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood has retracted an announcement that he made in several interviews, in which he stated that the Rolling Stones would be getting together in a recording studio at the end of April 2012. He also said he had to make an apology to the band about the comments.

Wood made the comments during the week of April 9, 2012, while he was promoting the New York City opening of his art exhibit "Faces, Time and Places," the U.S. publication of the memoir "Faces 1969-75" and his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction with the Faces. (Wood was the original guitarist for the Faces before he joined the Rolling Stones in the mid-1970s.)

Wood has now admitted that should not have made those comments about the Stones reuniting for a studio session in April 2012: He told Billboard: "I heard from Mick Jagger; he's going, 'What the hell?! We don't know anything yet!' And I said, 'you know what the media are like. I just expressed my personal view; I would love to go into the studio.' Then they took it all wrong. So I have to make a personal apology to the rest of the band. I didn't mean to say things out of line. We do have a 50th anniversary. Whatever is going to be done, we will know in the next few months."

Check out these interviews that Wood did on April 9, 2012, at a press conference and with the Associated Press. He clearly said, "The Stones are going to get together as well toward the end of the month." When the Associated Press asked him to elaborate on what Wood claimed was Stones' get-together at the end of April 2012, Wood replied that it was to “throw some ideas around in the studio, just to get a feel again.” So there's no way that he could have been "misunderstood" or "taken wrong" when those were his exact words.

This isn't the first time that Wood has made statements about the Rolling Stones in which he implied that the band would be reuniting in some kind of performance capacity, but his comments turned out to be about things that never happened.

He told The Sun that the Stones were invited to perform at the 2012 Summer Olympics in London (which is true), and that all of the band members wanted to do the performance (which is apparently not true, because drummer Charlie Watts later said that Rolling Stones would not be doing an Olympics performance, and Watts stated he never wanted to perform at the Olympics).

Wood also said in a Radio Times interview that the Stones were "on the verge" of touring in 2012. That also turned out to be false, since Jagger and Keith Richards later told Rolling Stone magazine that the Stones will not be touring in 2012. Richards said a Rolling Stones tour in 2013 is possbile, but many Rolling Stones fans are skeptical that it will happen, since it has been revealed that Richards' ongoing health problems from a 2006 brain injury were the among the reasons why the Stones are not touring in 2012.

In 2010, Wood and Richards gave several interviews saying that they wanted to tour with the Stones in 2011, and they implied that the tour would happen in 2011. But ultimately, the tour never happened.