I really don't want to do it anymore. I have many special memories. It's been wonderful. But I thought the last two tours with them were the best we have ever done, so I was quite happy to stop after that.

When I joined this band, we thought we would last two or three years with a bit of luck and come out with a few shillings in our pockets. Now, here I am 30 years later, and I haven't done any of the other important things ni life.

Keith: It was a huge surprise when he actually said, I'm going to leave the group. Nobody says that - that's a kind of Spinal Tap line - but I eventually had to accept it. I didn't let him off the hook for ages about it, because we've got this unit and whatever it is we do somehow seems to work well. The idea of taking a slice out of something that only has five elements in it in the first place is difficult. You can't do anything about people dying, but apart from that... Also Bill was my rhythm section. As far as I was concerned he and Charlie were joined at the hip, musically. He had an affinity with Charlie Watts that was quite amazing, and good rhythm sections don't come around that often.

Charlie: No, (it wasn't) a mistake, because he was in the middle of a terrible marriage that he should never have got into – he had a horrendous time with the Mandy girl – and he then married a very good woman and had three children very quickly... and he was very, very happy. But it was a shame he left because a) it was great having him and b) I think he missed out on a very lucrative period in our existence. There were very sparse periods you went through building the band, and he didn't really reap the rewards that we do now. 

Bill in comparison (to Darryl Jones) was almost an effeminate kind of player, although he played some great bass lines, fabulous lines in fact - I think that was because he came from the guitar, in the same way that Ronnie can play great bass... Bill was totally unlike a bass player. When we were in Toronto rehearsing for the Forty Licks tour I was listening back to a lot of the songs that Bill and I had played together - and I found myself thinking that he was a lot better than I had remembered. I supposed that I had never really thought about it before: Bill had been a bass player who I worked with, and a friend, and I had never sat down and considered his actual bass playing.

I sat down with Mick in New York in February of '93 and said, What are we going to do? We sort of had a glass of wine in his kitchen, and the only word - and the word that counted - was FOCUSED. We said, If we can look down the same telescope, I think we've got a good one here. That was the real word, to get everybody focused on the same thing.

It's kind of like an adventure, the Stones. You can't give up now. Once you're in, you take it to the end. If you got off the bus now you'd spend the rest of your life wondering where the end of the line was. We're the only ones here, so in a way there's a duty to see how far you can take it. I think there's a possibility of another gold period in the Stones somewhere.

The place there is Eddy Grant's studios. It's away from everything, not touristy. You don't get the feeling that you're anywhere.

Keith: I went straight off that (solo) tour and went into writing songs with Mick and Charlie down in Barbados, with maybe a week off. I really had no time to discern the difference between the Winos and the Stones. I was just doing what I was doing. I knew that I didn't have to do any practising; I was already on a roll.

Mick: I did go from work on my solo album straight into work on the Stones album. So yes, I was already in the groove, as it were. But the other side of that is that I just wrote a bunch of songs and now I have to write another whole bunch (laughs). I did have a few things left over that I hadn't finished, like Brand New Car, but I didn't have an awful lot else. So I went to Barbados and sat there at first thinking, What am I going to do?

We did a lot of writing. In Barbados, Keith and I did a lot.

I feel like I've been here before because everytime I say these things I read in an article where Keith says, Oh, it just happened, man!... And I look like a complete twit! Because I say all these kind of, like, Well this is why it was this or... At the risk of that, Keith and I DID actually sit down, and I also sat down with Charlie, we did actually sit down and say, Well what do you...? You know, I think the record should be like this. Or And it shouldn't be like this. So we did actually talk intellectually about it. We wanted it to be more direct. We wanted it to be more interesting rhythmically. We said we wanted to... keep sort of quirky things if they happened... to keep them in the album rather than say Well, that's very interesting but, you know, no one's going to like it. 

The trophy was signed by Sammy Kahn, one of the best songwriters of the 20th century. On his deathbed he said, I want to include Keith in the Hall of Fame. I found that really touching, and I am in good company there - Irving Berlin, George Gershwin and many more.

I just don't want to see the Stones grasping hungrily to be up to date and have hit records, I just want the Stones to do the best they can. They're the only ones who can do it. I want to make really good stuff. If we get hits out of it fantastic, but if not they'll be damn good reords, and they'll still last, and they'll be around a long time.

Charlie: I've never auditioned anybody before. It's not horrible, it's bloody hard work. We had four guys a day for a week! Seven days (sic) of it - you were just bassed out, I supposed they'd call it. I couldn't hear another bass at the end of the week.

Ron: One of the songs we would play with a bass player coming to audition with us would be a blues jam, but we'd leave that to the end, after starting with a couple of numbers like Brown Sugar and Miss You. The jam was important because it gave us to the opportunity to see how solid they were and how well they kept with Charlie.

We had so many applicants. All these people were coming out of the woodwork once they heard we were auditioning, from Noel Redding out of the Jimi Hendrix Experience to all these young whippersnappers.

A few hours before I auditioned, a friend who worked with the Stones called and said, Okay, they are probably going to play through this and this. So I just brushed up on those tunes a little bit, and I went in and played. Even from the beginning, though, I didn't go in thinking, Hey, play this like Bill Wyman played. I just learned the songs and played what I thought should be in those places. When I arrived, all of the guys were very, very nice. They really made me feel comfortable from the beginning.

Oh God... We auditioned about 16 (bass players) and then you have to listen back to the tapes. It's torture. And in order to be fair to them all, you have to do the same fucking songs over and over again. Brown Fucking Sugar. Then we had to try them on the the new stuff because anyone can play Brown Sugar. I can play Brown Sugar.

I knew Mick a bit but I'd never met Keith before. I went to an audition in New York, where they were trying out bass players. My interview for the job was listening to Keith tell me why he doesn't need a producer.

(I)t was shocking to me to contrast the Saturday Night Live parody image... with this vibrant, really intelligent, lucid, mind-racing character. He's the exact opposite of what you picture. The man is as creative as anyone I've encountered in my whole life. Whether he's doing a handwritten fax or playing guitar riffs, he's always inspired. It's a remarkable thing. I'd say he's at the peak of his powers. He's always grown as an artist and he's at a point where he's got a lifetime of experience on which to draw for inspiration.

We promised not to scare the horses. So Keith (was) only playing on Volume 8.

We talked about the record, and we wanted to be focused and direct and to keep it simple. That's all well and good, but we still had to write the songs! We took a long time to write them - which is good, because I hate to rush that part - and we got a lot of good things, so we didn't waste a lot of time in the studio.

I did a lot of playing along with blues bands (on record for this album) - mostly dead, unfortunately. You know, old records. I would come to the rehearsals in Ireland and for an hour I would just put up CDs of old, like, Muddy (Waters) records and stuff, and play with them. And if they had harmonicas on them, I'd play along with that. If they didn't I'd still play and get a really good sound.

I'm always a bit worried about (becoming obsessed with age) 'cause it always makes you set a lot more store by it than you should really be bothered with. I mean, as long as you can deliver the goods, I think - compose and sing and make the record and perform. I never seem to tire of writing and performing. I LOVE putting on those big shows. Contrary to what people say, I'm not interested in the BUSINESS side of it - only as an adjunct to getting the show up. To get it UP there... to me, that's a business ACHIEVEMENT.

Keith: The only cloud on the horizon last year, putting all this together, was changing the bass playing. You know, 30 years, the same rhythm section - this is a major upheaval. But in actual fact, it went smooth. We played with a lot of great guys, and eventually I said to Charlie, You decide... And he said, You bastard, you put me in the hot seat! And I said, Yeah, for ONCE, Charlie, once in 30 years, you're going to be the supreme judge on this. Mick and I will say what we think. Because they were all such good players and hey, you're playing a couple of hours with a guy and then another. It's so difficult to tell... So to get to that question - why Darryl (Jones) - I think that 5 years (playing) with Miles Davis didn't hurt as far as Charlie Watts is concerned! Because Charlie, being a jazz drummer himself, you know... I mean, to Charlie, rock and roll is part of jazz, and it still has to swing. So in a way one of the best decisions I made last year was to leave the actual choice up to Charlie.

Charlie: Eventually it came down to Dougie Wimbish and Darryl as well as this guy that Keith had worked with. It was an extremely close-run thing between the three of them, but Darryl was so easy to work with that in the end he got a unanimous decision.

It... got into a question of feel and do you think you could work with this guy for two years, or for however long it is? Luckily, Darryl was a very nice guy. He was a very pleasant man and a wonderful musician as well. This band doesn't call for that incredible sort of virtuoso bass playing, but he does have it, and if there was any room for it, he does have it, he could do it.

Ron: Working in Dublin, we weren't disturbed. If somebody did come into the studio, it was a funny character and they weren't going to hang any proceedings up. That is a big clue in the way that the album flows - it's that comfort. Everybody was happy in playing.

Mick: We did so much writing - that took so long - and the actual recording time wasn't very long.

(Don) has an unwritten understanding with the band that he doesn't interfere too much, but that he's there if you need any direction, which means that we are able to operate pretty quickly and efficiently with his help: he's a very easy man to work with. Most of the time the feedback I get from Don is, No, you're doing fine, just carry on doing exactly what you're doing. He might come up to me and say, You can let rip on this one, this one's for you or, I really like that line you were playing - play some more of that. And I think that Mick gets a lot of bounce-back from Don in terms of the arrangements, because Don's a very good arranger.

Chris (Kimsey) and Steve (Lillywhite) would always put in their twopennyworth, whatever they could do, but they were operating much more under the orders of Mick and Keith, who would be telling them, Right, we're going to do this this way, and we want you to handle it this way, whereas they tend to give Don more of an open hand in what he is doing, more of his own choice about the direction he wants the song to go in.

(Laughs) Yeah, there were a few intense moments. I don't particularly enjoy intense moments. People get very wound up about their songs. I do. Very precious. Very proprietorial. Everyone's playing them wrong. Play it faster, Keith, for Christ's sake, we can't play it this slow, everyone is falling fucking asleep! That was the source of some interesting discussions with Keith. Because if it doesn't get me up on to my feet then I get bored. But Keith just like things too slow and sometimes I have to give in and let him have his... slow things.

Don (Was) was rocked off balance very early on by a sudden and apparently terminal row that erupted in the studio, Windmill Lane in Dublin, between Mick and me, out of the blue, despite our apparent peace terms. It came from sheer nonexistent communication, the building up of festering rages... Ronnie and I had come back into the studio, and Mick was playing some imitation riffs on a brand-new Telecaster. It was one of his songs, called I Go Wild... I'm told I said, There's only two guitar players in this band and you're not one of them. I probably threw it out as a joke, but it didn't connect to the funny bone for Mick - he took it the wrong way, and then it got deeper. I just laid into him, and once again, according to eyewitness accounts, we hammered each other about everything from Anita to contracts to betrayals... And everyone else ran, th assistants and Ronnie and Darryl and Charlie and everyone, all scuttled into the control room... Don told me he genuinely believed that if one more word was uttered, everybody was going to get on planes and the show would be over forever... In the end, after maybe an hour and a half, we hugged and carried on.