Musicians who paint: Same river, different banks
Music and painting are not separate gifts but twin expressions of a single creative soul
There are questions that arrive quietly and refuse to leave. One such question haunts every story of the musician who abandons the recording booth for the studio, who trades the trembling string for the trembling brush — and it has arrived again, loudly and uncomfortably, in the wake of Jack White’s heavily criticised new exhibition at Damien Hirst’s Newport Street Gallery in London.
Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones was merciless. White, he declared, is “a complete nonstarter” as a visual artist — a musician of genuine greatness who has produced work of “glib and sterile” decorative emptiness, retreading well-worn artistic ideas with the conceptual confidence, Jones suggested with devastating precision, of “a 12-year-old who has just visited Tate Modern for the first time”. Even the star-studded collaborations with Hirst and Ai Weiwei could not rescue the show from its fundamental vacancy.
So the question hangs in the air, sharp and uncomfortable: can musicians create visual art? Or does the gift that electrifies a concert hall simply evaporate the moment its bearer picks up a brush?
The Victorian critic Walter Pater believed he knew the answer — or at least half of it. “All art,” he declared with magnificent certainty, “constantly aspires to the condition of music”. By which he meant that music alone achieves pure, sovereign abstraction — describing nothing beyond itself, needing no subject, no story to justify its existence. It simply is, in the way that longing simply is. Every other art form spends its entire life reaching upward toward that condition, magnificent in the striving if never quite arriving.
And there is something in this that should, theoretically, give musicians an advantage. Strip a great song to its trembling bones and what remains? Structure and surprise. Tension coiled and released with devastating precision. A palette of sounds chosen not for literal meaning but for emotional temperature — the minor chord falling across the ear like a shadow crossing a sunlit room. The great songwriter does not describe an emotion. They construct an experience of one.
Now face the canvas. Colour carries temperature precisely as chords do. Composition creates rhythm. Shadow manufactures tension; light delivers resolution. The painter, like the songwriter, is not in the business of description but of recreation — rebuilding, inside the observer’s chest, the precise feeling of being alive in a particular moment.
The greatest musician-painters understood this instinctively. Bob Dylan’s rain-blurred American landscapes bristle with the same restless energy as his finest lyrics. Miles Davis found his creative voice waiting patiently for him in paint when injury silenced his trumpet. David Bowie pursued music and painting as a single ongoing intellectual project, two faces of the same mountain. Paul McCartney discovered, somewhere in his fifth decade, that he had always spoken the language of visual art — he simply hadn’t known the dialect existed.
But — and here Jack White’s bruising critical reception demands its moment — passion does not automatically confer mastery. The river of creativity may flow from a single source, but each channel requires its own navigation, its own years of patient, humbling education. Technical vocabulary must be built separately, stroke by painstaking stroke. What musical greatness bestows is not instant visual fluency but something more valuable yet also more insufficient: the desire to cross the border, without the guarantee of safe passage once you attempt it.
White’s show, for all its famous friends and luxurious catalogue, appears to have mistaken that desire for the destination — confusing the impulse to make art with the hard-won discipline of actually making it. Enthusiasm, however genuine, is merely the beginning of the journey.
Creativity, in the end, is one river — singular, magnificent, fed from a source deep within the human interior — branching outward into music and image and word, each channel requiring its own devotion, its own surrender. The musicians who have crossed most gloriously from one bank to the other did not leap and immediately find their footing. They waded in, stumbled, persisted, and emerged — changed, humbled, and finally, triumphantly fluent.
The brush, like the instrument before it, rewards only those willing to spend years learning its particular and unforgiving language.
White, it seems, may not yet have served that apprenticeship. But then again — neither had McCartney, Dylan, or Davis, once upon a time. The river, at least, remains open to all who are brave enough to keep walking into it and reached for a way to say: I was here. I felt this. And I could not bear to let it disappear.
Here are 15 songwriters who crossed banks.
David Bowie: The man who painted the stars
There are those who make art, and there are those who are art — creatures so thoroughly inhabited by creative fire that no single medium could ever hope to contain them. David Bowie was, self-evidently and spectacularly, the latter.
Long before the world knew him as Ziggy Stardust or the Thin White Duke, young David Jones was sitting in the art department of Beckenham Technical School, absorbing lessons he would never forget. The brush, it turns out, was in his hand almost as early as the microphone.
Painting, for Bowie, was woven into the very fabric of his musical process — a parallel language he reached for when words and sounds temporarily failed him. “I’ll combine sounds that are kind of unusual,” he told the New York Times, “and I’m not quite sure where the text should fall. So then I’ll go and try and draw or paint the sound of the music. And often, a landscape will produce itself.” Music and image, he discovered, were not separate rooms but connected chambers of the same vast interior cathedral.
His visual language was Neo-Expressionist in spirit, drenched in the brooding severity of Die Brücke. It was in Berlin — recording Low, Heroes and Lodger while sharing an apartment with Iggy Pop — that his painting found its darkest, most urgent register. Canvases disturbing and haunted, vibrating with the intensity of a man simultaneously battling addiction and making some of the most innovative music of the 20th century.
His friendship with Jean-Michel Basquiat produced perhaps the most luminous collision of kindred spirits that era witnessed. Of Basquiat’s work, Bowie wrote with the reverence of a true believer: “There is a burning immediacy to his ever evaporating decisions that fires the imagination as freshly molten as the day they were poured onto the canvas.” No mere collector speaks in those terms.
South African artist Beezy Bailey observed that Bowie “wanted to be thought of as a valid artist. But to be taken seriously as a painter when you are a musical genius is virtually impossible”. And yet a painting bought for $4 at a Canadian landfill sold, once authenticated, for more than $80,000.
The market, at least, delivered its own thunderous verdict.
Kurt Cobain: The boy who drew before he screamed
Before the howl. Before the Marshall stacks and the flannel shirts and the three chords that detonated a generation — there was a six-year-old boy in Aberdeen, Washington, drawing Mickey Mouse from memory with such photorealistic precision that his grandfather accused him of tracing. Cobain drew Donald Duck to prove him wrong, then Goofy, then moved on to darker territories, as he always would.
Kurt Cobain was a visual artist before he was anything else.
Throughout a childhood fracturing under the weight of his parents’ collapsing marriage, he poured his anguish into illustrated comics and journal pages, gravitating instinctively toward forbidden imagery — monsters, violence, the macabre symbols that would later haunt his music with equal intensity. His art teachers gave him the encouragement his home life withheld. “He was constantly doodling,” recalled classmate Nikki Clark. The brush and the pen were, from the beginning, instruments of survival.
His visual work surfaced publicly in the Nirvana years — the unsettling painting that became the Incesticide album cover, the collage adorning the reverse of In Utero — but the true depth of his artistic life remained sealed in storage for more than two decades after his death in 1994. When UTA finally unveiled nearly 100 works at the Seattle Art Fair in 2017, the revelation was considerable. Josh Roth of UTA Artist Space observed that “his work as a visual artist is often overlooked — these paintings provide an opportunity to see him in a new light”.
The canvases that emerged — Fistula (top right), Crackbabies, gaunt amphibious figures rendered in brushstrokes precise yet raw — bristled with the same dark, irrepressible symbolism as his lyrics. The tree, the cross, the foetus, the seahorse — a private iconography of suffering and transcendence, worked and reworked with the obsessive intensity of a man who understood, instinctively, that some truths could only be painted, never sung.
A self-portrait sketched in black felt pen (top left) sold, decades after his death, for more than $281,000. The market delivered its verdict on what the world lost at 27.
“This is the tragedy of a life ending way too soon,” Roth said quietly. “I think he was just getting started.”
Miles Davis: The man who drew with fire
When silence descends upon a creative genius, one of two things happens. They wait. Or they burn through the walls of whatever medium remains available and set fire to that instead. Miles Davis, that most mercurial and uncontainable of spirits, was never going to wait.
It was injury and addiction that first drove him to the canvas in earnest — a brutal car accident, a body temporarily betraying its master, a mind utterly incapable of stillness. He painted, he said simply, because it was “like therapy for me, and keeps my mind occupied with something positive when I’m not playing music”. But to describe what erupted from those sessions as merely therapeutic is to describe Kind of Blue as merely pleasant background listening.
What Davis produced was nothing less than combustion made visible. Quincy Jones, a devotee of both his music and his paintings, observed that “Miles painted as he played: authentic, searching and never slick” — a verdict that captures perfectly the electric restlessness of canvases teeming with androgynous figures, fractured faces, entwined dancers and what Davis himself called “robots,” rendered in purples and crimsons and burning yellows that refuse to sit still on the surface. The influences — Kandinsky, Basquiat, African tribal art — are unmistakable, yet the result is entirely, stubbornly his own.
His collaborator and eventual companion, Jo Gelbard, guided his technical development, but the ferocious energy was always Davis’s alone. Two paintings became album covers — Star People and Amandla — and his final European concert was performed against enormous backdrops of his own work, the trumpet and the canvas united at last in a single, overwhelming statement.
“Painting,” Davis declared, “is the visual equivalent of making music”.
He did not dabble. He did not decorate. He burned — and in that burning, left behind work as restless, as unresolved, and as searingly alive as anything he ever coaxed from a trumpet.
Bob Dylan: The man who paints America’s soul
There are artists who dabble, and there are artists who see. Bob Dylan, it turns out, has always been the latter.
Long before the Nobel Prize Committee astonished the literary world by honouring a rock musician, Dylan had been quietly filling sketchbooks and canvases with the same restless vision that animated his songwriting. His visual art began surfacing publicly as early as 1968, and has since grown into a body of work spanning sculptures and exhibitions on multiple continents — his first solo show at the Modern Art Museum Shanghai drawing over 100,000 visitors in its opening months alone.
Guardian critic Jonathan Jones makes no apologies for his admiration. Dylan, he argues, possesses the rare gift of an artist who genuinely looks — whose drawings are “intricate, sincere, charged with curiosity,” alive with “a living, loose line” that saves them from mere technical exercise. Jones compares him favourably to Hockney: a patient traditionalist who paints what he sees, though what he sees is always “subtly merging with an America in his mind”. Coffee shops, drive-ins, desert skies burning purple at the edges — Dylan’s America is mythic and mundane at once, the roadside diner elevated into something approaching the sacred.
Writing in Paste magazine, Douglas Heselgrove observes that Dylan’s paintings carry “the underpinnings of sound and vibration”, as though the canvases bristle with suppressed music. Art critic Robert C. Morgan draws the most illuminating parallel of all, recalling how Miles Davis described creative decisions made in “a second of a second” — a phrase applying equally to trumpet playing and brushwork. Dylan, Morgan argues, operates identically.
Controversy arrived with the 2011 Asia Series, when several works were found to resemble photographs by Cartier-Bresson and others. Morgan contextualises this within a long tradition of artistic appropriation — noting that Dylan has borrowed freely from source material throughout his musical career with equal creative freedom.
What endures is the commitment. Geordie Greig, writing in The Independent, describes Dylan’s paintings as “a revelatory turn of the key into his soul”.
Dylan himself said it best: his purpose is “not only to observe the human condition, but to throw myself into it with great urgency”.
On canvas, as on record, he has never done anything less.
John Lennon: The man who drew with a poet’s hand
Before he was a Beatle, before the screaming stadiums and the culture-shaking chord changes, John Lennon was an art student — sitting in the Liverpool College of Art from 1957, declaring visual art his “first love”, filling pages with the same irreverent, restless intelligence that would later electrify the world through a microphone.
He never really stopped.
Throughout his life, Lennon drew compulsively, obsessively, filling sketchbook after sketchbook with minimalist pen-and-ink drawings of extraordinary intimacy — loopy, whimsical, sardonic, tender. Always in black and white. Always stripped to their luminous essentials, economy of line concealing depths of emotion that lesser artists would have needed entire canvases to approximate. Scott Gutterman, of New York’s Neue Galerie, writes that “the freewheeling figures he drew in his 20s gave way to sophisticated line drawings depicting his newfound daily life” — a man evolving quietly, privately, on the page, while the world watched only the stage.
His Bag One series of 1970 — intimate lithographs capturing moments from his honeymoon with Yoko Ono — caused immediate scandal when police seized them from a London gallery for their erotic content. Characteristically, Lennon was unmoved. He had never made art for approval.
After his murder in 1980, Yoko Ono began pulling drawings from drawers and filing cabinets, assembling an archive the world had barely glimpsed. In a decision that proved controversially divisive, she chose to colour some of his resolutely monochrome works for exhibition and sale (top left) — justifying it with characteristic pragmatism: galleries needed something in the window. Purists recoiled; Ono remained unapologetic.
The drawings themselves are, as one observer noted, not the work of a great visual artist in the conventional sense. But greatness was never quite the point. “I’m a Beatle,” Lennon once told Yoko sadly, when she suggested he pursue art more seriously. There was, she recalled, “a touch of sadness in his voice”.
What those drawings offer instead is something rarer — a window, unguarded and luminous, into the private soul of a very public man.
Paul McCartney: The man who painted in secret
There is something quietly heroic about a man who has written Yesterday, Hey Jude and Blackbird — who has stood before stadiums of 50,000 souls and moved them to collective rapture — choosing to lock himself away with a blank canvas and begin, humbly, nervously, from absolute zero.
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For nearly 15 years, that is precisely what Paul McCartney did.
He began painting seriously in 1983, aged 41, liberated by the example of his friend and neighbour Willem de Kooning — perhaps the most viscerally powerful Abstract Expressionist who ever lived. McCartney watched de Kooning work, absorbed his magnificent, ferocious relationship with paint, and felt something irreversible shift within him. And yet he kept it entirely to himself — accumulating more than 500 canvases before the world saw a single one.
That privacy was principled rather than merely modest. “I knew I couldn’t escape being called a celebrity painter,” he explained, “and that’s why I didn’t paint seriously for so long”. Here was a man protecting something tender from the crushing weight of his own legend.
When he finally exhibited, the critical reception was, to put it charitably, divided. Brian Sewell delivered a verdict of spectacular savagery — the paintings were “a self-indulgent impertinence so far from art that the art critic has no suitable words for them — beneath criticism”. Yet art critic John Russell Taylor arrived at an altogether different destination, telling the London Times: “These are the works of someone who, in front of a blank canvas, thinks and feels in paint. Which is just what painters do — real painters, that is.”
Real painters. Two words McCartney has surely turned over more than any review he ever received as a musician.
The public, characteristically, made up its own mind — 45,000 people flooding his first German exhibition alone.
“I’m making it up as I go along,” McCartney said. “That doesn’t mean I know what I’m doing — but I know when to stop.”
Perhaps that is the only definition of an artist that truly matters.
John Mellencamp: The heartland painter
Long before the world knew him as the poet laureate of small-town America — before Jack & Diane, before Farm Aid, before the heartland anthems that made a generation feel both seen and restless — John Mellencamp arrived in New York in the 1970s not to make music, but to study painting at the Art Students League. A record deal intervened, as such things do, and the canvases were temporarily abandoned.
He always came back.
Returning to painting in 1988, exhausted by the touring life and hungry for a creative space entirely his own, Mellencamp enrolled again at the Art Students League, studying under David Leffel, who initiated him into the techniques of the Old Masters. Later, at the Herron School of Art in Indianapolis, he found his own voice with the paintbrush — raw, unflinching, drenched in the brooding severity of German Expressionists Otto Dix and Max Beckmann. The portraits that emerged — grotesque yet beautiful, painted without preliminary drawing, built stroke by urgent stroke directly on to canvas — bristled with the same anti-establishment fury as his finest songs.
Art writer Hilarie M. Sheets observed that “for Mellencamp, painting has always been a refuge, a solitary antidote to the hectic life of touring and performing — not a precious or rarified activity but about staying productive, keeping his mind engaged, making something out of nothing”. He disappears into his Indiana studio for days at a time, completely unreachable, painting figures that simmer with injustice and melancholy — portraits of Martin Luther King, allegories of gun violence, the forgotten faces of rural America staring back from shadows thick as conscience.
It was Bob Dylan, visiting Mellencamp’s studio and confronting hundreds of accumulated canvases, who finally urged him to exhibit.
“There’s nothing closer to heaven than painting,” Mellencamp said. “You’re totally released to your imagination and you can’t edit your imagination.”
He paints, he insists, for nobody but himself. “I don’t need to paint for anybody.” Which is, of course, precisely why the paintings burn.
Joni Mitchell: The painter who wrote songs
“I have always thought of myself,” Joni Mitchell once declared with characteristic directness, “as a painter derailed by circumstance”. Not a musician who painted. A painter — one whom fate, in its infinite mischief, temporarily redirected through a recording studio and accidentally changed the world.
The circumstance in question was music’s irresistible gravitational pull, which drew her away from the Alberta College of Art in Calgary before her studies were complete. But paint, like first love, never entirely releases its grip. Throughout five extraordinary decades, Mitchell maintained a parallel creative life of remarkable fertility — one that produced, among its many treasures, 17 album covers bearing her own paintings and self-portraits, transforming the humble sleeve into a gallery wall of quietly insistent artistic ambition.
Those covers constitute a visual autobiography of devastating intimacy. The psychedelic swirl of Song to a Seagull. The grave self-portrait of Clouds. And most celebrated of all, the Turbulent Indigo cover of 1994 — Mitchell inserting herself into Van Gogh’s Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear with a defiant wit born of genuine frustration. “Rather than physically cut my ear off,” she explained, “I did it in effigy.”
Here was an artist who felt chronically undervalued, announcing her kinship with another misunderstood genius through the only language that felt sufficient.
Jonathan Jones detected something beyond celebrity dabbling in her canvases, noting that Mitchell possesses “a style” — a genuine visual intelligence that makes her paintings “worth a second look. Perhaps a third”. He observed, with admirable directness, that she is “making art that really matters to her, instead of just being a celebrity show-off”.
Mitchell herself described the relationship between music and painting as “crop rotation” — each discipline replenishing what the other depletes. “I forget to eat,” she confessed of her painting. “I forget to sleep.”
“I sing my sorrow,” she once said. “I paint my joy.”
In both, she was extraordinary.
Paul Simonon: The bassist who paints London’s soul
There is a photograph that defines an era. A bass guitar, mid-arc, descending toward a stage in a magnificent, doomed parabola — Paul Simonon, magnificent and furious, committing the most eloquent act of destruction in rock and roll history. It became the cover of London Calling. It became, in the truest sense, art.
But here is what the mythology obscures: Simonon was an artist long before he was ever a punk.
He arrived in the world already surrounded by images — his bedroom walls a kaleidoscopic patchwork of his father’s paintings and pages torn from art books, the whole gorgeous inheritance of Western painting pressed close against a south London childhood. A scholarship to Byam Shaw School of Art seemed to confirm his destiny, until Mick Jones materialised looking for musicians and history, characteristically, intervened.
When The Clash finally dissolved and his friend Nigel Dixon died of cancer in El Paso, Simonon felt the pull of the canvas again with an urgency that brooked no argument. He returned to Ladbroke Grove and thought simply: I have to paint again. What followed was a decade of fierce private apprenticeship — haunting the British Museum with a sketchpad, hauling enormous canvases to the Thames in all weathers, learning that a five-by-seven-foot canvas in high wind becomes, as he noted with magnificent practicality, “an enormous kite”.
Jonathan Jones detected in the resulting London landscapes something almost “Rubensesque” — finding in Simonon’s Battersea Power Station an evocation of “the London of 1977, the old, lost Britain in which punk started”. Yet Jones also delivered withering verdicts on later work, declaring his biker paintings “hamfisted” and “gauche”.
The charge stings precisely because Simonon spent years avoiding it — refusing to exhibit specifically because he dreaded being dismissed as a pop star with a hobby.
What endures, beyond the critical crossfire, is the extraordinary range of a man who paints bullfights and river light and cigarette packets with equal devotion — wresting magic, stubbornly and gloriously, from the magnificent ordinary.
Patti Smith: The keeper of the sacred flame
She arrived in New York in 1967 with a plaid suitcase and a vow — not to become a musician, not to become the high priestess of punk, but to become an artist. That the world came to know her primarily through a microphone is one of creative history’s most magnificent accidents. The drawings and photographs and Polaroids were always there, accumulating quietly in the margins of an extraordinary life, waiting for the world to catch up.
Smith’s visual art carries the same ferocious, ungovernable energy as her music — scratchy figures springing from the borders of pages “like the demonic marginalia of medieval manuscripts,” as one observer memorably described them. Hers is, in the words of the same writer, “a gnarled and knotty line” — dense and overworked where emotion runs highest, drifting to delicate wisps where attention wanders, “as if anything outside of the artist’s immediate attention didn’t matter”. Crowded with messiahs and lovers, constellations and visions, the drawings mesh Artaud with the trip book, passion made visible through the pure insistence of a line.
Her photographs, meanwhile — taken obsessively on a Land 250 Polaroid camera — constitute a collection of secular relics: the gravestones of Wittgenstein and Yeats, Tolstoy’s home, Hesse’s typewriter, Mapplethorpe’s tambourine. “It’s incalculable,” she said of Rimbaud’s calling card, acquired at considerable expense. “It was his, it was in his pocket.”
The same writer who observed her drawings noted, with admirable directness, that Smith had “earned the shows” — not merely because of her fame but because few artists manage to “articulate an aesthetics of passion so convincingly in an age of irony and surface”.
“I was drawing a picture,” Smith once wrote. “I thought it was Rimbaud but it was Dylan. I kept drawing. I thought it was Dylan but when I looked again it was me I was making.”
In the end, every mark she made was self-portraiture — the document of a woman who refused, magnificently and entirely, to be anyone other than herself.
Jack White: The scavenger who makes things sing
For two decades, while the world watched Jack White reinvent the blues with a guitar and a drum kit, he was quietly doing something else entirely — haunting Detroit’s junk shops and garbage days, rescuing discarded chairs and dying trees and obsolete amplifiers, coating them in glossy epoxy resin until they demanded to be looked at. Not a hobby. Not a side project. A parallel life, conducted entirely in private, until Damien Hirst saw photographs on a phone and said simply: why don’t you do a show at our gallery?
The result — These Thoughts May Disappear, currently filling Hirst’s Newport Street Gallery — is the first public exhibition of a visual practice spanning thirty years. Rooted in Detroit’s Cass Corridor tradition of industrial assemblage, informed by White’s early career as an upholsterer and his deep engagement with De Stijl and Dada, the show erupts across two floors with more than 100 works: sculptures cast in thermoplastic resin, repurposed wooden pallets, a life-size tree resurrected from his Nashville garden, chairs containing hidden amplifiers, interactive figures, found objects transfigured by resin into something simultaneously garish and gorgeous.
White describes his method as “Hardware Store Art” — assemblage and reappropriation, building outward from existing materials, getting the ego out of the way and letting beautiful accidents happen. “We can only work from the scraps we were given on this planet,” he says. “I like that. That’s a challenge.”
Jonathan Jones was having none of it, declaring White “a complete nonstarter” as a visual artist — the work “glib and sterile,” the conceptual ambition operating at “the intellectual level of a 12-year-old who has just visited Tate Modern for the first time”. Even Ai Weiwei’s contribution — the F-word spelled in buttons across a customised amplifier — Jones found more creatively alive than anything White produced himself.
White, one suspects, would reach for another piece of junk and start again.
“People don’t know this side of me,” he said, walking the gallery the day before opening. “I want them to see that this came from a passionate place.”
The passion, at least, is beyond dispute.
Ronnie Wood: The Stone who paints
Long before he took his place in the most dangerous rhythm section in rock and roll history, Ronnie Wood was already an art student — absorbing the fundamentals of line and colour at Ealing College of Art with the same hungry attention he would later bring to the fretboard. The brush and the guitar have been inseparable companions ever since, twin expressions of a creativity that has never been content with a single outlet.
Wood paints with the prolific enthusiasm of a man possessed — portraits of Jimi Hendrix and Elvis Presley, intimate studies of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, pastoral English landscapes, self-portraits, family scenes — working across charcoal, oils, acrylics, spray paint and watercolour with cheerful, restless versatility. Most recently, he painted the cover for the Rolling Stones’ new album Foreign Tongues, bringing his visual and musical lives into their most literal collision yet.
The critical reception, however, has been — to deploy the most charitable available word — spirited. Jonathan Jones detects genuine accomplishment lurking within the rock star bravado, praising Wood’s nature scenes as “Hockney-esque” in their pastoral calm, and declaring: “The range and variety of these paintings reveals a fresh eye and bags of accomplishment. He might make a landscapist if he wasn’t haunted by those dark satanic riffs.”
Others have been considerably less tender. Wood’s audacious reworking of Picasso’s Guernica — featuring the Rolling Stones dancing gleefully among the ruins of a bombed city (above) — drew particular critical fury. Oliver Basciano, editor of ArtReview, was devastating: “He seems to have taken one of the greatest and most moving works of art, a desolate cry against war, and used it as the basis for terrible fan art to, er, himself.” The Art Newspaper’s Louisa Buck was equally merciless: “Only a rockstar ego would think that it’s OK to put himself and his band boogieing on down amongst the devastation of Guernica.”
Jones, characteristically, found the middle ground with characteristic wit: “The citizens of Guernica were bombed and killed from the air. The Stones were only ever bombed on drugs.”
Ronnie Wood, one suspects, has heard worse from Keith Richards.
