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Bill Wyman was 'un rock star' in the '80s

 
Tampa Bay Times
Published June 2, 2017

As bass player for the Rolling Stones, Bill Wyman was the stoic presence on stage while Mick Jagger provided the calisthenics workout. Now 80 years old, is Billy Wyman a dirty old man - or just old? The video for (Si Si) Je Suis Un Rock Star might the smoking gun that reveals the answer.

Both Jagger and Keith Richards worked on solo projects in the '80s in between Rolling Stones albums and Bill Wyman did the same although his work was less promoted. Wyman actually made two solo albums in the '70s and in 1981 he released his only '80s album that featured the single (Si Si) Je Suis Un Rock Star. While it didn't chart in the U.S. it made it to No. 14 in the U.K. and was a Top 5 hit in Australia.

Translated from French to English, (Si Si) Je Suis Un Rock Star means If I Am A Rock Star. The gist of this funky little song is that a then 45-year-old Wyman meets a young beauty from the hills of Rio and tries to seduce her to travel back to France with him. In the middle of the video, Wyman sings with a grin, "we could go ... across the water. They'll think I'm your dad and you are my daughter."

These lyrics don't seem so uncommon in the hyper-sexual rock genre until you think that in 1989, a 52-year old Wyman married 18-year old Mandy Smith, whom he had been dating since 1984. If you do the math, that means Wyman was 47 years old and dating a 13-year-old which puts the video to (Si Si) Je Suis Un Rock Star in a whole new perspective. The Wyman-Smith marriage only lasted a few years. In 1993, it appears Wyman settled down for good when he quit the Rolling Stones and married for the last time (this time a 28-year-old) and eventually became a father of three daughters. As if things weren't odd enough with Wyman's past rendezvous', the soap opera almost got worse before it got better in the '90s when in 1993, Wyman's son 31-year-old son, Steven, was engaged for a time to Mandy's Smith's then 49-year-old mother, meaning Mandy could have been Bill's husband and granddaughter-in-law at the same time among other weird combinations.