Is Jo Wood a better advert for the virtues of two decades on an organic diet – or for the benefits of a quickie divorce from an errant rock-star husband? Hard to know for sure, but something's making this woman – this model-turned-rock-star-Wag-turned-divorcée- party-girl-and-pop-up-restaurateur – especially sparkly and upbeat.
Wood is 54 years old, a mother of three (plus one stepson) and a grandmother of six, and she looks good on it. She channels a birdish kind of glamour: purposely tousled hair, a delicate body; she has a brilliantly hectic demeanour. She flits about Holmwood House – a sprawling hunting lodge on the edge of Richmond Park in south London, built as a gift from Queen Victoria to Albert, which has been Wood's family home for 10 years and is now rammed with antique lamp shades and bohemian flounces and the paraphernalia of a rock-starry existence (art, guitars, snapshots of Wood and Brad Pitt). Jo Wood is excitable and passionate, and when she laughs she sounds like Barbara Windsor in Carry On mode. She wants to show me things: her granddaughter Maggie ("Who is six months old today. Happy half, Maggie. Look at that face!") and the stacks of beautiful mismatched antique crockery she's gathered for her latest project, a pop-up organic restaurant called Mrs Paisley's Lashings, which will run in the house in the run up to Christmas and is the reason for today's interview.
The last time Jo Wood talked to Observer Food Monthly was January 2005. The focus of that article was Wood's long-term love affair with organic food; and her quiet mission to spread the word about natural, fertiliser-free, seasonally dictated diets. Wood embraced an organic lifestyle earlier than most – in 1989, after being misdiagnosed with Crohn's disease. She was prescribed steroids. It transpired that she was suffering from a perforated appendix, something she believes she wouldn't have survived if herbalist Gerald Green hadn't encouraged her to go completely organic three months before her appendix erupted.
"So I'm laid in hospital, thinking: 'I'm well! I'm well! Jo, you've done it! I am meant to be here. And I am meant to be an organic girl!'"
In the interview Wood spoke about how she'd converted the extended Wood tribe (her older son James; her stepson Jesse; her younger children, Leah and Tyrone) to an organic diet. Most significantly, she said, she had converted her husband Ronnie Wood, the notoriously hard-living and generally toxic guitarist for the Rolling Stones. "If he didn't have such a good diet, all organic, he wouldn't be in such good health," she said at the time. Ronnie was her success story, her ongoing project, living proof that organic could turn you around. She'd even got him smoking organic tobacco in his roll-ups. "He might not even be here [without the organic diet]," she went on, "because he has abused his body a lot… really, a lot."
Four years later: Wood has maintained the organic diet – but ditched the husband. Although technically Ronnie ditched her; running out on 23 years of marriage with a twentysomething waitress in tow. In July 2008 Ronnie Wood began a horribly public relationship with a very young Russian named Ekaterina Ivanova. Ronnie – who has spoken openly about how hard he has struggled with alcoholism – was pictured drinking with Ivanova; his marriage to Jo Wood dissolved subsequently.
It was a terribly public end to what had been viewed as one of the few defiantly solid relationships in rock music. Wood had devoted herself to maintaining the marriage; beyond keeping Ronnie healthy and sober and raising their children, she'd toured with the Stones, converted the other band members to organic diets ("I turned up for a European tour with a suitcase full of potatoes from my garden. Made the chef cook them all") befriended the other wives and diverted the groupies' attentions by befriending them too. "It was hard," she says now. "You had to be strong. I was; I still am."
Jo Wood responded to Ronnie's departure with what appeared to be awe-inspiring stoicism. She didn't fall apart, she didn't spit retaliatory bile in the press, she didn't even retreat to lick her wounds. Instead, she got dressed up and she went out. "I thought: 'Your family are all here and they love their mum. And you really are very lucky. So: let's go, Jo!'" Wood became a fixture on London's party scene. Openings, premieres, launches: "To this function and that, which I hadn't really done before because we never went out. And I made all these friends! All these new friends! [Among them Kate Moss.] I was pushed into being a single girl. I wouldn't have chosen it. But when it happened, I thought: 'Oh! This isn't so bad after all!' And I was off. I was out every night."
Is it fair to say that the split was a liberation?
"Um, yes, because all I concentrated on, it was all about Ronnie. I wanted to do everything to look after him. And now – it's me! Just me!" She speaks with some relish. "And I think: 'Oh, what am I going to wear tonight?' I did go and do a few therapies. I think I went four times. And they said: concentrate on yourself. And once you get the hang of that, realise yes, it really is about you now… I mean, I was heartbroken. But truly, it didn't take me that long to… I can't say to get over it, not completely. But I did start finding my way out of it quite quickly."
How quickly?
She looks a little gleeful, a little naughty, and whispers: "Two months? Ha ha!" But that's as defiant as she gets. Generally Wood invokes her ex-husband's name comfortably, and with no evidence of rancour, regret or sadness – or anything, really, other than distant fondness.
But never mind the divorce. The thing Jo Wood really wants to talk about is Mrs Paisley's Lashings, the pop-up restaurant which first ran for a fortnight this summer, and will be halfway through its December run, by the time you read this. It's the latest evolution in Wood's gently expanding organic brand. In 2003 Wood launched Jo Wood Organic, a range of skincare products which flourished (and continues to flourish) commercially and compounded Wood's desire to reinvent organic sensibilities as glamorous and decadent and a little bit rock'n'roll. Mrs Paisley's Lashings was founded along precisely those principles. It was conceived on a beach in Kenya as a way to spread the organic-food message to an influential group of people, to feed them the idea, literally – and also as a way to have some fun. "Jack [Macdonald, Wood's son-in-law, husband to Leah and father of Maggie] told me about pop-ups, in Kenya. I said: 'Pop-up club? What's a pop-up club?' He said: 'It's only there for six months. That's how Jay Jopling started. With his galleries, and the latest thing is pop-up restaurants.' So I said: 'Pop-up restaurants! Fantastic!' Didn't I, Jack? In Kenya?"
"Yeah," says Macdonald, who is sitting on the floor, listening intently and chipping in when he thinks Wood's going too far off-message. He is a TV producer, but also a foodie with an enormous passion for the restaurant. He added the Lashings bit to the name. "Mrs Paisley, because it sounds Victorian. And lashings, like lashings of lemonade, but also: Lashings, you naughty, naughty boy!"
"Double meaning," says Wood, happily.
"So," continues Wood, "one of those little lightbulbs went off in my head, like: 'Aha!' I thought: 'Fantastic! I have such a big house, and this huge vegetable garden, and I love to entertain. This house rocks when it's full!' I could see it all. These great dinners! But they all went: 'I don't know, Jo…' especially my eldest son, Jamie. He's a real cynic. But, oh! I was going to do it, no matter what!" She claps her hands twice.
Once Wood had got her children behind her, she signed up chef Arthur Potts Dawson, who – quite apart from being Mick Jagger's nephew – is also the restaurateur behind organic destination Acorn House ("He was my first choice. I rang him up; he loved the idea"), planted a load of vegetables and herbs in anticipation of feeding hundreds of people – and began planning what she now refers to as: "Mrs P, round one, ding ding!"
The first incarnation of Mrs Paisley's Lashings ran through Wimbledon fortnight in June 2009 and was enormously successful. They'd planned to seat 30 people a night, maximum, and ended up with 48. Many more people applied for reservations, but Mrs P's was at capacity.
"And some nights it was just a bit of a decadent piss-up," says Macdonald. "But others, it was exactly what we'd hoped: a group of influential people in a room eating food that had been buried in the soil in Jo's garden half an hour earlier – and loving it."
It was intense and manic. Celebrities came: Mark Ronson, Noel Fielding from The Mighty Boosh… "The Spandau Ballet boys. What's his name? I'm terrible with names. Gary Kemp!"
"And at least three tables a night of public who applied," says Wood. "Every evening I'd go round the tables and say: 'Is everything all right?' Like a proper hostess! Ha ha! And this one woman said: 'My mum's come down from up north, and this is a special present I'm doing for her. And she's just blown away.' And I got a lump in my throat. Jamie, who's a bit sort of: 'I don't know what you're doing, Mum, you're so mad' – he said: 'They're going to nick everything!' And do you know: not one glass or cup was broken. Not one."
At the end of the fortnight, Mrs Paisley's Lashings turned a small profit, which Wood donated to the Soil Association.
"And now it's time for round two."
How will things be different this time?
"Well," says Wood, "I learned how not to drink too much every night. Organic booze might be organic, but it still gets you drunk."
Wood says her mission is evolving. This time all profits will go to an initiative called Mrs Paisley's Gardens, which will fund mini-allotments for inner-city schools. They're already in the process of setting one up within a north London primary school.
I wonder if she has any political ambitions. "No! Oh no. I wouldn't remember what to say! Mind you, I met Boris [Johnson] the other day. I said to him: 'Here, Boris! If you need anything eco, I'm your girl!'"
How did he respond?
"Oh: 'Rwah rwah rwah rwah rwah"," she says.
Mrs Paisley's Lashings is clearly, in part, a consequence of Jo Wood's programme of reinvention. Post-divorce, Wood is rebuilding herself project by project. We meet less than a month after she was voted off BBC1's Strictly Come Dancing contest. "It was the most scary thing I have ever done in my life. I loved it! But the nerves! I just couldn't dance, that was the problem! I kept thinking: I'm going to wake up tomorrow, and I'm going to be able to do it fabulously. But it didn't happen."
But whatever sub-agendas Wood entertains in reopening Mrs Paisley's Lashings, whatever healing benefits she sustains, are merely a bonus. Mrs P's is a nice, uncynical idea realised in a beautiful venue; its heart is in the right place. It may be prohibitively exclusive (Jack Macdonald explains that, in his mind, not getting in is half the point, because a great pop-up restaurant should be "the best restaurant you never got to eat in"), and celebrity-orientated – but it's certainly not a mindless, dilettantish or lazy venture.
Macdonald walks us round the parts of Holmwood House that will serve as dining rooms for Mrs P's; he shows us where the tables will be, and the bar; and points out the spot (just inside the front door, at the bottom of a sweeping staircase) where a Victorian mannequin will stand. "We change her outfit every night – she is Mrs P."
Arthur Potts Dawson arrives, and starts talking Wood and Macdonald through his menu ideas. Wood changes into an emerald green sequined cocktail dress and wellies and poses in her vegetable garden for the photographs.
I get the feeling Jo Wood's just getting started; she thinks I'm probably right.
"There's definitely more to come."
Will there be a Mrs P, round three?
"We'd like to. Another one in spring, I 'spose."
Potts Dawson adds: "Because we've done summer, we're doing winter; so yes, let's do another one in spring… See what happens after that."
Would they ever want to do it full-time?
"Oh, I can't imagine me being a restaurateur," says Wood. "But I wouldn't mind Mrs P's being a permanent thing."
"A little 30-cover restaurant somewhere cute in London," says Potts Dawson. "And we were thinking about doing afternoon teas…"
Wood produces a cake stand fashioned from four beautiful plates separated by gold-painted espresso mugs.
"We could serve sandwiches and cakes on it. Isn't that nice?"
"That is so Mrs P," says Potts Dawson.
"Oh, yes! So Mrs P!" says Wood. She laughs her Barbara Windsor laugh.
There aren't any limits for Mrs P, are there?
"No! Gosh no!" Wood says. "There's no limit to Mrs Paisley! No limit at all."
She laughs again. Wood laughs a lot, it must be said.
"You never know. There might even be a Mr Paisley round the corner." OFM
