With all the different music swirling around me, I needed a band. Dad had his one, Ted had Candy Bison Skiffle Group and Art was singing with Blues Incorporated, Britain's first R&B group.

By this point I had really long hair, which was different because almost everyone else I knew had theirs really short. People in the street used to ask, 'Are you a boy or a girl?' I didn't mind because long hair was one of the ways I was being me. My parents didn't mind, either. My dad never told me to go and get a haircut. In fact he actually said to me, 'If you want to look like that son, it's up to you.'

He made sure that I knew a lot of things were up to me, so I started recruiting friends for a band. I didn't have to look far though. Kim Gardner was round the corner, Tony Munroe was up the other end of the street, and Ali McKenzie was just down the other block. I decided we would call ourselves the Thunderbirds, after the 1960 Chuck Berry song 'Jaguar and the Thunderbird'.

Tony and I were the first ones to join the band, but we had only one amp between us, which had to work for the vocals and the two guitars. That's why we let Kim into the band ­ he had his own bass amp. And as a two-amp band we rocked Birmingham, Leicester and Manchester, but mostly we rocked Yiewsley. We played Motown, songs like Marvin Gaye's 'Ain't That Peculiar', and 'Baby Don't You Do It', and the Velvelettes' 'Needle In A Haystack'. We played Bo Diddley, the Temptations, the Beach Boys and Jimmy Reed, all in one set. I used to sing the Chuck Berry numbers 'Talkin' About You', 'Maybelene' and 'Too Much Monkey Business'. We'd rehearse in whoever's garage was free and jam until we were moved on. Eventually we got another rehearsal venue when a really polite old gentleman who ran the Rainbow Record store next to the Nag's Head said we could rehearse in his shop window. He would look inquisitively at us and explain the situation to his customers as we boomed in his shop, bounced off his window and made all sorts of noise. Anyone who walked past that shop got a free gig from us, we built up a small following, and it wasn't long before we had a proper stage. It was just over a mile from Whitethorn Avenue to the Nest, which is where we got our start, playing every Friday and Saturday night. We had to walk to work because none of us had a car. But we did have a wheelbarrow and a cart with flight wheels on it, so we'd pile our equipment up high and push it right down the middle of the high street, dodging cars, buses and taxis as we went. To get down Tavistock Road we had to cross over a bridge, which is inevitably where the wheelbarrow would tip, spilling the amplifiers, drum kit and everything else we owned on to the road. But once we set up at the Nest our mates would come in, plus our girlfriends, and we'd vibe up a show.

As word got out about us, more and more people jammed into the Nest, to the point where it regularly got packed. I guess we were doing all right because when Memphis Slim came to England without a backing band, word had got around that we would fit the bill just right, he came and saw us and after the show he asked if Kim and I would play with him at the Ivy League Club, which was just up the road from the Nest. I didn't realize how special Memphis was at the time but remember he sang and played piano real sweet. I wasn't sure if we were going to get any money for the gig. We didn't. Instead, Memphis paid us with a bottle of whisky and a big hug.

Music was exploding all over England and there were local bands, like ours, up and down the country trying to make it. But unless you had a manager you remained a bunch of neighbourhood friends with guitars and drums. We knew we needed someone to guide our careers, which is how I hooked up with the first of my occasionally dodgy managers, Leo de Klerk. Don't get me wrong, I had some good managers but Leo told us he was a South African businessman and bragged about all his connections in the music and entertainment industry. It turned out he was actually an East London wideboy whose first name was Lionel.

Leo told us he owned some clubs, including the Zambeezee in Hounslow plus the Caverns in Windsor and Reading. Whether he actually owned them, or just ran them for others, I don't know. But that didn't matter to us at the time because Leo's venues meant we always had somewhere to play. For Leo, booking us in his own venues meant he could easily control the bookkeeping.

It was around that time when we had to change our name. There was already a group called the Thunderbirds, and even though they were officially called Chris Farlowe and the Thunderbirds, they got angry with us. I took that to be a good sign because it meant someone had heard of us. But we got the message and shortened our name to the Birds.

The next thing we knew, Leo offered to put us on the road and to pay us ten quid a week. He said he would get us a van and a roadie (Colin) to look after us. Leo's solution to our transport problem was a knackered old blue transit van, Colin, who turned out to be a slave-driver, would chauffeur us to wherever our gig was, then shout orders at us as we unpacked all our equipment and carried it up God knows how many flights of stairs.

We may not have been a very good band in the beginning, but we were very enthusiastic, and we were getting better all the time, finding our feet, experimenting with Motown, soul and rock, and building up a following. We drove up and down the country playing in whatever spots we could. One night at the Altrincham I pulled a bird and brought her up to my room, not knowing that the guys were hiding in my closet. By the time Kim, Tony and Ali jumped out, I was just about finishing the job. They started laughing and teasing me, not because they'd caught me in the act, but because while I was in the act I still had my red socks on. But I always did that ­ it's an old English habit. I only started taking my socks off much later when I began meeting girls who were naughty.

Red socks included, one of the best things about being on the road was all the girls who were around the band. We used to get mobbed in Salisbury and we were very big in Cheshire. The girls would yell, scream and try to pull our hair out and, better still, try to rip our clothes off. The girls would write all over the van in lipstick.

Our venues and crowds were getting bigger, and we thought we'd finally arrived when Leo announced that the Birds were going to play the Glad Rag Ball, on the same bill with the Kinks, the Hollies and the Who. We were now considered a UK Top Twenty live act. This, without even having a hit record.

That was what was supposed to come next. We wanted to record, and so I wrote my first song for the Birds, 'You're On My Mind'. I just picked up my guitar, turned on the tape recorder and played what I felt. Of course, I was heavily influenced by the music I was listening to at the time, but I believed then, and still do today, that it's not what you steal, it's how you steal it.

For me, that recording session was fascinating and so new. I soaked it up and sucked it in. I went through all the motions and started learning the fundamentals of overdubs. It's a bit like doing a silk screen, where you put down one colour, and then put down another colour and continue like that until you've got a painting. We'd lay down the basic wash with drums and bass, a guitar track, then lay down the second guitar track, then the vocal and little by little we had a song. Now, this was the 1960s, so the equipment was primitive ­ sometimes four tracks but more likely two. From that they made one big 78 rpm vinyl master, then used the master to make 45 rpm records you know, the small ones with the big hole in the middle. We each got one white label 45 rpm, and two spares. I took mine home and played it for my parents, all my friends and all my parents' friends. I discovered the hard way that you couldn't play those records too many times before they wore out. I was so hungry to squeeze more songs on to vinyl.

Our demos got us a deal with Decca. So sometime in November 1964 we went to their studio in Savile Row and did both our songs. This only encouraged my craving to spend as much time as I could in these soundproof creative holes. A few months later we went back to Decca to record 'Next in Line', which I wrote as the B-side for the Eddie and Brian Holland song 'Leaving Here'.

That record earned us an appearance on a battle of the bands television show called Ready, Steady, Win. Consequently the song charted within the Top Fifty ­ this at a time when getting in the charts meant something. Understandably it was a big deal for us, as we could hold our heads a little higher alongside the bands we were rubbing shoulders with. But it also made me hungry to make better records. That's the problem with tasting success; you want more, you want to gorge on it. The club scene in those years was really rocking, and so were the record companies, which were all within staggering distance of each other along Oxford Street. You'd get invited to Christmas parties at all of them and go from one to another ­ Warner Brothers, Immediate, CBS ­ right on down the block, bumping into the Stones, the Small Faces, the Pretty Things, the Kinks, the Beatles and the Dave Clark Five. Anybody who was anybody was crawling Oxford Street at Christmas time. It was a mad, special era in British rock. Everybody was interchanging. The Birds would play the Ealing Club and the Who would walk in and tease us with their success. They had hit the top of the charts by then with 'Can't Explain', but that never stopped Keith Moon from jumping up on our stage and jamming with us. When we played the NME (New Musical Express) Poll Winners' Concert in the mid-1960s, we were on the bill with a host of bands including the Beatles, the Stones and Cliff Richard. There were a series of stages, and one band would play one song then the next band would take up when they had finished, and then suddenly it was your turn. It was good fun, essentially a massive jam, being out in front a sea of people.

After a time, my success with the Birds had made me just about enough money to buy my first custom guitar. I had it made at Jim Marshall's of Ealing and Terry Marshall sorted it for me. Mine was a converted Fender Telecaster body with a Danelectro twelve-string neck which I ordered in emerald green. I also got a double cabinet speaker stack made there, a huge thing with eight twelve-inch speakers in one cabinet instead of the usual four. In those days, Pete Townshend was getting famous for having all his speakers in big stacks. I was in Marshall's picking up mine when he came in and the minute he saw my double cabinet, he looked at me and said, 'You bastard.' I beat him to it. To take it a step further I customized my amp to 200 watts. The control did indeed go to eleven.

One day in 1965, I was hanging out at the Intrepid Fox, a pub in Wardour Street where a lot of musicians used to hang, when a fellow walked in wearing a big checkered Coco the Clown jacket, with his hair sticking up ­ almost exactly like mine ­ and sporting a real shiner of a black eye. We looked at each other and that's when he just walked up to me and said, 'Hello face, how are you?' The bloke with the black eye was Rod 'The Mod' Stewart. We turned out to be kindred spirits. He'd just had a record out called 'Good Morning Little School Girl', which was starting to climb up the charts. I knew his music and admired what he was doing. He told me the same thing about my music. Back then, two blokes with the same haircut couldn't escape each other for long.

We started drinking and talking and it was as if we'd known each other forever. We talked about bands and exchanged influences ­ vocalists like Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, Arthur Connolly and Jo Tex, and on the guitar side Buddy Guy, Robert Johnson and Broonzy. We sat shooting port and brandy and discussed various clubs we'd both played in, and the people we knew in common, how we had the same middle name and agreed that our favourite group was the Small Faces.

Several months after meeting Rod, I got a phone call at Whitethorn Avenue from Mick Jagger wanting to know if I'd play on a session. Yes, no doubt. He said he was producing a record for PP Arnold. She was a terrific singer and had been Ike and Tina Turner's backup vocalist. I would have been happy to play on any session for her, but this was even better because she was to do a duet with Rod. They were going to do the Gerry Goffin-Carole King song 'Come Home Baby'. Mick said he wanted me on the session because 'Rod likes you.'

I was there in a flash. Mick and I hit it off. The session was at the Olympic Studios and it was the first time I really met Keith. (The swine who would become my lifelong weaving partner, brother and mate.) He was at the studio, listening to a freshly laid-down track. I grabbed a drink, took a sip and went over to say hi. Just as I approached him, I stumbled a little and poured my drink on him. We laughed it off and cracked on. The manner in which our relationship started preempted how it would go on. Him with the upper hand. Conquering Buccaneer. I think for the next forty years I have been the little brother, his sparring partner and the new boy.

London was providing me with an intro into a whole series of people who would play a massive role in my life. I used to see the Yardbirds whenever they came to Richmond, and always admired the way Jeff Beck played. He was one of the first people on the music scene to fool around with electronic distortion, he milked foot pedals, fuzztones and feedback, and in a way he set the stage for the kind of sound that Hendrix would make famous as his own.

I met him pretty much at the end of his Yardbirds career, at Peter Stringfellow's Mojo Club in Sheffield. It was perfect timing. The Birds were finished, I was looking for a gig, so when I heard Jeff had left the Yardbirds I rang him up. I didn't know if he'd remember me, but he said he knew exactly who I was, and I breathed a big sigh of relief before asking him, 'What are you going to do?' He shrugged before asking, 'Do you fancy getting a band together?'

Before long we were speeding along in his Corvette Stingray, blaring out music, showing each other the sounds we loved. Buddy Guy, Vanilla Fudge and Chicago blues were devoured as we gathered riffs and licks on the guitar. I'd lost none of my enthusiasm for creating and was ready to grab the next opportunity. We spent the first two months of 1967 together, rehearsing at a studio on Gerrard Street in Soho before going out on the road.

The line-up was Jeff, me, a vocalist Jeff brought in called Roderick David Stewart and his choice of drummer, a paranoid Woody Allen type called Mickey Waller. We were ready to rock, target and conquer America with our new band, and with Jeff's experience in America we felt nothing could stop us.

He'd handed over his lead-guitar job in the Yardbirds to Jimmy Page, saw lead guitar in this group as his rightful role and wasn't going to risk losing it to me. So he asked if I fancied playing bass. I looked at it as a good challenge and wanted to prove myself on a new instrument, so I started trying to master it in the week and was playing it by the weekend. We were touring the country non-stop, making a name for ourselves with Jeff at the helm, and in my mind all those nights are all jumbled together as one very drunken, frantic, exciting long year.

One night, however, does particularly stand out as it was literally the most shocking of my life. We were playing one of the Starlight Ballroom venues up north and I unthinkingly moved a microphone whilst touching the bass strings with my other hand. With a VERY large bang I was catapaulted over the piano and ended up on my back.

The audience thought, yeah great, wow, do it again Woody, but I had become the earth of an entire very loud gig, connecting the full pelt of all our equipment. A roadie realized what had happened and unplugged me. They took me to hospital in between sets. I had burns on both my hands and after the doctor heard what happened he looked at me and said, 'All I can tell you Mr Wood is that you've got a really strong heart.' Then they drove me back to the bingo hall and we did the second set. I played with a refreshed, somewhat recharged look on life.

So it was time to go to America with the band. It was my first trip there, as well as Rod's, and before we left England, we used to tell each other that America was overrun with guns, hookers and pimps. When we finally got there, we discovered we were right..

We played the infamous Fillmore West in San Francisco where Rod was so nervous that he sang the first three numbers from behind the amps where nobody could see him. We rocked just about every venue going, including another four or five dates with Hendrix as our guest. We blew everyone else off stage, including the Grateful Dead and Moby Grape.

Day after day on the road, our homesickness increased. It was terrible and everyone got depressed. I found myself in charge of keeping up morale, which usually meant more red vermouth. We had no money to run home with, which is exactly how our manager Peter Grant had it worked out. We'd complain, try to get money out of him and he'd bark, 'You ain't going nowhere!'

Although Peter didn't treat the rest of us as well as he treated Jeff and himself, he did in the early days offer me the chance of being in a band other than the Jeff Beck Group. He told me that a bunch of blokes were putting a band together and intended to call themselves the New Yardbirds. Peter said, 'They want you as their guitar player.'

Well, I'd met a few of them up at his office, including the rude drummer John Bonham who reminded me of a farmer, bassist John Paul Jones and the harmless enough Robert Plant, and I told Peter, 'No, I'm happy where I am thanks.'

He insisted, 'This is an offer you really must consider.'

I considered it for two seconds, and then told him again, 'No way.' The New Yardbirds hired Jimmy Page instead and changed their name to Led Zeppelin.

Peter Grant's dedication to Jeff made touring with them an endless uphill battle, though Rod and I both loved meeting the other bands we were bumping into all over the country. We'd be on the same circuit as Sly and the Family Stone, coming across bands like Cream and a group called Savoy Brown. We got to know Jethro Tull (we called them Jethro Dull, Bore 'Em at the Forum) the 'Grateful When', and we were always bumping into the Who. By now we were referring to them as the World Health Organization.

It was beginning to become clear that our manager had seriously different agendas for us all. Grant was focussed on Jeff and Rod while Nicky and I had to make do. Krissie (my first wife) and I were living in the Old Forge at Henley-on-Thames and I was about to return to America with the group in March 1969, when a day or two before I was scheduled to leave, Peter Grant called to say, 'Woody, you're fired.'

I went, 'Oh really?'

He said, 'Jeff wants to get a new rhythm section so you and Mickey Waller are both gone.'

Just as I found myself unemployed, almost as soon as I put the phone down on Peter, Kenny Pickett rang up to say he had reformed the band Creation and wanted to take the band on tour in Germany. That sounded like more fun than working with Jeff Beck (and definitely more than not working for anybody), especially because Creation were so huge in Germany ­ so big, in fact, that Diana Ross and the Supremes were billed to support them.

They wanted me to do the same tricks that Eddie Phillips used to do onstage, like playing guitar with a violin bow. That was strange, more of a gimmick than anything else, but it looked cool. So I was thrown in at the deep end and had to learn how to play with a bow very quickly.

Even more fun, Phillips painted onstage. I loved that. I would set up a big canvas plus a bucket of black paint, and every night while we performed I would somehow paint and play. I'm not sure how good my onstage paintings were or what happened to them, but I suspect they were trampled to death as soon as we left the stage. Painting while we played was way ahead of its time and added excitement to the show. Plus I got to do my two favourite jobs at the same time.

The band didn't last much longer than that tour because it was disorganized and everybody involved was pulling in different directions.

Great timing though, because as soon as I got home I received a desperate call from Peter Grant saying the new rhythm section hadn't worked out and Jeff really wanted us back.

I loved hearing Grant squirm and said, 'Only on my own terms.' He asked, 'How much?' '£2,000 a week.' Which was enormous money then. To my surprise, Peter agreed.

So I went back to the States with the Jeff Beck Group for a fourth (and fifth) time. The only compensation, besides the money, was that Rod was getting more and more fun to hang out with.

In between my fourth and fifth tour of the States with Jeff Beck, Steve Marriott of the Small Faces announced that being in that band was no good for him any more, and left to join up with Pete Frampton and form Humble Pie. I can't imagine why he did that, except perhaps because that's when he started to lose it.

Steve's departure put Ronnie, Mac and Kenney in the lurch, so risking rejection and braving the outcome that fate had presented once again I got hold of Ronnie's number, just like I did a few years before with Jeff Beck, and rang him up.

I said, 'This is a crime that you're splitting up. You're Rod's and my favourite band. What are you doing now that Marriott's left?'

He said, 'I don't know, we're lost. Do you want to come over and have a play with us?'

I still had that fifth tour of the States to do with the Beck Group, but the writing was on the wall. Jeff and Peter had become too much of a pain in the arse, and the tour was a disaster. It was also very brief. Instead of being in the States three months, we were back in England in three weeks.

Ronnie, Mac, Kenney and I spent time together jamming at the Stones' Bermondsey rehearsal studios in South London, because Stu (the founder keyboardist, road manager and trusted friend of the Stones) was in charge of that. Having no money he took pity on us and let us use the place for free. We sort of became the Small Faces minus Steve plus Woody. We didn't have our own name, we didn't have a vocalist and we didn't have any original songs, so we played instrumental sets. The music of really funky American bands like Booker T and the MGs, the Meters with Al Jackson, Zigaboo Otis and the blues, the Mar-Keys and the Bar-Kays. Earthy, soulful bluesy music.

We hung out like that for about six weeks, and it was during this that I missed a real important phone call. Jagger was trying to replace Brian Jones and he picked Mick Taylor to take up the mantle.

Sod's luck, Ronnie Lane answered the phone.

Mick asked, 'Would Woody join the Stones?'

Lanie told him, 'Ronnie is quite happy where he is, thank you very much.'

Rod had been curiously listening to us rehearsing from an upstairs room during those six weeks in the Bermondsey studios. I knew we needed Rod, but the others were worried about having another Steve Marriot. Also, Rod wasn't so sure about hooking up with a group like this, after what he'd just gone through with Jeff Beck.

I had to convince the boys that we needed Rod and had to convince Rod that he needed us. Kenney went upstairs and brought him down from his listening room. That broke the ice. With all of us in the room we looked around, saw that Rod and I were taller than the others, agreed that the Small Faces had grown up, and decided to call ourselves, simply, The Faces.