"A laid-back collection of gentle boogies and carefree shuffles": Bill Wyman ages in easy-going fashion on Drive My Car

Bill Wyman's Drive My Car is a covers-heavy stroll that conveys gentle, unpretentious senior joy

Bill Wyman - Drive My Car cover art
(Image: © BMG)

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We can only hope that when we reach our ninth decade on planet Earth we’re having as much fun as former Rolling Stones bassist Bill Wyman sounds like he’s having on this laid-back collection of gentle boogies and carefree shuffles. 

His voice was never that strong in the traditional sense (anyone remember Je Suis Un Rock Star? You might choose not to), but at 87 Wyman’s super-weathered vocal expression of these 10 tunes adds to the rocking-chair vibe.

Bill Wyman - Drive My Car (Official Lyric Video) - YouTube Bill Wyman - Drive My Car (Official Lyric Video) - YouTube
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He tackles covers such as Taj Mahal’s Light Rain and Bob Dylan’s Thunder On The Mountain in a manner that he admits in the sleeve notes owes an unashamed debt to JJ Cale.

The title track (no relation to the Beatles track but one of three self-written originals) is typical of the likeable bouncing grooves Wyman’s band create here. ‘Eat a pack of cherries, spit out the pips,’ he suggests. You can’t beat simple pleasures.

Johnny Sharp

Johnny is a regular contributor to Prog and Classic Rock magazines, both online and in print. Johnny is a highly experienced and versatile music writer whose tastes range from prog and hard rock to R’n’B, funk, folk and blues. He has written about music professionally for 30 years, surviving the Britpop wars at the NME in the 90s (under the hard-to-shake teenage nickname Johnny Cigarettes) before branching out to newspapers such as The Guardian and The Independent and magazines such as Uncut, Record Collector and, of course, Prog and Classic Rock