Ronnie Wood: Beating lung cancer like being given 'get out of jail free card'

Rolling Stones rocker Ronnie Wood has said beating lung cancer was like being given a “get out of jail free card”.

The guitarist, 72, survived the illness in 2017.

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Opening up about it in new documentary Somebody Up There Likes Me, Wood said he was diagnosed with the illness after smoking “25 to 30 a day at least for 50-odd years”.

“I got away with having it cut out of one lung, the cancer,” he says in a preview of the programme.

“Luckily it had just stayed there.

“They said, ‘We got rid of that and while we there we got rid of the emphysema on the top lobe of your lung.’

“I went, ‘Oh great’, and they went, ‘Your lungs now are like you’d never smoked’ and I went, ‘How is that for a get out of jail free card?’”

“Somebody up there likes me, somebody down here likes me too,” added the rocker.

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Wood, who no longer smokes, also opened up about the ageing process in the documentary.

He admitted that he has “never got past 29” in his head.

“So to be 70 is just so weird,” said the father-of-six.

“It is so... it is like being in a Dali painting, it’s very surreal to be 70.

“I didn’t expect time to so go quickly.

“You feel almost cheated really, about time going by.”