Ronnie Wood says The Rolling Stones have some "lovely music on the back burner", and the band hope to return to the stage next summer.
The 73-year-old guitarist hinted the ‘Brown Sugar’ hitmakers have new material in the pipeline, and he has "a couple of albums" of solo work "ready to go", but he doesn’t foresee the band being back on the road until around next August because they cannot meet up at the moment due to the coronavirus pandemic.
When asked if he is assuming it could be "a few years" until the group will be on tour again, he said: "Please don’t say [it’ll be] a few years, I want to be out this time next year, for sure.
"We’re not holding our breath, otherwise we’d have collapsed.
"But we are happily carrying on day by day … chores, and enjoying our families.
"There’s some lovely music on the hob, you know, it’s on the back burner.
"We’re bringing it towards the front of the hob now, but gradually.
"The thing is, we can’t all get together at the moment to do it, but I’ve been working on music.
"I’ve got a couple of albums ready to go as well.
"Everything is, you know, life is on hold."
Ronnie has called for someone in the music industry to take control of the situation and work out how big shows can go ahead.
He said: "The thing is, there’s got to be a time when somebody sorts out some direction of what we’ve got to do, somebody has got to lead this thing."
While he hasn’t been playing his guitar much of late, Ronnie has turned to painting to pass the time during lockdown.
He added to Sky News: "I thought, I’m not going to let it depress me anyway.
"Sometimes I may have a musical period or maybe it’s just the art and I don’t play the music. That’s what I’ve been doing lately – not playing. Not through choice. And I’m looking forward to the day when I can be playing again.
"But it’s been an honour spending a lot of the lockdown paying tribute to artists that turned me on at college and through my younger years. I did some tributes to Delacroix, to Picasso and El Greco."
In April, The Rolling Stones released a new song, ‘Living In A Ghost Town’, which was their first original music since 2012.