She gets a salary and her per diems, just like the rest of the crew . . . the big difference being that she gets to sleep with the guitarist.

So Jo is back on the road. She and Ronnie have been together since she was 22. She was a successful model . . . the Sun's Face of '72 ("before they started all that page 3 stuff", she says coyly) and already had a son, Jamie, and an ex-husband when she met the guitar legend at a party. They've been together ever since, raising their family in circumstances that may sometimes have been difficult, but rarely dull. There are stories of managers who ripped them off and business ventures gone south which have engendered in Jo a healthy caution in matters financial. So now Jamie, who is 31, runs all the family businesses from his step-dad's prolific painting career to his mum's new beauty venture (of which more later) and holds the purse strings. Then there's Jo's stepson Jesse, 29, a musician, and Ronnie and Jo's children together Leah, 27, an artist, and the baby, Tyrone, 22, who works for Jamie. There are grandchildren now too. The family always toured with Ronnie, bringing tutors with them, living in hotels, packing and unpacking, keeping an eye on Dad.

Life on the road is a bit different these days. In their heyday, the Rolling Stones epitomised all that was most decadent, most outrageous, most louche, most rock 'n' roll about the rock 'n' roll business. They were sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll . . . with the headlines and the kiss-and-tells and the drug busts and the sojourns in rehab to prove it. Now, pretenders like Pete Doherty and his ilk have taken up the bad boy mantle and the oldsters have calmed down . . . whisper it, have the Rolling Stones gone sedate?

In the old days, the post of Ronnie Wood's assistant might have involved tasks that tested the boundaries of prudence, if not legality. Now, Jo is procuring nothing more dangerous than Ronnie's favourite organic baked beans, which she cooks up for him on a specially constructed cooking unit that she had manufactured and put into a flight case and brings with them everywhere. "I only set off the smoke alarm once . . . in a hotel suite in Hartford, Connecticut."

For most women, being the assistant to Ronnie Wood . . .

organising all the laundry, the packing, the stage clothes, the food, the Beecham's when he feels he might have a cold coming on . . . might be enough. But Jo has another gig of her own going on and, pragmatist that she is, saw the value in hitching a ride on the Rolling Stones tour and at the same time promoting her line of recently-launched organic bath and body care products. She calls it killing two birds with one stone.

Every pampered rock star wife is into organic these days of course, but Jo got there before them courtesy of a health scare in the early '90s that saw her diagnosed with Chron's disease, and every detail of her condition splashed across the tabloid front pages. She found herself on steroids which "took her soul away". And then she got a letter from an English herbalist who claimed that he could put her into permanent remission if she took his specially formulated pills and stopped ingesting the chemicals that she was pumping into her system courtesy of a diet that would have sent the nutrition police running for cover. This was her epiphany . . . overnight, Jo went organic. The produce was difficult to source back them and she would drive long distances in pursuit of an organic chicken or two. The Woods started growing their own vegetables at their house in Kildare, smuggling the odd suitcase of potatoes back home to the UK. Jo developed a repertoire of fake-junk family meals that substituted for all the bad things that she was determined to banish from their lives.

By the time that the source of her illness was discovered to have been a perforated appendix and not Chron's after all, there was no going back. Sleeping on organic sheets and drinking organic vodka and coke, Jo had never felt better.

And she certainly looks good for a grandmother of four in her early 50s . . . good clear skin with no trace of surgery or botox, blonde but not too blonde, slender but not thin.

As organic took over her life, Jo read around her subject and soon realised that anything you put on skin is absorbed quicker into bloodstream than anything you eat. And she started looking for organic beauty products, only to find that there was a limited range available and that even when the products were good, they were always a bit wholesome . . . too girly, not subversive or sexy enough for a woman who's been a bona fide rock chick all her adult life. She set about filling the gap in the market.

Josephine Fairley, the woman who started Green & Black Organic Chocolate and the author of the Beauty Bibles series, introduced Jo to Dr Colette Haydon, a French pharmacist and specialist in cosmeticology.

Together they have developed a range of bath and body products in two fragrances . . . Amka and Usiku (Swahili words meaning 'to wake' and 'night' . . . Jo has a bit of a Kenya thing going on) in beautiful bottles with Biba-esque packaging.

The marketing is sophisticated, except for the slogan 'Don't F**k With Nature' which jars, but maybe I'm not rock 'n' roll enough to appreciate it. The sourcing of the ingredients has been an adventure in itself . . . cedarwood from Morocco, cardamom, ginger and cloves from the Far East . . . and they are particularly proud of their innovative use of Sicilian organic orange juice, ultra-filtered to the point that it becomes a pure vegetal water to be used in emulsions and capable of recharging the skin with trace elements for essential cell energy cascade.

Yes, there's a lot of that kind of talk but Jo and Colette are patently sincere and the products are delicious, testament to the rigour that they have applied to their development.

There are plans to launch a skin care range in 2007, when Jamie agrees to let his mum have some more money out of the budget that he controls. I had assumed that the business was funded by Ronnie but Jo disabuses me of this notion . . .

"No, I went to see the bank manager and got my own loan, my own money. I prefer it that way. Ronnie thought I'd never get this together, now look."

Jo Wood Organics is available at Harvey Nichols, Dundrum. Prices from 17 for Organic Body Soap to 91 for Organic Bath Oil