Rod Stewart's Faces co-star 'couldn't afford medical bills' before tragic death

Rod Stewart's bandmate in the Faces was left so poor he couldn't afford to pay his medical bills before his sad death at the age of just 51. Ronnie Lane co-founded both the Small Faces in 1965 and the Faces in 1969, as well as playing bass in both bands. Despite being posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2012, Ronnie sadly lost thousands on a failed tour and battled to fund his medical bills.

After leaving the Faces in 1973 - a year after leaving his wife and eloping with a new woman - Ronnie moved onto a farm near the Welsh border and "sunk his money" into two things - purchasing a mobile music studio to record at the farm and developing a "rock and roll circus" named The Passing Show.

In 1974 he planned to tour with various big names in the rock genre, but poor planning and pushback from council planning regulators meant things quickly went downhill when they tried to tour the UK.

According to Norman Lamont's blog, they were using "clapped out" trucks and generators that "regularly failed" - and the "circus", which included musicians, fire-eaters, dancers and jugglers, was a "disaster and financial black hole".

The tour was eventually abandoned after only 30 people attended across three separate nights in Newcastle. Ronnie had spent thousands trying to keep it going, as had his co-star Bruce Rowland, who confessed: "I lost about four and a half grand, a lot of money in those days.

"Everything was broken and we had to bring it home. I took a 40-foot caravan down the M1 with a Land Rover, then went back to Newcastle on the train and drove the Pantechnicon down. It had two gears, no reverse, back brakes only, and no starter. I drove between 5mph and 10mph most of the way. It took me three days."

The disastrous project was made worse by the fact that Ronnie was not receiving royalties from his work with the Small Faces. Drummer Kenney Jones fought a campaign for renegotiation of the band's contracts - but sadly by the time they were successful, Lane had already died from multiple sclerosis in 1997, aged just 51.

Towards the end of his life, his bandmates Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood helped to fund his hyperbaric oxygen therapy and other medical bills as Ronnie was unable to afford them. Ronnie died from pneumonia in the final stages of MS and was buried in Trinidad, Colorado after making an unreleased album of live BBC recordings in an attempt to pay for his care.