VALE CHARLIE WATTS
STARS AND FANS PAY THEIR RESPECTS TO THE ICONIC ROLLING STONES DRUMMER
You can’t always get what you want,” so the lyrics of the Rolling Stones song of the same name go, but if anyone was able to disprove that line, the band’s late drummer Charlie Watts could. For more than five decades, his precision drumming, widely acclaimed by his musical peers, was the beat that propelled the Stones to their enduring global success.
With that came fame and an unimaginable wealth, but Watts, who died aged 80 in a London hospital on August 24 surrounded by his family, was the antithesis of the wild, spotlight-seeking stars of his generation.
He was married to his wife Shirley Shepherd for nearly 60 years and the couple shared a daughter, Seraphina, and a granddaughter, Charlotte. In 2018, he told UK music publication NME that the reason his marriage worked was “because I’m not really a rockstar … I don’t have all the trappings of that. I’ve never been interested in doing interviews or being seen”.
Nevertheless, his bandmates, Mick Jagger, 78, Keith Richards, 77, and Ronnie Wood, 74, never took the quiet achiever’s role in their success for granted. “Charlie’s the engine,” said guitarist Wood in the 2003 Stones documentary Tip of the Tongue. “We don’t go anywhere without the engine.” Guitarist Richards then added, “Charlie Watts is the Stones.”
Born in London on June 2, 1941, to a factory worker mother and a lorry driver father, Watts taught himself how to play the drums as a teenager and went on to play in jazz clubs around London. He played his first gig with the Rolling Stones at the Flamingo Club on January 14, 1963.
“When the Stones asked me to join, they talked in terms of a band, a commitment, in other words,” Watts once said. “So, I was like, ‘Oh, this will go on a year, and then next year, it’ll fold up.’”
Not quite. The band went on to produce 30 studio albums. “When we got Charlie that really made it for us,” Richards said, according to Rolling Stone magazine.
The unflappable Watts has also been credited for keeping his wild bandmates in line for more than 50 years. “He was always the person to go to sort issues, he was like their dad,” the group’s touring photographer Denis O’Regan told UK’s Sunday Mirror. “He was the father in the band – the oldest and the most placid unless severely provoked.”
One famous incident of severe provocation occurred in 1984, which was retold by Richards in his autobiography, Life. Richards and Jagger had returned to their hotel around 5am from a night out in Amsterdam when Jagger called Watts, on the phone, asking, “Where’s my drummer?” Around 20 minutes later, Richards recalls in his memoir, an immaculately dressed Watts barged through the door, punched Jagger in the face and said, “Never call me your drummer again. You’re my f--king singer.”
Bandmate brawls aside, Jagger was among the first to honour his friend on social media after his passing, sharing an uncaptioned image of Watts laughing behind his drum set. Other rock legends soon followed suit. “Charlie was a fantastic drummer, steady as a rock,” Paul McCartney posted in a video message. Queen guitarist Brian May summed up his feelings on Instagram: “He was the nicest gent you could ever meet. And such a pillar of strength for the Rolling Stones – to whom he brought a touch of Jazz and a mountain of pure class.”
The beating heart of the Stones has been stilled, but Watts’ legend will live on in the iconic music he co-created.
• By Jennie Noonan
“Charlie Watts is the Stones”
RICHARDS