The beat goes on
Late Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts still has a few licks left in him.
In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, the surviving members of the band — Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood — revealed that Watts, who died in August at age 80 from an unspecified illness, had participated in new recordings before his death.
“We have a lot of tracks done, so when the tour's finished we'll assess where we are with that and continue,” Jagger, 78, said.
The rockers were in the middle of recording new songs for a followup to 2016's Blue & Lonesome when the pandemic hit in early 2020. One of those songs — Living in a Ghost Town — has had an official release.
“If everything hadn't got closed down, we might've finished the damn thing,” Richards, 77, said.
Wood, 74, was the last to see Watts alive in the same London hospital room where he was treated for cancer in 2020.
“We call it the Rolling Stones suite,” Wood told the Times. “We watched horse racing on TV and just shot the breeze. I could tell he was pretty tired and fed up with the whole deal. He said, `I was really hoping to be out of here by now,' then after that there was a complication or two and I wasn't allowed back. No one was.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Jagger opened up on the Stones' decision to continue with its No Filter tour, which has been on the road since 2017 and is currently in the midst of a 13-date run through the U.S.
“No band is the same when you lose someone. But the Stones is a very resilient band,” he said. “We've been through a lot of ups and downs through the years, and we've had changes of personnel, as have a lot of bands.”
Jagger and Richards wouldn't shed any further light on the new songs, which will serve as the band's first batch of original material since 2005's A Bigger Bang, other than to say that Watts will appear on several tracks.