Farewell to Charlie, the reluctant Stone loyal to one woman
He was the modest genius who gave the band their magic. But Charlie Watts, who’s died at 80, hated being a star, stayed loyal to one woman... and gave Mick a right hook for calling him ‘my drummer’
This is the eternal image of the Rolling stones – Keith Richards grinding out the dirty guitar riffs, Mick Jagger prancing as he taunts the stadium crowd: ‘i know it’s only rock’n’roll but i like it, yes i do.’ Except Charlie Watts didn’t. The backbone of the band, the man whose driving rhythm was the tireless heartbeat of the greatest rock’n’roll group in the world, never had much affection for the music he played for 60 years.
his self-effacing patter and genial dismissal of everything he achieved has tempted some observers to take him at his word. Charlie Watts was estimated to be worth £165million – despite writing none of the stones’ hits. he described himself as ‘just very lucky’.
But the rest of the band knew better. he was the keel that kept them from capsizing, the creative energy that stopped them getting stale and the talent that kept their music grooving.
if you’ve ever danced to a Rolling stones song, you’ve danced to Charlie Watts.
his jazz-tinged beat was the magic that made them swing while other bands just stomped.
Though no cause has been stated, his death comes two weeks after he revealed that an emergency operation meant he would be unable to join the stones on the
rescheduled dates for the Us leg of the band’s No Filter tour, which is due to open in st Louis, Missouri, on september 26.
Announcing the news, he joked: ‘For once, my timing’s a bit off.’
he adored playing the drums. he lived for that. But it wasn’t the type of music that he aspired to make, nor that he listened to, given a choice.
The best reason for recording new albums, over the past 30 years or so, was that ‘it gives us something different to play on stage,’ he said. ‘it’s not Brown sugar again.’ The implication was that he was sick to death of the classic stones catalogue. Asked to rate the best years of the band’s career across six decades, he would say – without hesitation – it was the brief period from 1969 to 1974 with Mick Taylor as lead guitarist, following the death of Brian Jones.
Those were the years that saw them record Let it Bleed, sticky Fingers and Exile On Main street. But asked to pick a few favourite tracks, Charlie would just shake his head.
‘i don’t listen to those LPs much,’ he always said.
His disdain for the traditions of rock included a hatred for festival crowds and stadiums. ‘i don’t want to do it,’ he shrugged, as the band prepared for a headline appearance at Glastonbury in 2015. ‘i don’t like playing outdoors and i certainly don’t like festivals. Glastonbury, it’s old hat really. it’s not what i’d like to do for a weekend, i can tell you.’ What he wanted to do was play jazz.
‘in jazz you’re closer. in a football stadium, you can’t say you’re closely knit together. it’s difficult to know what Mick’s up to when you can’t even see him. he’s half a mile away.’ he moaned just as much about going on tour. ‘i play drums,’ he said wearily.
‘The only way to play drums is to be away from home. it’s the blight of my life.
‘When i get a call from Mick or Keith, it’s a call to arms – five months on the road.’
he hated the spotlight too, rarely giving interviews or hanging out with celebrities. ‘The only time i love attention is when i walk onstage,’ he said. ‘When i walk off, i don’t want it.’ That contempt for rock’s shallow rewards extended to his love life. While the rest of the band enjoyed notorious and very public affairs with supermodels and actresses, Charlie married his wife shirley in 1964 and was unshakeably faithful to her.
Bassist Bill Wyman recalled in his memoirs a band meeting in 1965 when all the stones, then surfing their first tidal wave of fame, compared how many groupies they’d slept with in the past two years: ‘i’d had 278 girls, Brian [Jones]
130, Mick about 30, Keith 6, and Charlie none.’
The rock life bored him. He and Shirley shunned the bright lights of London and New York, instead opting for life at Halsdon Manor, near Dolton, a rural village in north Devon, where they owned an Arabian horse stud farm.
In the late Eighties, Watts summed up his career as ‘five years of playing, 20 years of hanging around’. By the Noughties, he had another way to describe it: ‘Four decades of seeing Mick’s bum running around in front of me.’ And then there was the way he looked and dressed. Even when the rest of the band were in tie-dye and kaftans, Charlie wore his suit and tie.
All in all, he was the most unlikely rocker in music history. Yet he was also the mainstay, the man who kept the group together – both on and off stage.
No matter how wrecked Keith was, or if a backstage row meant none of the band were talking to each other, Charlie was always rock solid and imperturbable.
Asked how he kept Jagger and Richards from strangling each other, he shrugged and replied: ‘Oh, that. Brothers, innit. Brothers in arms. You just let it take its course, really.’
Born on June 2, 1941, Watts grew up in a prefab house in Kingsbury, north-west London, after his family’s neighbourhood was razed during the Blitz. As a boy he was a gifted artist and earned a place at Harrow Art School before taking a job as a graphic designer.
That passion for drawing never left him, and he produced cartoons and comic strips for some of the band’s album covers – as well as making a sketch, he claimed, of practically every hotel room he ever stayed in.
But despite his artistic talent, it was jazz that obsessed him. He listened incessantly to the New Orleans ragtime pianist Jelly Roll Morton and big band leader Duke Ellington, before discovering modern jazz through bebop stylist Charlie Parker.
His father, a lorry driver, bought him his first drum kit and Charlie began to play at coffee shops and local clubs with bands such as the Jo Jones All Stars (who, despite their name, were all complete unknowns). His break came when the broadcaster Alexis Korner asked him to sit in with his band, Blues Incorporated. Watts claimed that he’d never heard of ‘rhythm and blues’, and assumed it meant slow jazz.
Instead, he found himself in Britain’s first electric blues band, playing at the Ealing Club to an ecstatic audience that included a teenage Rod Stewart, Jimmy Page and Paul Jones.
THROUGH those gigs, Charlie started playing for laughs with a bunch of young blues aficionados, including a grammar school boy called Mick and his mates Keith and Brian, as well as piano player Ian Stewart. Joined a year later by Wyman on bass, they played their first gig at the Marquee Club in July 1962.
He had already met his wife, who used to come to the Blues Inc rehearsals. Shirley shared
Charlie’s indomitable streak, but while he showed it by quietly doing his own thing, she was never afraid of a confrontation.
When Jagger decided to ban girlfriends from Stones recording sessions Shirley simply ignored him.
She and Chrissie Shrimpton, who was Mick’s girlfriend in the mid-Sixties, turned up at the studio and refused to leave.
‘We sat there,’ Chrissie remembered, ‘with Mick pulling faces at us through the control room glass.’
It was his wife’s no-nonsense attitude that gave Charlie his confidence in the face of the other bandmates’ prima-donna excesses. ‘She is an incredible woman,’ he said. ‘The one regret I have of this life is that I was never home enough. But she always says when I come off tour that I am a nightmare and tells me to go back out.’
Shirley didn’t enjoy the band’s most famous gig, the free concert in Hyde Park in 1969, two days after Brian Jones was found face down in his swimming pool.
His wife’s dudgeon was Watts’ chief memory of the concert: ‘She got hit with a stale sandwich, on the back. I remember her going mad with that. It obviously hurt.’
He also remembered the debacle with the butterflies. At the climax of the show, Jagger released a boxful, to symbolise the ascent of Brian’s spirit to another dimension (or something like that).
Unfortunately, after hours in an unventilated container, most of the butterflies had suffocated. ‘I didn’t like that,’ Charlie said. ‘The casualty rate was worse than the Somme. Half of them were dead.’
It was Shirley and their daughter Seraphina who saved his life, when he seemed in danger of succumbing to the excesses that were ordinary aspects of life to other rockers.
Throughout the Seventies, when Richards and Mick Taylor were steeped in heroin addiction, Charlie didn’t even bother with debauchery. ‘Bill and I decided to grow beards,’ he said. ‘The effort left us exhausted.’
But in the early Eighties, ‘I became totally another person. At the end of two years on speed and heroin, I was very ill.
‘My daughter used to tell me I looked like Dracula. I nearly lost my wife and everything over my behaviour. I went mad, really. I nearly killed myself.’
EvEn Keith was concerned. After Charlie passed out in the studio, the guitarist brought him round and warned him he was overdoing it. Worse, he was being unprofessional. That shook him. ‘This is Keith, who I’ve seen in all sorts of states doing all sorts of things.’ But the decision to sober up came when he broke his ankle while playing the drums at Ronnie Scott’s jazz nightclub.
‘I had to get straight. So I just stopped cold – for me and my wife.’
With Charlie in bad shape, the Stones were closer to disintegration than they had ever been. Jagger was forging a solo career, and the drummer saw that as cashing in on the band’s reputation.
He agreed to play on Mick’s first album, as did Keith, but didn’t turn up for the initial recording session.
Jagger was fuming and, drinking in his hotel around 5am, phoned Charlie’s room. ‘Where’s my drummer?’ he demanded.
Charlie put the phone down. Half an hour later, he knocked on Mick’s door.
Keith opened it: ‘He walked straight past me. Savile Row suit, perfectly dressed. Tie. Shaved. The whole bit. I could smell the cologne.
‘He got ahold of Mick and said, “never call me your drummer again. You’re my singer.” Then he gave him a right hook.’
Within 12 hours, Charlie had returned to the studio. ‘It takes a lot to wind that man up,’ Richards mused.
For all the ructions, he never lost his respect for his bandmates. The Stones were better than all their rivals, he believed, because ‘we’ve always been about playing properly.
‘I don’t mean technically brilliant. But Mick wouldn’t dance well if the sound was bad. Mick is the show, really. We back him. You know, the costumes you’re wearing, that’s candyfloss, it’s froth. What you’re really doing is playing the drums.’
The rest of the band knew they owed it all to him. When the last note has died away, says Keith, ‘I want to be buried next to Charlie Watts.’