Charlie Watts 1941–2021
‘The glue that held the Rolling Stones together’
Charlie Watts was a gentleman and a star. Perhaps the least showy drummer in rock history, he played on some of the raunchiest and most explosive records ever made, the quiet force and swinging backbeat in the greatest rock and roll band in the world. And he did it all with a flick of the wrist, while barely breaking a sweat.
A deadpan presence behind the showy antics of his bandmates, Watts was the glue that held The Rolling Stones together. It wasn’t just his playing. Watt’s rocksteady consistency, enduring enthusiasm and complete absence of ego allowed the disparate personalities in the band to clash and collide, assured in the knowledge that Watts would hold the centre. The passing of Charlie Watts casts a very big shadow over the future of The Rolling Stones.
For every rock and roll fan, news of Watt’s death from throat cancer aged 80 will come as a blow. He always seemed the Rolling Stone most suited to gathering moss. Over the decades, age only added an air of refinement to a man who always carried himself with considerable poise. Attired in elegant suits, perfectly accessorised in every detail, he looked just about the coolest English gent you ever clapped eyes on.
While some of his colleagues seem determined to grow old as disgracefully as possible, Watts was mature before his time. He was married to Shirley – his girlfriend from before he even joined the Stones – since 1964. They lived on a working farm in Devonshire, where he cheerfully admitted to whiling away a great deal of time listening to old jazz records and classical music on Radio Three. “I can’t listen to a rock station,” he once told me. “Fifty per cent of it will be so bland. Especially if it’s white musicians playing. And I’m one.”
He was doing himself a disservice. Alongside Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, Watts was the only member of the Rolling Stones to play on all their albums over 58 years together, the man in the driving seat on everything from (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction to Miss You.
He was the last to join the original line up in 1963, forming a supreme rhythm session with bassist Bill Wyman. Watts took the scruffy young blues band to another level, bringing a loose swing that would free them from strict, hard tempos. As Richards would often remark of his favourite drummer: “A lot of people can rock but they forget about the roll.”
From the very beginning, Watts seemed to belong to an older musical world. His great love was jazz, and even in the explosion of rock culture, hippy fashions and rampant experimentalism that the Stones spearheaded in the Sixties and Seventies, Watts comported himself with a quality of aloof separation. A moment to look out for in a Rolling Stones show was Watts’ long-suffering expression whenever Jagger would do something particularly outrageous. There would be a roll of the eyes, a wry smile or a fleeting grimace while the beat played on.
Although he never rated himself compared to the jazz greats he admired, Watts was an innovative drummer. His range expanded from the shuffling samba groove of Sympathy For the Devil to the ice cold snap of Start Me Up and the country crawl of Wild Horses. “You have to be a good drummer to play with the Stones and I try to be as good as I can be,” he told me when I met him at Ronnie Scott’s jazz club in 2000. “It’s terribly simple what I do actually, it’s what I like, the way I like it. I’m not a paradiddle man. I play songs. It’s not technical, it’s emotional. One of the hardest things of all is to get that feeling across.”
The thing Watts most famously disliked about being in the Stones were the longueurs. In 1986, he described his musical career as “20 years of waiting around and five years of playing”. I wonder if he even suspected at that point there would still be another 35 years to go. For a brief period, Watts lost his way in life, drinking too much and dabbling with heroin in the early 80s, which he later seemed incredulous about. “Coffee is the hardest stuff I touch nowadays,” he told me in 2000, sipping a cappuccino. “Keith always warns me about drinking this stuff. He says it’s worse than whisky!” he added, chuckling. “Keith of all people.”
Watts expressed incredible loyalty to his bandmates throughout his career. “I think The Rolling Stones is a very good band,” was his modest assessment. “There’s no fabulous technique or anything but we really work for each other, I love that. They’re great people to play with.
“Mick’s got very quick ears, he’s very loose. I think he’s the best in the world with an audience. He can play ’em like a great fly-fisherman.
“Keith has a way of putting things together, he’s always surprising you, pulling things out the air. And he’s hilariously funny.
“Him and Ron Wood together are one of the great comedy acts, the way they develop situations, their language. It’s actually something I look forward to when we’re going on tour.”
He sometimes touchingly confessed to missing the friendship and company of his long-term rhythm partner, bassist Bill Wyman, who departed the fold in 1993. Yet while Wyman’s departure never seriously threatened the Stones’ continued existence, the loss of Charlie Watts is altogether more worrying. Unusually, the Stones have embraced line-up changes over the years, finding opportunity in adversity with their choice of new members. They are currently on tour in the US, with Steve Jordan (who has played with Keith Richards and the X-pensive Winos, Chuck Berry and the Blues Brothers) standing in for Watts. In the past, both Jagger and Richards have described Watts as irreplaceable, and there was certainly a time when I thought if Watts were to ever pack up his drumsticks, the group would finally grind to a standstill.
But I don’t think that is the case anymore. There is something heroically belligerent about their continued existence, battling on as members fall by the wayside, pushing rock and roll into the undiscovered country of old age. The Rolling Stones are going to rock ’til they drop. And Watts wouldn’t want it any other way.
So let us pause for a moment and pay our respects to the greatest drummer in the greatest rock and roll band in the world. Charlie Watts is gone. The Stones roll on.
‘I think The Rolling Stones is a very good band. There’s no fabulous technique or anything but we really work for each other’
CHARLIE WATTS, the Rolling Stones drummer, who has died aged 80, was the least likely member of the group; yet he was its linchpin – the most respected by musicians and popular with the fans.
Small, delicate-looking and unassuming, Watts was the Stone who never rolled. Fastidious about his appearance, well-manicured and with a penchant for understated Savile Row suits, he never looked happy in a kaftan or designer grunge.
While Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were getting themselves arrested for drugs, pilloried by politicians or chased by screaming girls, Watts carried on undemonstratively playing drums and going home to his wife, Shirley, every night. On tour he would retire early to his hotel room and sketch the bed he slept in to pass the time. When the group were invited to the Playboy Mansion by Hugh Hefner, Watts took advantage of the games room instead of cavorting with Hefner’s harem.
“He got thrown into a thing which really wasn’t part of his self image,” as Keith Richards observed.
Watts’s first love was jazz and, as he frankly admitted, he only went into rock because he was not quite good enough to make it in on the jazz scene of the early 1960s. It was something of an irony that he threw in his lot with a group whose brand of Rhythm and Blues helped to kill off jazz as a popular music form.
But he was the Stone who kept the band together. A spectator at a rehearsal noticed that the other members would play facing Watts “waiting for his approval”. Keith Richards noted that “If Charlie don’t get into it, then I haven’t written something that the Stones can get a groove going on.”
“Don’t ever call me your drummer again,” Watts told Mick Jagger on one occasion: “you’re my f------ singer.”
Watts’s trademark on stage was semi-detached impassiveness. As his colleagues cavorted and wriggled, pouted and leered, Watts took refuge in unshockable Zen-like cool, eyes focused somewhere in the middle distance, as dependable and steady as a rock. Only at the end of the performance would he be coaxed from behind the drum kit to receive what was usually the biggest cheer of the night.
Watts regarded himself not as a star, but as a musician, and disliked the celebrity scene: “Playing the drums was all I was ever interested in, the rest of it made me cringe”. Anecdotes about the Stones were not always affectionate, but no one had a bad word to say about Watts, except himself.
“I don’t really like much of what I’ve done”, he confessed on one occasion. As for the Stones: “We’re a terrible band really, but we are the oldest. That’s some sort of distinction isn’t it?” At home he kept his radio firmly tuned to Radio 3. If he did not quite achieve the legendary status among jazz aficionados that he craved, there were some compensations – a £17 million manor house and stud farm in Devon and a fortune estimated at somewhere between £70 and £80 million.
As biographer Alan Clayson observed, had he stuck with the jazz and blues bands he played with in his early years, “it’s likely that he’d have recouped little more than memories – not all of them golden.”
One of two children, Charles Robert Watts was born in Islington on June 2 1941, the son of a parcel delivery driver for British Rail. Brought up in a prefab in Wembley, he attended Tyler’s Croft Secondary Modern School where he was a talented soccer player and cricketer, then studied graphic design at Harrow School of Art, after which he took a job in the West End advertising agency Charles Hobson and Gray.
His love of jazz went back to his childhood in Wembley where he first heard Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker and Earl Bostic. He shared his enthusiasm with his next-door neighbour, Dave Green, who went on to be a jazz bassist. He bought his first jazz record when he was 13 – Walkin’
by Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker’s quintet, which inspired him to want to learn the drums. Kenny Clarke, the bebop drummer, became his role model.
He made his first drum kit out of Meccano and a cannibalised banjo and, by the time he was working in advertising, was playing drums for local acts. In 1958-9 he and Dave Green played in a jazz band called the Jo Jones All Stars.
He was working in a club called the Troubadour with a group called Blues By Five when he met Alexis Korner, in whose band he played for nine months in 1960.
When he joined the Rolling Stones at the beginning of 1963, it seemed no big deal: “I used to play with loads of bands and the Stones were just another one. I thought they’d last three months.”
Watts went on to play and tour with the Stones for nearly six decades.
In 1964, aged 23, he married Shirley Shephard, an art student with whom he would have one daughter, Seraphina. They lived in Sussex for many years then moved as tax exiles to France. Returning to England in 1980, they bought a stud farm near Barnstaple, where they kept horses and greyhounds.
While other members of the group were indulging their appetites in the carnal and pharmaceutical funfairs of the 1960s and 1970s, Watts avoided the booze-and-drugs lifestyle, though he took his colleagues’ antics in good part. “I wouldn’t want my wife associating with us,” he remarked after some excess or other.
But other aspects of the celebrity lifestyle he found irksome in the extreme: “I loved the adulation when we were on stage,” Watts confessed. “After that I hated it – when you couldn’t walk down the road without people running after you, literally. That was the most awful period of my life.” He was typecast as “the Silent Stone”, explaining, when a journalist asked him why, that it was “because I don’t talk much”. Then, in the early 1980s, just as the other Stones were calming down, he embarked on a two-year midlife crisis, drinking heavily and taking drugs.
On one occasion he passed out and had the ignominy of the famously hell-raising Keith Richards picking him off the floor. But he managed to pull himself away from the abyss to save his marriage.
Watts remained true to his first love, jazz. In 1964, with the Stones in full swing, he published Ode to a High Flying Bird, a booklet of cartoon drawings dedicated to Charlie Parker, and throughout quieter spells of his career with the Stones he performed in jazz clubs.
In 1985 he realised a long-held ambition when he brought his own 35-piece big band to Ronnie Scott’s and took it to America the following year. In the 1990s he performed regularly with his own Charlie Watts Tentet and Charlie Watts Quintet, doing acclaimed tours and recording several albums.
In 2009 he started to perform with the ABC & D of Boogie Woogie together with the pianists Axel Zwingenberger and Ben Waters and with his childhood friend Dave Green on bass. “The tight jeans and the big stages, they’re not my world at all. My world is the Blue Note Club in Paris or Birdland in New York,” he said.
In 2006, Watts was elected into the Modern Drummer Hall of Fame; in the same year, Vanity Fair elected him into the International Best Dressed List Hall of Fame.
Watts put a high value on style and often had a hand in the design of the Stones’ gigs. In 1975, inspired by the way Orleans jazz bands promoted their gigs, he arranged for the Stones to hold a press conference in New York playing Brown Sugar on the back of a truck in the middle of Manhattan traffic. He also contributed graphic art and comic strips to early Rolling Stones records.
Watts collected everything from pocket watches and antique guns to cigarette cards and suits. He shared Mick Jagger’s fondness for cricket and, in 1995, paid £3,600 for a Don Bradman blazer from the 1934 England-australian test series.
In 2004, though he had given up smoking in the 1980s, Watts was treated for throat cancer. The cancer was reported to have gone into remission. Earlier this month he was forced to pull out of an upcoming Stones tour of the US following an unspecified emergency operation – the first time he had missed a tour since 1963. “For once, my timing has been a little off,” he observed.
Charlie Watts is survived by his wife and daughter.