Jagger: One minute I was talking to Charlie about our US tour... the next he was gone
SIR Mick Jagger has spoken movingly of his final conversation with Charlie Watts hours before The Rolling Stones’ drummer’s death.
The 79-year-old singer said he’d felt sure Watts would recover from heart surgery because Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood had beaten a similar illness.
But unexpected complications emerged and drummer Watts died in a London hospital last year after pulling out of the band’s delayed No Filter tour of North America.
Jagger said: ‘It was all so quick. That was the shocking part of it. One minute I was speaking to him about the tour and what the logo was going to be and the next minute he was gone.’
In an interview with author Paul Sexton for Charlie’s Good Tonight: The Authorised Biography Of Charlie Watts, Jagger said his friend had been reticent about going on tour because he hadn’t been feeling well.
But he’d assured Jagger: ‘You’re the cheerleader of the group and if you say I should do it, I’ll do it. Of course I will. I’m happy to.’
However, by mid-summer last year it had become clear 80-year-old Watts was not well enough. In August the Stones’ official website announced that although he’d undergone a successful operation, he couldn’t attend rehearsals.
In an extract from the book published in yesterday’s Times Magazine, Jagger said: ‘I was speaking to him in hospital and, because he was so untechnical, I sent him a big iPad to watch the cricket on. I set it all up with the apps and he watched some of it on that.
‘But Ronnie had had a similar illness and got better and that’s why I guess I was so confident Charlie was going to do the same thing.’
Wood, however, was not so sure. He told Sexton: ‘The last few days of his hospitalisation, he was like, “I don’t like this,” because he went to a certain level of treatment, then they decided to do some extra work on him.’
He went on: ‘We were already well into rehearsals when we got the news. We had a day off and thought, well, Charlie doesn’t want us to sit around and mope. We’ll just get on with it.’ It is the first time members of the band have spoken about their final, private moments with Watts as he lay in hospital.
However, the Stones made a series of emotional tributes online after his death last August.
Watts had previously recovered from throat cancer in 2004. Yet by 2018, according to Jagger, both family and band members were increasingly worried about his ‘picky’ eating and the singer resorted to nagging Watts about managing his diet.
‘I would force him to eat with me at night,’ he said. ‘Me and Charlie are probably putting out the most energy [during a gig] and he was probably putting out more than I am. You’d don’t get to stop and you can’t f*** up. If I don’t want to run to the other side of the stage, no one’s going to tell me I have to.
‘If Charlie stops playing, then you’re f ***** .’