Charlie Watts: the heartbeat of the Rolling Stones

Watts discovered jazz around the age of 10 and, over the decades, kept his hand in, playing with various ensembles throughout his career with the Stones

Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts' calm style counterbalanced the onstage flamboyance of the band's other members

British drummer Charlie Watts, who died on Tuesday at 80, was known as the quiet man of the scandal-soaked Rolling Stones, keeping the beat for the legendary rock group in his own steady style.

Watts' deadpan expression and metronomic rhythms formed an integral part of the band's classic performances, counterbalancing the onstage energy and charisma of singer Mick Jagger and the goofing about between guitarists Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood.

"Through five decades of chaos, drummer Charlie Watts has been the calm at the centre of the Rolling Stones storm, on and off stage," the Mirror wrote in 2012.

"It was very short for me. I just stopped, it didn't suit me at all," he told the tabloid.

"I've never filled the stereotype of the rock star," he told Rolling Stone magazine in 1994. "Back in the 70s, Bill Wyman and I decided to grow beards and the effort left us exhausted."

Born on June 2, 1941 in London, Charles Robert Watts discovered jazz around the age of 10, with the likes of Jelly Roll Morton and Charlie Parker.

But he had no formal training and learned by watching great jazz drummers in London clubs, it says.

Throughout his career with the Stones, Watts actively kept up his love of jazz, as leader of a jazz quintet and tentet, and a 32-piece band called the Charlie Watts Orchestra.

As the Rolling Stones aged, Watts was blase about the prospects of the band splitting.

Watts openly admitted that he often thought of leaving the group.

"Two weeks later, you're fidgeting and your wife says: 'Why don't you go back to work? You're a nightmare.'"

Ten years earlier, Modern Drummer magazine voted him into the Modern Drummer Hall of Fame, alongside other notables such as The Beatles' Ringo Starr and Keith Moon of The Who.

He pulled out of the Stones' Covid-postponed US tour, scheduled for September 2021, as he recovered from a medical procedure.

The band were last seen at the One World: Together At Home concert in April 2020, performing a socially distanced rendition of their 1969 classic "You Can't Always Get What You Want".

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