Obituary: Charlie Watts, Rolling Stones drummer, 1941-2021
Mild-mannered drummer Charlie Watts grumbled about fame and was baffled by the excesses of his bandmates’ rock’n’roll lifestyle.
Charlie Watts may have been the most mild-mannered member of the Rolling Stones, but he saw red when Mick Jagger made the mistake of possessively referring to him as “my drummer”.
It happened one night in Amsterdam in 1984 and according to Keith Richards’s autobiography, the drummer hauled Jagger up by his lapels and gave him a punishing right hook that sent him sprawling across a table laden with platters of smoked salmon.
Self-effacing and low maintenance as he was, Watts had his pride and Jagger’s slight had pushed him too far. The next day Watts was still so angry that he told Richards, “F..k it, I’m gonna do it again”, and had to be physically restrained by his bandmate.
It was a rare explosion by the normally placid Watts, and Jagger was careful never to disrespect his drummer again. The Stones rode the losses of Brian Jones, their founder member, and bassist Bill Wyman, but Jagger thereafter always insisted that there could “never be a Rolling Stones without Charlie”.
As a counterweight to the flamboyance of Jagger and Richards, Watts’s phlegmatic presence was a vital ingredient in the Stones’ often volatile chemistry. Yet in many ways he was an unlikely member of a group that in its pomp boasted of being the rowdiest, noisiest, nastiest rock’n’roll band in the world. Despite six decades in the job, Watts never seemed entirely comfortable with being a rock star. “He’s modest and shy and the idea of stardom horrifies him. He’s a very secretive man,” Richards said.
Throughout his life he preferred jazz to rock music and he was the closest thing to a conservative Rolling Stone. The phrase sounds like an oxymoron, but Watts was a creature of habit who valued stability above rock’n’roll mayhem.
While his bandmates dressed like outlaws, Watts was a style icon who preferred smart Savile Row tailoring, well-polished brogues and expensive eau de cologne. The Daily Telegraph and Vanity Fair both voted him in their lists of the world’s best-dressed men.
His watchword was constancy. He spent almost 60 years in the same band and was faithfully married to his wife, Shirley, for more than half a century. When the Stones weren’t touring the world he ran his own jazz combo. With characteristic loyalty the line-up included his childhood next-door neighbour, whom he had known since he was three years old.
The low-key informality of club gigs with his jazz mates was in stark contrast to the circus extravagance that surrounded a Stones tour and he relished the absence of hoopla. “It’s great because you just walk on, start the set and at the end you can go home,” he observed.
On the road with the Stones, Watts displayed a distaste if not a disdain for the rock’n’roll lifestyle. While others partied wildly, he avoided the temptations of the road and spent his time sketching his hotel room and its furnishings. He claimed to have drawings of every room in which he had ever stayed and deadpanned that on non-concert days he could often be found going to bed about the same time that Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood were getting up.
“We won’t do this again. At least I won’t. It’s too much,” he told The Times at the end of one of the group’s gargantuan world tours in the late 1990s. But then he admitted he had been saying that at the end of every tour since 1972.
Nobody believed him, least of all himself, but his grumbling became part of his routine. Asked to describe his own character, he replied: “Miserable most of the time, sitting in the back, moaning about things”, a reply that drew on the spirit of the 1950s radio comedy It’s That Man Again and its famous catchphrase: “It’s being so cheerful as keeps me going.”
His protests reached a peak when the Stones headlined Glastonbury for the only time in their career in 2013. “I don’t want to do it but everyone else does,” he grumbled. “I don’t like playing outdoors and I certainly don’t like festivals.”
He played the gig, of course, and was still on the road with the Stones in 2021, when he was forced to bow out of an autumn tour after an operation for an unspecified medical condition. “I say I’ll retire and then I have two weeks off and my wife says, ‘Aren’t you going to work?’ ” he said.
If his temperament was conservative, he was also a genuine English eccentric with a passion for collecting things he could never use. He never learnt to drive but had a garage full of vintage cars. According to Richards he bought a 1936 Alfa Romeo “just to look at the dashboard”.
When Jagger introduced the band in concert and the spotlight was turned on Watts, the drummer acknowledged the applause with nothing more than an apologetic shake of his leg and the briefest of paradiddles on his snare drum. Stones fans loved him for his stoicism and the eruption of the crowd was in inverse proportion to the minimalism of his response. “For the band, I want everyone to love us and go crazy, but when I walk off, I don’t want it. I never could deal with it and still can’t,” he said.
Yet his swinging, rhythmic drumming style suited the Stones to perfection. He eschewed the flashy and self-indulgent drum solos favoured by the likes of Led Zeppelin, but his indestructible beat powered the Stones’ 1960s pop hits such as (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction, Get Off Of My Cloud, and 19th Nervous Breakdown and grounded the monstrous riffs on such rock classics as Jumpin’ Jack Flash, Honky Tonk Women and Brown Sugar.
“Charlie’s always there, but he doesn’t want to let everybody know,” Richards said. “People think Mick and Keith are the Rolling Stones. But if Charlie wasn’t doing what he’s doing on drums, that wouldn’t be true at all. You’d find out that Charlie Watts is the Rolling Stones.”
Born Charles Robert Watts in 1941 in north London during the Blitz, he grew up in a “prefab” in Wembley after being bombed out of the family home. His father, Charles Watts, was a lorry driver and his mother, Lillian, a housewife.
He grew up listening to his father’s Frank Sinatra records and fell in love with jazz at an early age. After an early abandoned affair with the banjo, he cited Walkin’ Shoes by the American saxophonist Gerry Mulligan as the piece of music that convinced him to become a drummer.
By then he had failed his 11-plus and was at Tyler’s Croft Secondary Modern School, where he showed some talent as an artist and on the sports field as a footballer and cricketer.
His parents bought him his first drum kit when he was 14 and while other teenagers were dancing to Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry, Watts was listening to records by Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker in his bedroom with his next-door neighbour Dave Green.
By the age of 16, both were playing together in a local jazz combo while Watts attended Harrow art school. Green was still playing bass in the jazz band Watts ran as a side project from the Rolling Stones more than 60 years later.
By 1961 Watts was playing the London jazz clubs with the likes of Chris Barber, and met the British blues pioneer Alexis Korner, who asked him to join his band Blues Incorporated, where he met Jagger, who occasionally guested as a singer.
Jagger also had his own group which already included Richards and Jones, but lacked a regular drummer. When Watts was asked to join in the summer of 1962, he refused, preferring his secure job as a designer in an advertising agency. He subsequently admitted that at the time he was convinced rock’n’roll “wasn’t going to last five minutes”. Six months later he relented and Watts made his first public appearance with the Rolling Stones in January 1963 at the Flamingo Club in Soho. Yet he still stubbornly refused to give up his day job until the Stones signed their first recording contract with Decca later that year.
For a while he lived with Jagger, Richards and Jones in an infamously sordid flat in Chelsea. But after the Stones had scored their first chart hits with Come On and I Wanna Be Your Man, he moved to an apartment overlooking Regent’s Park and married his art student girlfriend, Shirley Shepherd. Fearing his marriage would upset the Stones’ army of screaming teenage female fans, he figured that the fewer people who knew the better and didn’t even tell his bandmates or Andrew Loog Oldham, the Stones’ manager.
Domesticity reinforced his image as the quiet and unostentatious Stone. While Jagger and Richards got themselves into endless high-profile scrapes, Watts did his best to stay aloof from the group’s “lock up your daughters” notoriety, determined to maintain his privacy, even as he was required to live his professional life in full public view.
On the group’s first trip to Australia in 1965, eschewing the attraction of groupies and hangers-on, he spent more money on long-distance phone calls home every day to Shirley than he earned on the tour.
By that year, he had used his share of the proceeds from the group’s growing list of chart-topping hits to become one of the first of rock music’s country squires, buying a 16th-century timbered mansion in Sussex once owned by Lord Shawcross. The couple’s daughter, Seraphina, was born there in 1968. She was later expelled from Millfield School for smoking cannabis and has spent much of her adult life abroad, living in Bermuda for many years and now Rhode Island.
The hippy era found Watts cast as a square peg in a psychedelically decorated round hole. “I hated all that. To me the 1960s was Miles Davis and three-button suits,” he said. While the other band members experimented with mind-expanding drugs, Watts declined to join them and felt alienated when Jagger, Richards and Jones were all busted for drugs.
He was also deeply unhappy when the Stones were forced to become tax exiles in 1971. Quintessentially English in his tastes, he spent a miserable year living in the Vaucluse in France while the Stones recorded the druggie Exile On Main St album at Richards’s rented house on the Riviera.
Returning to Britain at the earliest opportunity, he subsequently bought an estate in Devon where he stabled horses and took up breeding sheepdogs.
Having survived the drug scene of the 1960s unscathed, for reasons he was never fully able to explain he started taking heroin in the 1980s. “I had never done serious drugs when I was younger but at this point in my life I went, ‘sod it, I’ll do it now’,” he recalled. “Looking back, I think it was a midlife crisis. I became totally another person and I nearly lost my wife and everything over my behaviour.”
His haggard, smack-haunted look led to him acquiring the nickname “Dracula” but he cured himself of his addictions after taking a potentially fatal fall down a flight of stone steps while under the influence. “I was in the cellar getting a bottle of wine and it brought it home to me how far down I’d gone,” he said. “I thought, enough is enough. So I stopped drinking, smoking, taking drugs – everything, all at once.”
His sobriety was sorely needed, for by the time he had straightened himself out there were other destructive forces tearing the Stones apart. When a ruinous rift between Jagger and Richards resulted in them not speaking to each other for several years in the mid-1980s, Watts was cast in the role of arbitrator. The punch with which he laid out Jagger notwithstanding, it is unlikely that without his diplomatic skills the Stones would have survived.
As the Stones embarked upon a series of box office-breaking world tours in later years, Watts found a new role, putting to use his early training as a graphic designer to help create the band’s elaborate stage sets.
Despite his moaning about life on the road, he admitted that he could not envisage doing anything else. “This band doesn’t mean everything to me and I don’t really care if it stops,” he observed in the 1980s when the Stones weren’t even halfway through their long and colourful existence. “But I don’t know what else I’d do. I think I’d go mad.”
Charlie Watts, Rolling Stones drummer, was born on June 2, 1941. He died after a period of illness on August 24, 2021, aged 80
The Times
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