Paul Sexton - Charlies Good Tonight: the Life, the Times, and the Rolling Stones: the Authorized Biography of Charlie Watts

To the memory of Mum and Dad,

with eternal gratitude for their

love and encouragement

Charlie was an incredibly open-minded musician, and there was a real subtlety about his playing. He was so catholic in his taste, through jazz, boogie-woogie, blues, classical, African music, dance, reggae and dumb pop songs that just happened to be good. People always say he was a great jazz fan, but he wasnt just that. Its over-simplifying his musical tastes, and what he liked to play.

Its a bit of a myth that Charlie didnt go out. Of course he did. We used to go to watch sport, and to lots of fashionable places, to eat and to hear music. In the studio we would often play just on our own, every kind of music, after everyone had gone home or before people turned up. Sometimes hed play these African beats, and some of the things he did were amazing. He wasnt super-technical, but he was very adaptive, so when he got a new beat, he got very excited about it.

He was a classical music fan, too. He liked Dvok, Debussy, Mozart, and he and I used to listen to Stockhausen and Mahler. We listened to modern composers and tried to figure out what the hell they were on about.

He was intelligent, and softly spoken, but he could be direct and say what he thought. He would keep his private life very private, but we understood each others thought processes. Charlie was a very quiet person, but he had a great sense of humour and we laughed all the time. I miss him in so many ways.

Mick Jagger

June 2022

Every time I think, Im going to talk about Charlie Watts, you realise the essential man wasnt something you put into words. Charlie was a presence, and when you were with him, that was it.

With Charlie and me, it was basically structured around humour. We took the piss out of people without even talking. We had a sort of visual sign language, necessary between a rhythm guitar player and a drummer, because you have to communicate in certain ways. But we developed a language to a finer art where it could encompass irony, being pissed off, or on stage: OK, now were flying, how do we land?

Charlies humour was incredibly dry and understated, but I knew certain key words, which Im not going to release. I didnt do it often, but there were a couple of words I could say that if he was in the middle of an airport, he would lie down and start laughing with his legs in the air. The odd time that I got him in that position, luckily, we were in hotel rooms, because sometimes youd get hysterical laughter, and hed let it all out in one big go. And God knows what the joke was. As usual with that sort of laugh, whatever kicked it off was not really that funny.

He was a very private man. I always had the feeling that I wouldnt necessarily step over or enquire about something, unless he wanted to talk about it. There was no side on him, there was no act to follow. Charlie was just what you got, which was Charlie. He was the realest guy I ever met.

Keith Richards

June 2022

The first time I met Charlie Watts was on Eel Pie Island. It was a Wednesday, first day of May. I had seen the Stones live for the first time the previous Sunday at the Station Hotel in Richmond. I had not spoken to him I may have nodded at Mick and Keith but I only spoke with Brian Jones, at the time the groups designated spokesman.

Id been overwhelmed by the band at the Station Hotel. I had no idea what it really was, except that it had changed my mind about so much, and I wanted in. By the following Wednesday I was hustling on behalf of myself and my landlord, the agent Eric Easton, who rented me a room and phone on Regent Street. The gig had ended, and I was nervously hanging around wanting to pass the audition and get on with it.

I was standing next to Charlie and his kit. I had no idea what to talk about, so I offered to help him schlep his kit. He smiled and declined my offer; he already knew better and that my skills lay elsewhere. He had mesmerised me at the Station Hotel, as had they all.

In my first autobiography Stoned, I wrote: The drummer appeared to have been beamed in, and it seemed you didnt so much hear him as feel him. I enjoyed the presence he brought to the group as well as his playing. Unlike the jacketless other five, he had the two top buttons of his jacket done up meticulously over a just as neat button-down shirt and tie, unaffected by the weather in the room. Body behind kit, head turned right in a distant, mannered disdain for the showing of hands waving at 78rpm in front of him. He was with the Stones, but not of them, kinda blue, like hed been transported for the evening from Ronnie Scotts or Birdland, where hed been driving in another Julian Cannonball Adderley time and space. He was the one and only, all-time man of his world, gentleman of time, space and the heart. His rare musical talent is an expression of his bigger talent for life: Id just met Charlie Watts.

Our last sessions together were We Love You and Dandelion. As happened on many a Stones tune going in, there was no pre-arranged ending better to see if the meat and potatoes were in place before applying the veg. The ending was a mlange of Nicky Hopkins and Brian Jones on keyboards and woodwind, Keith and Mick on hallowed vocals and Charlie leading the fray with improvised fills. At the time I thought the fills were just for me. They were not, they were just Charlie-appropriate.

In the 80s Charlie dropped by for something in New York during one of his solo jazz jaunts. I made the mistake of playing him something I had been working on. He was just not interested. Andrew, he said, perhaps by way of an explanation, I just dont care about what the Stones are about. Im only interested in what I play. Fortunately the rough patch faded, the get-over-it, get-on-with-it yell prevailed and the band played on. I saw him last in Seattle in 2005, exactly the same fellow Id said hello to on Eel Pie Island.

In the movie world they talk about the golden era. Ours was Charlie Watts. All the great bands have one thing in common: a different drummer.

Andrew Loog Oldham

June 2022

A Man Out of Time, Always in Time

Madison Square Garden, New York, November 1969. As the greatest rock n roll band in the world, newly anointed thus by tour MC Sam Cutler, ease out of Chuck Berrys Little Queenie and into their most recent No. 1 Honky Tonk Women, Mick Jagger offers a conversational observation: Charlies good tonight, innee?

Of course he was, and he always would be. The very mention of Charlie Wattss name, in the context of this biography or however it may arrive in the conversation, is enough to have fellow musicians and fans alike practically standing to attention. Which is exactly the sort of eulogy he would have run a mile from, as he did throughout a truly singular and unlikely life.

Charlie was the proof that not all rock stars are created equal, and that clichs are there to be avoided. Such as the one that, in his mind, he was a rock star at all. He was the global celebrity who hated attention and once said that he preferred the company of dogs to humans; the car enthusiast who didnt drive; the horseman who didnt ride; the man of wealth and taste who grew up in a prefab; the drummer who toured the world for five and a half decades and spent all of them yearning to be back home; the jobbing musician who thought the Stones would be finished in a year, and ended up as their pilot light with a whole-life tariff. If you made him up you would find few believers.

To be writing about him in the past tense is innately sad, but he would probably have avoided reading this book in any case. I can imagine he might have looked to see which photographs we had chosen of him in his besuited elegance, but that would be it. It is, I hope, a gentle tale of a life well lived and certainly well loved. If youre looking for controversy, youre looking under the wrong Stone.