Words: Tom Ward
Famous for infusing the Rolling Stones’ music with a jazzy swing — a roll, as much as a rock — Charlie Watts, a session-player-turned-essential-member of the timeless band, has died this week at the age of 80.
Having originally trained as a graphic artist, Watts joined the Stones in 1963 at the age of 21 — and remained with the band until his death. Renowned for enduring grooves on songs like Honky Tonk Women and Brown Sugar, Watts helped re-define rock drumming, lending it a laconic swagger that stood out next to the neat-and-tidy efforts of similar bands of the era. “It was Charlie who brought the dance beat,” David Hepworth said of the band in The Times.
On a personal level, Watts was regarded as quiet and considerate — a charming antidote to Jagger’s flamboyant peacock, who cared less about women and cars and more about clothes and art. (Tellingly, he collected cars for their aesthetic value alone — and never held a driving licence).
“He was quiet, drily funny and unfailingly modest, characteristics theoretically better suited to his initial profession as a graphic designer than the scream-rent world of 60s pop,” wrote Alexis Petridis in the Guardian. Watts did, in fact, work with Jagger to create many of the Stones’ more elaborate stage sets.
As for his own take on his life with the Stones, Watts remained characteristically blasé, describing his part in one of the biggest bands in the world as “five years of work and 20 years of hanging around”.
While it’d be impossible to sum up 80 years of innovation and spirit in one article, we’ve compiled six of his most memorable moments below.
Watts with the band in 2002 — sporting his iconic bespoke tailoring
Watts was only known to have lost his temper once
Perhaps the most famous story about Watts sees him take umbrage with his strutting counterpart, Mick Jagger. The tale goes that, hanging out in an Amsterdam hotel, Jagger called Watt’s room and demanded: “Where’s my drummer?”
According to Keith Richard’s 2010 memoir, Watts turned up to Jagger’s room 20 minutes later, clean shaven and wearing a Savile Row suit. He told Jagger: “Never call me your drummer again. You’re my singer.”
Richards recalls Watts then hauled Jagger up by the lapels “and gave him a right hook”.
“Mick fell back onto a silver platter of smoked salmon on the table and began to slide towards the open window and the canal below it,” Richards wrote.
(“The most legendary story about Watts — the possibly apocryphal one about him losing his temper when Mick Jagger referred to him as ‘my drummer’, punching him in the face and telling him he was, in fact, Watts’s singer — is legendary because it seemed so utterly out of character,” wrote Alexis Petridis in the Guardian.)
Watts in 1964 — one year into his long tenure with the Stones
He was an artist in more ways than one
Watts trained as a graphic designer at the Harrow School of Art, and was working in that profession before his rock career took off. Having illustrated some of the band’s early album covers, Watts became known for a very un rock ’n’ roll way of killing time in hotel rooms: sketching every bed he slept in.
In fact, in 2001 Watts estimated he had more than 15 books full of such drawings. “They are a diary,” he recalled on Desert Island Discs. “I started in 1967 as something to do – and now I can’t miss a single one.”
His artistic flair extended to the live arena too — in 1975 he orchestrated the band’s famous New York press conference from the back of a truck.
The band in 1986. From left: Wyman, Watts, Richards, Jagger and Wood
He was a dedicated follower of fashion
“I’m saving the bespoke tailoring industry single-handedly,” Watts once joked. “I have this disease – I see a swatch [of material] and I have to have a jacket made.”
Thought to have owned more than 200 suits, Watts was a good friend to Saville Row, and would frequently commission bespoke designs. On tour he even had a special travelling trunk with room to hang his shirts so that they would arrive in the best possible condition. Apparently his sartorial obsession came from his father and the film stars of the 1940s and 50s.
Alongside suits, Watts was known to be an avid collector, with a stable of horses and, for a short period, 24 dogs at home on his farm in Devon. “I’ve always been like that,” he said on Desert Island Discs. “When I lived in Brighton, I would collect collar starchers from vintage shops.”
“While his bandmates were bedding 1000s of women, and buying 16th Century manors by mistake, Watts was collecting collar starchers and listening to Tony Hancock” Alex Diggins wrote in the Telegraph.
Watts in 1978
He ditched drugs with sultanas
The Eighties was a rough patch for Watts. As part of one of the most excessive rock bands on the planet, even the mild-mannered drummer couldn’t escape the grip of drugs and alcohol. All of that changed when he broke his ankle after falling down some stairs on his way to retrieve a bottle of wine.
“I nearly lost my life and my marriage,” he said of a period in his 40s when heroin and alcohol had taken hold of him. “I was another person. I was Dracula, living the life of a junkie. And it frightened me. I couldn’t explain it. I don’t know why I did it.”
Richards reportedly found Watts on the studio floor after he had blacked out and set him on the straight and narrow. “Keith picked me up — this is Keith, who I’ve seen in all sorts of states doing all sorts of things,” Watts said. “And [Keith] said, ‘This is the sort of thing you do when you’re 60.’”
Watts reportedly went cold turkey, kicking his habit with a six month diet of water and sultanas.
In Hyde Park, 1969
He remained faithful to the same woman for 58 years
The Rolling Stones may as well have invented sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll — but Watts was different. Speaking to the New York Times in 2003, Watts said that while he “loved playing with Keith [Richards] and the band,” he “wasn’t interested in being a pop idol sitting there with girls screaming.”
Instead, Watts married Shirley Ann Shepard, whom he had met before joining the group. “I hated the girls chasing me down the road,” he told Desert Island Discs. “The way I live is very monastic and kind of disciplined.”
The relationship stayed strong up to his death, following a dynamic many married couples might recognise. “I hate having to leave, but my wife will push me out the door and say: ‘It’s time to get to work,’” Watts said. “We have a huge farm, with lots of animals, and she thinks I get in the way.”
Watts and the band meet Princess Diana at the Royal Albert Hall, 1983
He wasn't a fan of drum solos
Today, any drummer worth their sticks is expected to throw a drum solo into a set. Like the indulgent guitar solos of the 70s and beyond, it’s become a staple of a live rock show. But Watts, one of rock drumming’s pioneers, wasn’t so keen on showing off.
“I get fed up halfway through attempting to do one,” he once told an interviewer.
“I am not a paradiddle man. I play songs,” he told Telegraph music critic Neil McCormick in 2000. “It’s not technical, it’s emotional. One of the hardest things is to get that feeling across.”
According to Richards, Watts’ sense of style and order extended to his playing, and his kit. “At the end of the show, he’ll leave the stage, and the sirens will be going, limousines waiting, and Charlie will walk back to his drumkit and change the position of his drumsticks by 2 millimeters,” Richards said. “Then he’ll look at it. Then if it looks good, he’ll leave. The drums are about to be stripped down and put in the back of a truck, and he cannot leave if he’s got it in his mind that he’s left his sticks in a displeasing way.”
What a way to make an exit.
Read next: The man who shot the seventies: Mick Rock breaks down his most iconic photographs
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