Charlie Watts: Me, retire? What am I gonna do? Mow the lawn?The Rolling Stones drummer talks about touring, the problem with Prince’s underpants and why, at 75, he still won’t hang up his sticksJohn Bungey
May 5 2017, 12:01am, The Times
It’s surprising to learn what Charlie Watts — drummer with that fine advert for an active old age, the Rolling Stones — can remember about his past. “I was born in 1941, and I do remember the Anderson [bomb] shelter and I remember planes going overhead in my nan’s back garden.”
And it’s surprising what he doesn’t. “I can’t really remember a lot about the Stones,” he says. “It was quite pleasing to me when we became successful in the Sixties. But I used to hate being recognised. When it was girls screaming down the street I felt very uncomfortable.” He shrugs. “To me it was so . . . unhip,” says Charlie the jazzman.
Unhip?
“Yeah to me Tubby Hayes [bebop saxophonist of the Sixties] was hip. Georgie Fame was hip. This bloody other world [of pop] was a bit minor to me. I’ve always felt like that.”
Watts and his fellow drummer Keith Moon of The Who in 1968
AVALONWatts is not meant to be here to talk about that “bloody other world”. Instead he has a new jazz album to plug. There is also a Jazz FM gold award “for services to jazz and blues”, which he will be picking up later that day, to crow about. However, neither plugging nor crowing is his forte. He looks puzzled. “It’s rather ludicrous me getting the award. My contribution has been minimal . . . If it was for blues they could have given it to Freddy Below [Chuck Berry’s drummer].” Well yes, except he died in 1988. He smiles: “Still, in the end you just say thank you. What else can you say?”
Watts, courteous, affable, is the master of self-deprecation. At 75 he looks fantastic — slim, sharp suit, immaculate pinstripe shirt. His face is elegantly craggy, his silver-white hair clearly authentic — a Saga poster boy. We’re seated in the Stones’ management offices in London, a suite of rooms in muted greys. A silvered Jagger tongue logo over the reception desk gives a clue as to what goes on here.
Charlie Watts Meets the Danish Radio Big Band is a polished album of big-band arrangements that includes three Rolling Stones tunes. The other Englishman on it is Watts’s lifelong chum and unsung hero of British jazz, the bass player Dave Green. Watts has brought him along to join our chat. The pair talk enthusiastically about the impressive facilities and jazz funding they encountered in Copenhagen before Watts runs out of promotional steam. “It was a lovely week. Me and him had nothing to do with it. We were invited to turn up and play and it was great.”
Today Watts enjoys the life of a rural multimillionaire on an Arabian horse stud farm in Devon. He lives there with Shirley, whom he married in 1964, the one Stone who never kept rolling. It must all be very different, I suggest, from the Wembley prefabs where Green and Watts met, aged five, as neighbourly refugees from the bombsites. Neither, though, recalls postwar deprivation and soon they are reminiscing nostalgically like a couple of gents in the British Legion bar.
Dave: “It was great. It was a wonderful community because everybody had exactly the same, nearly all the same size gardens as well.”
Charlie: “Though we backed on to the woods, we were lucky.”
Dave: “Everybody was equal, it was a sort of utopia.”
Charlie: “Everyone had the same cupboards, two bedrooms, fitted kitchen. Mum was knocked out.”
Dave: “We had a refrigerator for the first time.”
Charlie: “Do you remember the ice cream? That was the big thing. It was modern luxury, more or less.”
Together the pair gravitated towards the jazz scene with Green swiftly establishing himself as a first-call player and soon a Ronnie Scott’s regular. I ask why Watts moved from the true path of jazz towards the rhythm and blues scene. “I think Dave thought it was sacrilege,” says Watts. Dave is too polite to answer.
“I didn’t pick the Stones. They picked me. I was in a few bands and the one that kept asking me to do gigs was the Stones. Brian Jones [the group’s founder] really pushed them. He’d write letters to the editor of the NME saying how good they were.”
Watts says he did not mind moving into the pop world because he was in the shelter of a band. “We were fortunate that we’d got two very good show-offs [Mick Jagger and Keith Richards]; well there’s three now with Ronnie [Wood].”
Pressed, Watts does come up with some career highlights. In 1964 the Stones shared a rehearsal room with James Brown for a California show. Watching the soul singer in his pomp was a revelation. So too was encountering Marvin Gaye. “In the mid Sixties he was phenomenal. One of the hippest people I ever met.”
Of a younger generation, Watts rated Prince. “We asked him to tour with us [in 1981]. Keith wasn’t too pleased but Mick and I loved his early stuff. Unfortunately it was the time that he was wearing a pair of knickers on the album cover [Dirty Mind]. He went on stage in his knickers, which didn’t go down too well. So the first show he got booed off — and the second. I don’t think he bothered with the next one, which is amazing because he was so good.
“Keith didn’t like him because of the underpants. He probably thinks different now.”
As for great Stones shows: “If you’d asked me a year ago I’d have said . . . what’s that one? Glastonbury. That was a pleasing day.” Last October the Stones played at the vast baby-boomer celebration, Desert Trip, in southern California. “That was an incredible thing too.”
With both Watts and Green three quarters of a century old, I ask how they keep fit. Neither has much of a secret. “He does it through work,” Watts says. “I do it through getting up early.”
How does that help? “Well I get a headache if I sleep too much . . . Keith and I used to sleep 12 hours round the clock.” Green says he goes for a half-hour walk — every two or three days.
Talk then turns to retirement and the evident impossibility of it. “Well I try at the end of each tour,” says Watts. “Keith says: ‘What are you going to do?’ I dunno, mow the lawn . . . so I don’t retire.”
I mention Bill Bruford, an ace jazz and rock drummer who quit seven years ago at 60, reluctant to see his technique decline. “Yeah, he was brilliant,” says Watts, “and I know what he means about the physical side — but it’s your whole life.”
Watts has long had a love-hate relationship with touring. “When I get a call to go and play for eight people in Croydon [I think we’re talking jazz here], you just worry. But when you’re up on stage and it’s going great, there’s nothing like it.”
As for the Stones, he compares a tour to army life. “You get your call-up, you get your kit together, you say goodbye to your wife and you come back two months later, hopefully with your limbs intact.
“It’s always been tough. The worst time is when you have a young child. I never took mine or my wife on the road. But if you take them like Ronnie — he lugs everything around, even his bloody easel to paint with — it’s not such a wrench. It’s admirable in one way, but I couldn’t work like that — too many distractions.”
The Stones in Quebec City, in 2015
C FLANIGAN/GETTY IMAGESThe Stones, he says, are going back into the studio and then will probably take to the road again. Like Bob Dylan, it’s as if there is no alternative. “Now it’s not so bad because we only do 10 or 15 shows. In the old days you’d get three sheets of dates and you couldn’t see the end.”Sherry Daly, Watts’s charming but no-nonsense manager, then appears at the door to check that we have talked about the album. It’s also time to shepherd the drummer and Green off to the Jazz FM awards ceremony, and to prod the reluctant Watts towards the spotlight. Luckily, two of the “show-offs” from the Stones turn up to deflect attention. Wood and Jagger are here, with Watts, to collect gongs for best blues band and best album (Blue & Lonesome). Watts says a quick “thank you” but it’s Jagger who makes a speech about the Stones’ start in jazz clubs and hogs the limelight. That, you suspect, even on his big day, is how Charlie Watts, accidental celebrity, wants it to be.
Charlie Watts Meets the Danish Radio Big Band is out now on Impulse