OMG, his last weeks and days...thanks so much for that excerpt, slane82.

~"Love is Strong"~

"Ronnie had had a similar illness"?

Interesting comment from Devonian on the Times site:

"Charlie had it well sussed. Turn up, do the work, take the money and enjoy your life. In his case it was easy because he loved his work and was rather brilliant at it, with the swing of a jazz drummer. I bumped into him twice whilst out and about. At a wedding in the Cotswolds in the early 80s, Charlie and his wife were at the next table at a rather raucous reception. Some drunken wobbler spilled a drink on Mrs Watts and was invited to apologise by Charlie. I don’t think he realised who Charlie was so got a bit gobby; something that only a fool does to a drummer. Without warning, Charlie stood up, never said a word, and kicked the fellow in the nutsack before sitting down as if nothing had happened.

In the late 80s, I went with my beautiful new wife to Ronnie Scott’s to see the Charlie Watts Big Band. It was a very cold night so we were waiting in the foyer for a while for a cab. Charlie came through, saw my wife and asked her if she’d enjoyed the gig. A bit of chat then Charlie’s driver came in and said the car was ready. Charlie bid us goodnight turned to the driver and said “ I hope you’ve warmed it up tonight, I nearly froze my bxxxx off last night.”



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2022-09-03 12:27 by slane82.

Quote
Topi
"Ronnie had had a similar illness"?

i would assume mick means lung cancer and he had surgery to remove it there where complications and he died

and that's probably as close as well ever get to actually knowing the exact cause

its nice to see how much mick seemed to have cared about charlie

sending him that ipad and worrying if he eats enough so he makes sure to invite him to eat with him while there on tour

Quote
slane82
Interesting comment from Devonian on the Times site:

"Charlie had it well sussed. Turn up, do the work, take the money and enjoy your life. In his case it was easy because he loved his work and was rather brilliant at it, with the swing of a jazz drummer. I bumped into him twice whilst out and about. At a wedding in the Cotswolds in the early 80s, Charlie and his wife were at the next table at a rather raucous reception. Some drunken wobbler spilled a drink on Mrs Watts and was invited to apologise by Charlie. I don’t think he realised who Charlie was so got a bit gobby; something that only a fool does to a drummer. Without warning, Charlie stood up, never said a word, and kicked the fellow in the nutsack before sitting down as if nothing had happened.

In the late 80s, I went with my beautiful new wife to Ronnie Scott’s to see the Charlie Watts Big Band. It was a very cold night so we were waiting in the foyer for a while for a cab. Charlie came through, saw my wife and asked her if she’d enjoyed the gig. A bit of chat then Charlie’s driver came in and said the car was ready. Charlie bid us goodnight turned to the driver and said “ I hope you’ve warmed it up tonight, I nearly froze my bxxxx off last night.”

well you should look on the bright side buddy you could have been punched in the nuts by a drummer



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 2022-09-04 10:28 by ProfessorWolf.

Inside the Rolling Stones’s wild years in exile

Brian Jones’s death, drugs in the Côte d’Azur and the making of their greatest album — in a new book Mick Jagger, Charlie Watts, Keith Richards and Bill Wyman go on the record to Paul Sexton


Charlie Watts, Keith Richards, Bill Wyman, Brian Jones and Mick Jagger in 1967 (ALAMY/TONY GALE)

Paul Sexton
September 05 2022

In 1966 Keith Richard — still without the “s” — took possession of Redlands, his longtime estate in West Wittering, West Sussex. Mick Jagger was soon to purchase the Stargroves estate, also known as Stargrove Hall, in Hampshire. Bill Wyman recalled that Mick assumed the squire role with some enthusiasm, joining the Country Gentleman’s Association.

Before the end of the following year, Charlie Watts and his wife, Shirley, moved to the village of Halland, seven miles northeast of Lewes, and into Peckhams, a centuries-old manor house that, reported NME’s Keith Altham, was once used as a hunting lodge by the first Archbishop of Canterbury. “It’s got some land, not that I want to do any farming,” Charlie told Melody Maker.

Bill himself was buying Gedding Hall, his 15th-century moated manor near Bury St Edmonds in Suffolk, and late in 1968 Brian Jones purchased Cotchford Farm in the High Weald of Hartfield, East Sussex, the 1920s home of Winnie-the-Pooh author AA Milne. The Rolling Stones had become the out-of-towners.

Finally free of the ardours of constant touring, Charlie was now able to enjoy the thing he had always craved: time away from the music business. “Two years ago it was like a nightmare,” he admitted. “We had reporters and photographers practically living with us the whole time.”

By now, the wariness that he maintained towards the majority of the media was well in place. “It’s frightening to think that with a few well-chosen quotes or clever angles they are capable of destroying someone like John Lennon,” he said.

Back at work in March 1968, the Stones were at Olympic Studios with their new producer Jimmy Miller, the New Yorker with great studio credit already in the bank with the Spencer Davis Group, Traffic and others. But Brian’s mental and physical health was palpably sliding, leading — in what seems in retrospect almost slow motion — to his firing from the group in June 1969 and his death a month later at 27. On the night of July 2, with Bill having left a band session at Olympic Studios slightly early, it was Charlie that called him at 3am to break the news.

“It wasn’t unexpected, to be honest with you,” Charlie told me of his friend. “You didn’t expect him to die, but he wasn’t well for a long time, a couple of years, and a year of not being very well at all. So it wasn’t as big a shock as if it was Bill, for example, [when] you would have thought ‘Blimey’. Or when Stu [road manager Ian Stewart] died, you know, that was really a shock.” There is something quintessentially of Charlie’s world-class unflappability that he might have greeted the news of a death in the group with the word “Blimey”.

Today, the recurrent symbol of the free show given by the Stones in Hyde Park just two days after Jones’s death is the white-smocked Mick Jagger reciting Shelley in Brian’s honour, and releasing hundreds of cabbage white butterflies, supposedly into the air. Said Charlie: “The butterflies were a bit sad, really. They looked good from the audience, but actually if you were near them, there were an awful lot of casualties. It was like the Somme before they even got off the ground.”

The 1970s dawned uncertainly for the Rolling Stones, with the decade’s first summer cast into considerable acrimony by twin divorces from their manager Allen Klein and Decca Records.

With the band’s finances in intensive care, the drastic decision was taken for lock, stock and barrel relocation. Charlie, who was soon to turn 30, told me later: “It was a bit drastic. Suddenly, you have to sell the house you live in and leave the country. ‘Bye bye, Mum, bye bye, Dad’. What do they call it, a break in earnings? It worked out, thank goodness.”

Keith, who was practically railing against the establishment in his sleep by then, remembered: “At that time, they wanted us in jail. They couldn’t manage that, so the next best thing was put the economic pressure on. Yeah, you could have stayed and made tuppence out of every pound. Thanks a lot, pals.”

In more than one of our conversations, Charlie pointed the finger of mismanagement directly at Klein. “He waved dollar signs at everyone, particularly at Mick and Keith,” he said in 2009. “He had a very tough, American manager way of looking at things, and in a way it was not right for us. He was a stroppy sod. But it taught you a lot.”

The newly exiled band’s choice of recording location for what became Exile on Main St, at Keith’s Nellcôte villa on the Côte d’Azur in the south of France, was a classic Stones decision: significantly inconvenient for the rest of the group. Charlie had to commute from his family’s new home in the Cévennes, three or four hours east along the French coast, almost into Italy, heading back again at weekends. Bill was “only” an hour away. “Fortunately my wife spoke French,” said Charlie, “because I moved miles from anywhere. Our daughter went to school there, and our stuff all came down in a horse lorry, along with the horses.”

He said of the sessions: “A day would become a week, or a week would be all in a day. It used to drive Bill mad. He’d drive down at 10 o’clock in the morning, and no one, including me, would be up till about three in the afternoon, because we didn’t go to bed until nine that morning, an hour before Bill arrived. So Bill would go home at six, and Keith would be getting up,” he laughed. “That was how the band functioned.”

“It was very Mediterranean, an Edwardian villa, and very beautiful, on top of this point with its own boat. When Keith rented it, the garden was very overgrown, so it was magical. It was fantastically exotic, with palm trees. We had to saw a couple of them down to get the [Rolling Stones Mobile Studio] truck in to record.”

Added Keith: “The basement was the strangest place . . . it kind of looked like @#$%&’s bunker.”

The sessions dragged on, partly because most of the rumours you’ve always read about the world-class debauchery in play are true. “Everyone’s life was full of hangers-on,” Mick said. “Some of them were great fun, they’re all good for a bit, but when you really come down to it, you don’t want them around, because they just delay everything. But that was the lifestyle then. There was lots of drugs and drinking and carrying on. But, you know, it’s not a factory. It’s not a mill in the north of England. It’s a rock’n’roll environment.”

What came out of it, miraculously, was a double album that many feel they’ve never bettered, including Charlie.

The Stones were off the road for 15 months until the North American tour of summer 1972, which is most often celebrated as the all-time zenith of rock’n’roll libertinism. The rest of the year played out to all manner of arrests, each of them in character: Mick and Keith for an altercation with a photographer, Keith and Anita Pallenberg for violating French drug laws, and Bill for speeding.

The moment they could, Charlie and Shirley were back in the Cévennes, living the pastoral life and giving their daughter, Seraphina, what she looks back on as the perfect upbringing.

“I had a lovely childhood, totally normal,” she tells me. “I grew up in a small village in France. It was a very rural village, hidden away, and we were the only English people.”

I ask her when she first became aware that her father did something unusual for a living. “Probably very late,” she says, “and they’re not very nice memories, because children will tease at school. I probably knew I was different because we had the biggest car. But not in terms of what he did for a living.”

That changed when the family returned to England in 1976. “That’s when I was made aware, by other children,” says Seraphina. “That’s when I heard the word ‘rich’ in a negative way. I really don’t remember anything being that different. I got to meet Olivia Newton-John as a birthday present.” But, she adds, “My father wasn’t interested in a celebrity lifestyle.”

“If you went down to his house, he was always doing the washing up,” says Tony King, Seraphina’s godfather, “always making cups of tea, always swearing at the dogs, always cleaning up the shit and the piss if they did that in the house, always doing all the menial tasks. He was thoroughly domesticated.

“Shirley always kept him in line. He was never allowed to get too big for his boots if she was around. I remember she wrote me this brilliant letter in the early days when they were touring America, around Altamont time. She said, “Charlie came home at the weekend, full of conceit about being a member of the Rolling Stones. So I made him clean the oven.”

In the early 2000s, Seraphina turned on the television and saw something that struck a hilarious chord. “My parents were a bit Sharon and Ozzy of Devon,” she says. “When I saw that show I was like, ‘Oh my gosh.’ He walked around the house going ‘Shirleyyy’.

“I said to them, ‘This is you two.’” And I was like stroppy Kelly. All the dogs and everything. They were horrified.”

‘He was mad about cricket’

Charlie shared Mick and Bill’s passion for cricket: one of the pieces he selected on Desert Island Discs was the BBC Radio archive recording of John Arlott and Michael Charlton’s commentary on the 1956 Test match between England and Australia.

“We mostly watched cricket but we were great football fans too,” says Mick, who follows Arsenal while Charlie was a Tottenham Hotspur fan. “We loved talking about cricket and we’d go to a lot of games, mostly Test matches, and one-days. Most English people who normally wear a black suit, they go to Lords and dress in this ridiculous 1920s striped blazer, those MCC colours. Lurid, to say the least. Charlie used to sometimes dress up in those blazers. He would be very sociable at these games, he wouldn’t be the quiet Charlie that we all talk about. Yakety-yak, all day long.”

“He had collections of cricket stuff, and I used to give him signed photos of Bradman and all kinds of stuff like that,” says Bill. “He was mad about cricket, as Mick is, and he used to go and watch all the time. He used to watch, I used to play.

“Charlie never came to any of the charity things but when I took my hat-trick at the Oval against an Old England team, Charlie heard about it and I got this phone call at three o’clock in the morning.

“He said, ‘I just found out that you took a hat-trick at the Oval? They said you were smoking a cigarette when you were bowling?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I always do.’ There’s pictures of me with the cigarette, bowling my leg breaks and googlies, getting a hat-trick. And he said, ‘And you were treading your cigarette ends on the hallowed turf?’ He was more interested in what I was doing with my cigarette ends than the fact that I’d taken this hat-trick against an Old England team.”

While working on one of the many BBC Radio 2 documentaries I made on the Stones, I once pinned Charlie down about his bandmates.

“Ronnie? He has demons, but he’s the most gregarious one in the band, and he has the biggest head . . . He’s a very loving guy.

“Mick is the one I speak to more than anybody. Keith is the one you never hear from, from one month to the next, because he hates telephones. He’s the most eccentric of all of us, that man. He loves touring. Whenever I say I’m going to retire, he says, ‘What are you going to do?’ He reads these tomes. I don’t think he reads anything under three inches thick. The thicker they are, the happier he is.”

The point was rather well emphasised in 1998, when the band’s European tour was delayed by nearly a month when Keith fell off a library ladder at home in Connecticut and cracked two ribs, reaching for a book on Leonardo da Vinci. “I was looking for da Vinci’s book on anatomy,” he said. “I learnt a lot about anatomy, but I didn’t find the book.”

Extracted from Charlie’s Good Tonight: the Authorised Biography of Charlie Watts by Paul Sexton, published on September 15 (Mudlark; £25)

[www.thetimes.co.uk]

This is gonna be a great book...

Charlie was and is held in such high regard by all, and we will have even more light shed on exactly why from those who loved and knew him best.

It struck me reading this thread that maybe the reason why everyone holds their memories of Charlie so close to their own hearts is that he was just a normal guy, like all of us, but living a dream life and staying true to himself while doing it!

We salute you, Charlie, and always smile thinking of you!

So...

It is an official biography so why is it "official"?

The family authorized it, is my understanding. Not sure where the quotation marks come from, maybe the journalist?



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 2022-09-06 07:27 by Topi.

The book includes forewords from both Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.
What about Bill Wyman? Bill should be involved in the forewords. He was very close to Charlie.

I think why this book will be a big seller among fans is that we don't know all that much about Charlie. He was so quiet, so unpretentious, so gentlemanly. Even before the book, up until its publication, every little tidbit of information, any small anecdote has garnered wide commentary.

I will be right there when it comes out. <3

~"Love is Strong"~

Clean-living, jazz-loving Rolling Stone Charlie Watts was the mildest man in rock



Paul Sexton’s affectionate new biography reveals that Watts ‘hated’ his Rolling Stones stardom, but quite liked doing the dishes

By Mick Brown
7 September 2022


Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts in 1964 Credit: Getty

Charlie Watts would say that what he always wished he could have been was a black drummer, playing in the jazz clubs of New York’s 52nd Street in the 1940s and 1950s.

Watts was a jazz aficionado who, growing up, had paid no attention to rock ’n’ roll. The fact that he played drums in The Rolling Stones for almost 60 years, until his death last year, seemed almost accidental, and perhaps explains the faintly bemused expression he habitually wore when performing with the band on stage. But what about the stardom, adulation and world tours?
“I’ve always hated it,” he told Paul Sexton in one of the numerous interviews the respected music journalist and broadcaster conducted with him over the years. “My idea of working is to get up and go across the road to Ronnie Scott’s, play till three in the morning, come home and go to bed.” But then again, he added, the feeling of playing in front of 70,000 people at Wembley was “wonderful”.

The son of a lorry driver, Watts grew up in a prefab in Wembley where, in the early days, the Stones would often sleep over on their way back from gigs outside London, Charlie’s mum providing a breakfast of bacon sandwiches. He studied at art school and had a promising career in design, which he abandoned to join the Stones, only after being given the assurance that they would have two regular gigs a week.

From the outset, Watts was an essential part of the group, yet at the same time curiously apart from it. He described playing with the band not as a vocation but “a job”, for which he dutifully turned up for work, drummed brilliantly and largely kept to himself, cultivating a studied detachment from the ­orgiastic excesses that went on around the rest of the Stones.

He met his wife, Shirley, in 1962 – when he was playing with Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated, a group he left because he didn’t think he was good enough to play with them – and they married in 1964.

As was the custom with pop groups of the day, the marriage was kept secret to avoid alienating fans, until the story was leaked by the press. “He still denied it for the first couple of days,” the Stones’ bassist Bill Wyman remembers, “and then he owned up and that was alright.”

Watts was a loyal and devoted husband. In the early days of the group, when they were earning next to nothing, Wyman recalls, he would retreat to his hotel room, spending all his money on phone calls home to Shirley (although to describe Wyman, who once admitted to sleeping with 350 women in a two-and-a-half-year period with the Stones, as “his equally well-behaved bandmate”, as Sexton does, is surely ironic).

Shirley, Watts said, “was a sens­ible woman. She has always kept well away from the Stones.” The one regret he had of his time with the group, he said, was that it kept him away from her, and that he was never home enough. “But Shirley always says when I come off tour that I am a nightmare and tells me to go back out.”

Tony King, a close friend, describes him as “thoroughly domesticated”, and recalls Shirley once telling him how Watts came home at the end of one tour, “full of conceit about being a member of The Rolling Stones. So I made him clean the oven.” No great hardship. He also enjoyed doing the washing-up.

Amidst the carousel of costume changes the Stones underwent over the years – satin, furbelows and, in Keith Richards’s case, Rasta-­coloured headbands and more necklaces than a dowager duchess – Watts remained a model of studied elegance. He had his suits – broad lapels and flared trousers – made at Huntsman in Savile Row, and his chisel-toed shoes made at G J Cleverley for £4,000 a pair (Watts had 80 made there). The shoemaker recalls his “slim, elegant feet. The foot that every­one dreams of.” The T-shirts he wore on stage were also tailor-made.

He collected vintage Tailor & Cutter pattern books, suitcases, hats, American Civil War armaments, signed first editions by Graham Greene, P G Wodehouse and Evelyn Waugh, and cars, including several Rolls-Royces, a 1937 Lagonda, a Bugatti Atlantic and a Lamborghini Miura – although he never learnt to drive – vintage drum kits and ­Horatio Nelson memorabilia. The record producer Chris Kimsey describes him, somewhat improb­ably, as “a man of simple, old-­fashioned tastes”.

In later years, Watts and his wife lived on a converted goat farm in the Cévennes region of the south of France, and a 600-acre stud farm in Devon, where Shirley bred Halsdon Arabian horses. At one time, the herd was 300 strong. “The original intention was to have 20,” Shirley told Arabian Horse Times. “I’m not good with maths.”

Inevitably, given Watts’s role as the lynchpin of the group, much of this book is given over to a familiar recitation of the Stones’ history, albums and tours – all of which have Sexton reaching for his thesaurus in a search for superlatives – along with accounts of Watts’s numerous side projects as a jazz drummer. But it is also crammed with telling incidental information.

Watts carried a sketch pad everywhere and would draw every hotel room, its fixtures and fittings, that he stayed in. Like Wyman, who would keep every ticket and receipt from every gig the Stones played, and who seemed to be his closest friend in the group until the bass player’s departure in 1993, Watts was borderline OCD, always arranging his drumsticks in a neat row before leaving the stool, fastidiously removing the peel from a table if anyone was eating an orange. His granddaughter Charlotte recalls how “you couldn’t open a present, the paper would never hit the floor”. On a country walk, he would be “tidying the side of the road. Like twigs and pushing pebbles off the side and into the undergrowth. I’d be like, ‘Come on!’”

Many people might also be surprised to learn that Lennie Peters, of Peters and Lee – whose 1973 No 1 hit Welcome Home was in the charts in the same week as the Stones’ Angie – was Charlie Watts’s uncle. Peters, Watts’s sister Linda remembers, “was the only blind person I’ve ever known who could hang wallpaper, and change a lightbulb”.

Sexton is a fan and this is a fan’s book, exhaustively researched and wholly admiring; adoring, even. Charlie, we surmise, was ever modest, polite, generous to a fault, an ­uxorious husband and doting father and grandfather. The book largely skates over his dabbling with drugs in the 1970s and 1980s (tactfully avoiding the word heroin), which Watts, with typical deadpan humour, attributed to “the male menopause”. Nobody has a bad word to say about Charlie, as nobody should.

[www.telegraph.co.uk]

Just pre-ordered my copy from Amazon UK.

"Charlie’s Good Tonight" - Apple Books has an 35-pages preview (excerpt) - [Books.Apple.com] :






(Screenshots from Apple Books)

I'm so looking forward to this book. It's the first time that I've ever pre-ordered anything!

I'm glad Bill is a part of this book too!

Rolling Stone Charlie Watts sketched every hotel bed he slept in

Charlie’s Good Tonight by Paul Sexton examines the inscrutable drummer

Victoria Segal
Sunday September 11 2022


Implacable: Charlie Watts with Keith Richards in 1968 (MARK AND COLLEEN HAYWARD/REDFERNS)

As befits an agent of rock’n’roll subversion, Keith Richards almost sabotages this authorised life of the Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts before the first chapter has begun. “Every time I think ‘I’m going to talk about Charlie Watts’,” he says in a touching foreword, “you realise the essential man wasn’t something you put into words.”

Even so, Paul Sexton is prepared to have a go. With input from the drummer’s inner circle — Mick Jagger also provides a fond foreword — plus quotes from interviews with the band, it’s an affectionate portrait, one that recognises Watts as musician, colleague, family man, obsessive collector and immaculate dresser. Fans looking for lurid vérité won’t find it here: it’s a book that’s as gentlemanly as its subject, who died in August 2021.

Born in Wembley in 1941, a lorry driver’s son raised in a postwar prefab, Watts initially pursued a career in graphic design before jazz diverted his energies. Recruited into the Stones from Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated, he always considered himself a jazz musician, at a remove from rock’n’roll. Yet he quickly became essential to the band. A newspaper report from around 1965 detailed the chaos of live shows, Jagger dragged to the floor, “Brian Jones wrestling three punching teenagers”. Meanwhile, “implacable Charlie Watts carried on playing stone-faced”. A cab driver he used described him as a “decent old stick”. He was 26.

The anchor still needed anchoring, though. In 1964 Watts married the sculpture student Shirley Ann Shepherd. Most of his touring income trickled down an international phone line as he called home for hours. Once when he returned from touring “full of conceit”, Shirley wrote to a friend, she made him clean the oven.

Yet there was clearly a turbulence behind his pristine façade and Sexton describes his eccentricities without ever quite unpicking them. His fastidiousness extended far beyond a preference for handmade shoes and suits that once belonged to Edward VIII. He sketched every hotel bed he ever slept in. Once, when fleeing from screaming fans at a venue, he had to turn back and run down the stairs again because, somehow, he hadn’t got them right. Sexton, honourably, doesn’t try to psychoanalyse him any further but more frustrating is the biographer’s vagueness on the drummer’s surprising patch of heavy drug use during the mid-1980s.

Watts remains inscrutable here. He never learnt to drive, but would buy classic cars and sit in them with the engine running, enjoying their beauty. In Charlie’s Good Tonight, he feels like a man on a ride he loved but still couldn’t quite control, the disconnect between jazz man and rock’n’roll hero slightly jolting him in his beautifully tailored skin. “He was the realest guy I ever met,” Richards writes, but for the reader Watts remains just beyond reach, at the back of the stage.

[www.thetimes.co.uk]

Quote
Irix
"Charlie’s Good Tonight" - Apple Books has an 35-pages preview (excerpt) - [Books.Apple.com] :






(Screenshots from Apple Books)

Interesting to compare the two forwards. Almost like comparing left and right hemisphers...

Charlie’s Good Tonight by Paul Sexton review – chronicles of a reluctant Stone

Neil Spencer
13 Sep 2022


Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts during filming of the video for Respectable in New York, 1978. Photograph: Michael Putland/Getty Images

The authorised biography of the Rolling Stones’ late drummer is warm and diligent on his love of jazz and family – while ducking any difficult issues

“Never do the authorised biography,” a colleague once told me. “You’ll find out where the bodies are buried, metaphorically speaking, but you won’t be allowed to publish their location.” That advice surely applies double when the act under consideration is the Rolling Stones, a group who have left in their wake a trail of outrage, depravity, misogyny, addiction and a few real-life cadavers. There has been some decent music at times, too. The group’s incendiary past gets scant airtime here – the hellish Altamont concert of 1969, for example, with its on-film crowd murder, was merely “an event waiting to go wrong”. Even the Stones’ music gets little attention. There are lists of who guested at which shows and on which albums, praise for Charlie Watts’s unerring timing and ability to hold together a rowdy, loose-limbed band (bassist Bill Wyman gets rare praise for his part too) and some commentary on drum technique, but the impact and meaning of the Stones’ music stays unremarked.

It doesn’t much matter. There are already walls of books about the Stones, including Keith Richards’s memoir, Life, and we are here to celebrate the late Watts, who, while bringing stability to their shows and inspiration to their records – the tom-tom gallop of Paint It Black, say, or the wonky cowbell of Honky Tonk Women – was always ambiguous about Stonehood. As early as 1966 he told Rave magazine: “It’s just a job that pays good money”, which remained his default position. “I have tried to resign after every tour since 1969, but each time they talk me back into it,” he tells author Paul Sexton later in his career. “It’s like being in the army,” he once told NME. “They don’t let you leave.”

He protested too much, of course. Running through the interviews here, whether by Sexton or lifted from other sources, is a strong camaraderie, along with testimony to how much Watts enjoyed playing with the band. “In the Beatle period, when people used to scream at you, girls running down the road, I hated that, used to hide. But there’s nothing like walking on a stage and the place is full of screaming girls.”

Watts’s ambiguity was there from the outset. He grew up in a prefab in a drab north London suburb, and jazz, his first love, became a passport to a world of crisply dressed cool and dazzling artistry, his heroes alto saxophonist Charlie Parker – jazz’s Picasso – and drummer Chico Hamilton. One of a talented pool orbiting around blues pioneer Alexis Korner in the early 1960s, Watts was headhunted by Jagger, Jones and Richards but faltered. “Should I join this interval band?” he asked his fellow travellers, relenting only after the trio secured enough gigs to match his wage in an advertising agency. Art – his only O-level – remained a passion. He sketched every tour hotel room he occupied, and later advised on the Stones’ elaborate stage sets.

The Stones’ ascent to stardom was swift, astutely overseen by manager Andrew Loog Oldham, who traded on their bad-boy image. Though Watts could play along, affecting a gormless, slack-jawed idiocy for TV cameras, he remained wedded to jazz’s cool school, and to his beloved wife Shirley (nee Shepherd), an ex-art student whom he wed when pop-star marriage was considered commercial suicide. The pair prospered, moving from a Regent’s Park flat to a Sussex mansion and finally to a Devon farm, where Shirley established an upmarket stud farm of Arabian horses. Later, during the Stones’ tax exile, they added a French farm, where their daughter Seraphina grew up.

Watts’s personal life is rightly given as much prominence as his career, but it is not drama-filled. He remained a devoted husband and father (later grandfather) and maintained friendships that stretched back to childhood. He never lost his passion for jazz. The orchestra he put together in the late 1980s was internationally acclaimed, and was followed by smaller groups at London’s Ronnie Scott’s. The Stones became wealthy and in later years super-rich – the 147 shows of their 2005 A Bigger Bang tour grossed $558m – enabling Watts to indulge his passions. Always immaculately dressed and always a collector, he freely indulged his passions: endless Savile Row suits, handmade shoes at £4,000 a pop, cashmere sweaters that would be worn once or twice, the purchase of Edward VIII’s suits at Sotheby’s. Then there were the military uniforms, civil war weaponry, Napoleon’s sword, the drum kits of legendary jazzers … and a string of Arabian horses, including the $700,000 purchase of a grey mare.

Sexton, a longtime Stones chronicler, tells Watts’s story with warmth and diligence, though difficult issues are ducked – the causes of Watts’s flirtation with heroin in the 1980s remain opaque – and there are some unctuous turns of phrase. The Stones’ late career albums, mediocre at best, become “greatly underrated”, “an improbable triumph” or “undervalued delights”. Even a passing PR man is “a revered writer”. Never do the authorised biography.

[www.theguardian.com]

The foreword by Mick Jagger is very well written: Indeed Charlie Watts was interested in a broad range of music genres. Looking at his projects one will found various styles: Rocket 88, The Charlie Watts Orchestra, A Tribute to Charlie Parker with strings, the albums with Bernard Fowler, the Tentett, the electric CW & Jim Keltner Project - and finally the circle was closed by the ABC & D of Boogie Woogie. This is quite something.

Seems to be available now:

[twitter.com]

Got a dispatch notification on mine the other day, but it says the estimated delivery (UK to Finland) is on September 27.

Quote
Koen

Seems to be available now

UK-Edition: 15-Sep-2022 - [www.Amazon.co.uk] - [Books.Apple.com] , also as Kindle eBook,

US-Edition: 11-Oct-2022 - [www.Amazon.com] - [Books.Apple.com] , also as Kindle eBook,

Dutch Edition: 19-Oct-2022 - [www.Amazon.nl] - [Books.Apple.com] ,

Spanish Edition: 16-Nov-2022 - [www.Amazon.es] - [Books.Apple.com] , also as Kindle eBook,

German Edition: 24-Nov-2022 - [www.Amazon.de] - [Books.Apple.com] , also as Kindle eBook.

Audible and Apple have also Audiobooks.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 2022-11-04 17:10 by Irix.

Yes, mine arrived on 15 September in the UK.

There is another article here:

[www.yahoo.com]

Quote
Irix

UK-Edition: 15-Sep-2022 - [www.Amazon.co.uk] - [Books.Apple.com] - also as Kindle eBook,

US-Edition: 11-Oct-2022 - [www.Amazon.com] - [Books.Apple.com] ,

Dutch Edition: 19-Oct-2022 - [www.Amazon.nl] - [Books.Apple.com] ,

German Edition: 24-Nov-2022 - [www.Amazon.de] - [Books.Apple.com] , also as Kindle eBook.

Audible and Apple have also Audiobooks.

Spanish edition 16-Nov-2022 [www.amazon.com]

£12.50 on Amazon in the UK (50% discount). Just ordered - should get it tomorrow

Quote
Beast
Yes, mine arrived on 15 September in the UK.

Oooh, jealous! I ’might’ get mine by 29 September.

Paid 12,5£ on Amazon UK,delivered 19.09 to Poland. Picture of Charlie in his drum room is must see.

And now you guys tell me about the discount!