REMEMBERING Charlie Watts and Shirley Watts.

 

Obituary

Charlie Watts obituary

 

Dapper and elegant drummer who was the rock-steady heartbeat of the Rolling Stones

 

Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts dies aged 80

The calm, brilliant eye of the Rolling Stones’ rock’n’roll story |

 

Adam Sweeting

Tue 24 Aug 2021 20.39 BST

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/aug/24/charlie-watts-obituary

 

Despite becoming one of the greats of rock’n’roll, the dapper and deadpan Charlie Watts, who has died aged 80, spent more than 60 years doing his second-favourite job. Watts applied himself diligently to the task of being the rock-steady heartbeat of the Rolling Stones, but what he always yearned to do was play jazz. Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington and Miles Davis were his musical idols, and his playing was inspired by jazz drummers such as Elvin Jones, Roy Haynes and Philly Joe Jones.

 

Watts’s career with the Stones ran from the cramped clubs of Britain’s early-1960s blues boom to the international stadium tours that became their metier. Through it all, he seemed determined to be as self-effacing as anybody could be as a member of perhaps the world’s most high-profile rock band. Nonetheless, the group fully understood his value to them. Keith Richards, in particular, often acknowledged how fundamental Watts was to the Stones’ sound, perhaps not least because he was prepared to make space for the churning rhythmic drive of his guitar. The crisp economy of Watts’s drumming, both swinging and muscular, was remarkable for its absence of frills or fuss, freeing the rest of the band to express themselves around it.

 

Watts, who trained in graphic design, also contributed a lot to the Stones’ marketing and presentation, which came to the fore as they evolved into a global brand and their performances grew increasingly spectacular. He created artwork for some early Stones releases and collaborated with Mick Jagger on the design of their elaborate stage sets for such tours as Steel Wheels/Urban Jungle (1989-90), Bridges to Babylon (1997-98), Licks (2002-03) andA Bigger Bang (2005-07).

 

The Rolling Stones outside the Marquee Club, London, in 2012. From left: Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Ronnie Wood and Charlie Watts.

The Rolling Stones outside the Marquee Club, London, in 2012. From left: Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Ronnie Wood and Charlie Watts. Photograph: Reuters

 

Any conversation with Watts was likely to rove amiably across topics such as Savile Row suits, cricket – he often attended Test matches at Lord’s or the Oval – and the Arabian horses he reared with his wife, Shirley, at their Halsdon Arabians farm in Devon. But he would invariably come back to jazz.

 

“The first person whose playing I was aware of was [the baritone saxophonist] Gerry Mulligan, and the track was Walking Shoes, with Chico Hamilton playing drums,” Watts recalled in 2012. “That’s what made me want to play the drums. Before that I wanted to play alto sax because I loved Earl Bostic.”

 

Charlie was born at University College Hospital, London, to Charles Watts, a lorry driver, and his wife Lillian (nee Eaves). The family (including his sister, Linda) lived in Wembley, north-west London, in a prefabricated home.

 

He became lifelong friends with his neighbour Dave Green, who would become a jazz bass player. The young Charlie (dubbed “Charlie Boy” by his parents) became fixated on hard bop and cool jazz during the 50s. He bought himself a banjo when he was 14, but rather than learn how to play it he converted it into a snare drum.

 

He was given his first drum kit as a Christmas present in 1955, and while other kids were shaking a leg to Bill Haley or Elvis Presley, he dreamed of playing drums with Davis, or stepping into Art Blakey’s shoes with the Jazz Messengers.

 

His first band was the jazz outfit the Jo Jones All Stars, which he and Green both joined in 1958.

 

After Tyler’s Croft secondary modern school in Kingsbury, Watts studied at Harrow School of Art, where he drew, as part of an assignment, a 36-page children’s book called Ode to a High Flying Bird, depicting the life of the saxophonist Charlie “Bird” Parker. The book was later picked up by a London publisher and printed in 1964.

 

After art college Watts secured a job as a designer with a London advertising agency, Charlie Daniels Studios, in 1960.

 

While working at the agency he was lured away from jazz by Alexis Korner, who recruited him for his band Blues Incorporated in 1962.

 

In the small pool of the nascent British “blues boom”, the future Stones Jagger and Brian Jones (then calling himself Elmo Lewis) made appearances with Korner’s band, before Jones branched off to start his own group that included the Stones’ unsung but faithful pianist, Ian Stewart.

 

A meeting with Jagger and Richards prompted the formation of the Rolling Stones, although it was a few months before the cautious Watts could be induced to leave Korner’s band to join them, which he eventually did in January 1963.

 

 

Watts would observe the Stones’ remarkable trajectory from his vantage point at the back of the stage, occasionally permitting himself a quizzical smile but always remaining detached from the cavalcade of sex, drugs and spectacular headlines that followed the band around the world.

 

Renowned as the quiet, sensible one, he never strayed into the limelight if he could avoid it, though the title of Peter Whitehead’s documentary film Charlie Is My Darling, shot when the Stones visited Ireland in 1965, acknowledged that Watts projected his own quiet mystique. While Jagger, Jones and Richards would be out on the town in London, Watts quietly married Shirley Shepherd in 1964 without telling his bandmates, and their relationship remained solid until his death.

 

Only for a brief period during the mid-80s did his natural self-reliance fail him. During recording of the Stones’ Dirty Work album in 1985, Jagger and Richards were at loggerheads, the future of the band looked shaky, Charlie’s daughter Seraphina (born in 1968) had been expelled from school for smoking dope. Watts began hitting the bottle, and – shockingly for anyone who knew him – developed a heroin habit, though never on a scale to match that of Richards.

 

“Maybe towards the end of 1986, I hit an all-time low in my personal life and in my relationship with Mick,” he admitted later. “I was mad on drink and drugs. I became a completely different person, not a nice one. I nearly lost my wife and family and everything.”

 

However, the ever-practical Watts quietly weaned himself off drugs even before his problem had become public knowledge, and concentrated on building a family life focused around horses and breeding sheepdogs at a country estate he had purchased in Devon.

 

Charlie and Shirley Watts at the Pride of Poland Arabian horse sale in 2012. They bred horses at their Halsdon Arabians farm in Devon.

Charlie and Shirley Watts at the Pride of Poland Arabian horse sale in 2012. They bred horses at their Halsdon Arabians farm in Devon. Photograph: Janek Skarżyński/AFP/Getty Images

 

He also distracted himself from the squabbles and struggles of the Stones by putting together the Charlie Watts Big Band, which featured many top British jazz players.

 

They toured the US and recorded an album, Live at Fulham Town Hall, released in 1986. In 1991 he formed the Charlie Watts Quintet, which recorded a string of albums including From One Charlie, a tribute to Charlie Parker, and in 2000 he teamed up with fellow sticksman Jim Keltner for the Charlie Watts/Jim Keltner Project, a tribute to the pair’s favourite jazz drummers.

 

In 2004 came Watts at Scott’s, a live recording of the Charlie Watts Tentet at Ronnie Scott’s club in London. The disc appeared as news emerged that Watts had been undergoing surgery and radiotherapy for throat cancer. The treatment proved successful and the cancer went into remission.

 

While touring and studio work with the Stones continued as ever, in 2009 he began playing with the ABC&D of Boogie Woogie – the name came from the first-name initials of its members, who were the pianists Axel Zwingenberger and Ben Waters and bassist Dave Green. They recorded the albums The Magic of Boogie Woogie (2010) and Live in Paris (2012). Charlie Watts meets the Danish Radio Big Band was recorded live in Copenhagen in 2010 and belatedly released in 2017.

 

He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with the Stones in 1989, and was voted into Modern Drummer magazine’s Hall of Fame in 2006. Also in 2006, Vanity Fair voted the impeccably tailored Watts into the International Best Dressed List Hall of Fame.

 

Shortly before his death it was reported that he had undergone surgery and that Steve Jordan would be taking his place on the Stones’ No Filter tour of the US.

 

He is survived by Shirley, Seraphina, and a granddaughter, Charlotte.

 

 Charles Robert Watts, drummer, born 2 June 1941; died 24 August 2021

 

Shirley Watts, widow of Rolling Stones drummer and noted Arabian horse breeder, dies

 

BY HILLEL ITALIEASSOCIATED PRESS

DEC. 19, 2022 4:54 PM PT

https://www.latimes.com/obituaries/story/2022-12-19/shirley-watts-widow-of-rolling-stones-drummer-and-famed-arabian-horse-breeder-dies

 

Shirley Ann Watts, a former art student and prominent breeder of Arabian horses who met drummer Charlie Watts well before he joined the Rolling Stones and with him formed one of rock’s most enduring marriages, has died at 84.

 

Her family announced that she died Friday in Devon, England, after a brief illness. Rolling Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood was among those who mourned her.

 

“We will miss you so much, but take comfort that you are reunited with your beloved Charlie,” Wood wrote on Facebook.

 

While Wood, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards all have had multiple wives and girlfriends, Charlie and Shirley Watts remained together for more than half a century, until Charlie’s death in 2021. Their only known crisis happened in the mid-1980s, when Charlie Watts struggled with heroin addiction, a time he would later say nearly cost him his marriage. He was otherwise regarded as so devoted to his wife, and daughter Seraphina, that journalists essentially left him alone.

 

“I’ve always wanted to be a drummer [and] as long as it’s comfortable with my wife, I’ll continue to do it,” he told Rolling Stone magazine in 1996.

 

When Charlie wasn’t touring or recording, he and his family lived on a 600-acre, 16th century estate in Devon, where they were better known for their Polish Arabian horses and for rescuing animals than for the drummer’s singular place in rock history. Stories about the Wattses were as likely to appear in Arabian Horse World as they were in a music publication.

 

According to Charlie, his wife had warm relations with Jagger and Richards and, unlike him, would play the Stones’ music around the house. But Shirley also expressed ambivalent feelings about the famous group her husband played in, telling Vanity Fair in 1989 that the band’s drug use affected her life “very, very deeply” and that in general she had little use for the rock star world.

 

“It was quite appalling being pitched into the life of the Rolling Stones,” she said. “I really got lost for about 25 years and I’ve never been able to cope with it. There’s been lots of anger, much of it very, very deep. I like the people in the group — up to a point. But I’ve always hated the way rock music and its world treat women and particularly the Rolling Stones’ attitude. There is no respect.”

 

Shirley Ann Shepherd was born in London in 1938 and was studying sculpture at the Royal College of Art in the early 1960s when she first saw her future husband, who at the time was part of the emerging blues and jazz scene in England. They were already dating when Watts joined the Stones early in 1963 and married the following year, just as the band established itself as second only to the Beatles in local popularity.

 

“She was so funny and clever, and she had the most infectious laugh you’d ever heard,” Charlie Watts told the Guardian in 2000. “And I loved the world she was in, the world of art and sculpting. I just admired Shirley very, very much.”

 

The biggest scandal about their marriage was probably their decision to get married. Rock star weddings were considered bad business at the time, a turnoff to young female fans — the Beatles’ John Lennon was among those who hedged when reporters asked him about his domestic life.

 

Without informing the other Stones, the Wattses married in Bradford and had a quiet lunch at a nearby pub in lieu of a formal reception. According to Paul Sexton’s “Charlie’s Good Tonight,” a 2022 biography of the late drummer written with his family’s cooperation, Charlie Watts initially denied reports that he was married, telling the Daily Express that “it would do a great deal of harm to my career if the story got around.” But Shirley happily confirmed the news, saying they could not “bear to live separately any longer.”

 

Neither Charlie nor Shirley liked drawing attention to themselves, but at times they did. Shirley Watts was arrested in 1971 at the Nice airport in France for attacking customs officials after they reportedly singled out her husband for attention. In 2016, she threatened to sue Polish government officials over the alleged mistreatment of two Arabian mares at a state-run farm.

 

Shirley Watts also endured a battle with alcoholism, one she said she overcame partly by spending hours sculpting horses and dogs. The Wattses’ shared interest in horses grew from collecting figurines to raising hundreds of Arabian horses, a passion that began after Charlie purchased a part-bred stallion for his wife.

 

“I much prefer my life here with the horses. I love the hunt. The sense of power one gets on a horse,” she told Vanity Fair. “It’s a very primeval instinct. When you hear the hounds — they call it the music — when you hear the hounds’ music, it’s bloodcurdling, it’s so thrilling. And it affects both you and the horse. There’s nothing like it. It’s dangerous. It’s exciting.”

 

She added, with a laugh, “It sounds rather like a rock ’n’ roll concert.”

CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK

The Uniform Cool of Charlie Watts

 

With his Savile Row suits, custom shirts and jazzman’s assurance, the Rolling Stones drummer staged his own quiet rebellion.

 

By Guy Trebay

Published Aug. 25, 2021

Updated Sept. 2, 2021

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/25/style/the-uniform-cool-of-charlie-watts.html

 

“Style is the answer to everything,” Charles Bukowski, of all people, once said in a lecture that’s still afloat in the ether of YouTube. Swigging Schlitz from a bottle, the pockmarked laureate of the underground discoursed on one of the few traits that, as is well known, one may possess though never acquire.

 

Bullfighters have style and so do boxers, Bukowski said. He had seen more men with style inside of prison than outside its walls, he also somewhat questionably asserted. “To do a dull thing with style is preferable to doing a dangerous thing without it,” he then added — and that much, at least, seems indisputable.

 

Nobody ever accused the Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts, who died Aug. 24 at 80, of dullness. Yet so granitic and unshowy was he relative to his preening bandmates — in their face paint, frippery and feathers — that it was easy to be distracted from the ineffable Watts cool that anchored the Stones sound and that drew on a lineage far older than rock.

 

 Well before joining what is generally called the world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll group, Mr. Watts, a trained graphic artist who learned to play after giving up banjo and turning the body of one into a drum, was a seasoned sessions player. He considered himself at heart a jazzman; his heroes were musicians like Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Lester Young and phenomenal pop crooners like the unfairly forgotten Billy Eckstine.

 

He studied famously natty dressers like Fred Astaire, men who found a style and seldom deviated from it throughout their lives. A famous story about the Stones describes them starving in order to make enough money to recruit a drummer then in no great rush to join the band. “Literally!” Keith Richards wrote in “Life,” his excellent 2010 memoir. “We went shoplifting to get Charlie Watts.”

 

Mr. Watts was expensive then and, as it happened, chose for himself an image that seldom looked otherwise. “To be honest,” he once told GQ. “I have a very old-fashioned and traditional mode of dress.”

 

When his bandmates Mick Jagger and Mr. Richards began peacocking in Carnaby Road velvets, secondhand glad rags from Portobello Road, Moroccan djellabas, boas, sequined jumpsuits and dresses plucked from the wardrobes of their wives or girlfriends, Mr. Watts continued to dress as soberly as an attorney. And when, in the late 1970s, Mr. Jagger and Mr. Richards began adding suiting to their wardrobe, their selections tended to feature nipped waists, four-lane lapels, checkerboard patterns or Oxford bag trousers.

 

“I always felt totally out of place with the Rolling Stones,” Mr. Watts told GQ, at least in style terms. Photographs appeared of the band with everyone else wearing sneakers and Mr. Watts in a pair of lace-ups from the 19th-century Mayfair shoemaker George Cleverley. “I hate trainers,” he said, meaning athletic shoes. “Even if they’re fashionable.”

 

Perhaps in some ways Mr. Watts was just ahead of the other Stones and the rest of us in purely style terms — more evolved in his understanding of convention and how stealthily to subvert it, a bit like a jazz musician improvising on core melodies. There may even have been something punk in his determination to patronize some of the more venerable Savile Row tailors whose businesses were still so discreet in the 1970s that they were often marked by only small metal plaques. It was his brilliance to mold what those tailors did to his own assured tastes.

 

Take, for instance, the 1971 Peter Webb images — lost for 40 years before rediscovery in the past decade — depicting the young Mr. Watts and Mr. Richards from “Sticky Fingers” at the very height of their fame. Mr. Richards is fabulously attired in zippered black leather, graphically patterned velvet trousers in black-and-white, a contrast-patterned shirt, a custom leather bandoleer belt and buccaneer shag. Mr. Watts, by contrast, is wearing a three-piece suit with a six-button vest in what appears to be stolid burgomaster’s loden.

 

Or take the double-breasted dove gray morning coat the mature Mr. Watts is seen wearing in another shot of himself and his wife, Shirley, at Ascot. (The couple bred Arabian horses.) Beautifully cut for his compact frame (he was 5-foot-8), it is worn with a pale pink waistcoat and tie, a shirt whose rounded collars are pinned beneath the knot, a style he first glimpsed and copied from the cover of Dexter Gordon’s imperious jazz classic “Our Man in Paris.”

 

Each of those suits was bespoke, the latter stitched by H. Huntsman & Sons, a Savile Row institution that has been dressing British swells since 1849. Theirs was one of just two tailoring companies Mr. Watts worked with throughout his life.

 

“Mr. Watts was one of the most stylish gentlemen I’ve had the pleasure of working with,” said Dario Carnera, the head cutter at Huntsman, in an email. “He imbued his own sartorial flair in every commission.” He ordered from the establishment for more than 50 years, the craftsman added. (In the Huntsman catalog there still exists a fabric — the Springfield stripe — of Mr. Watts's design.)

 

By his own rough estimate, Mr. Watts owned several hundred suits, at least as many pairs of shoes, an all-but-uncountable quantity of custom shirts and ties — so many clothes, in fact, that, inverting a hoary sexist cliché about fashion, it was his wife who complained that her husband spent too much time in front of the mirror.

 

Mr. Watts seldom wore any of his sartorial finery onstage, however, preferring the practicality and anonymity of short-sleeved dress shirts or T-shirts for concerts or tours. It was in civilian life that he cultivated, and eventually perfected, a sartorial image as elegant, serene and impeccable as his drumming.

 

Correction: Sept. 2, 2021

An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the shopping habits of Keith Richards and Charlie Watts. Mr. Richards did not buy suits at Tommy Nutter; Mr. Watts did. The article also described incorrectly the signage of some Savile Row tailors in the 1970s. The businesses had small plaques on their storefronts; they were not unmarked.