Charlie's Good Tonight: The Authorised Biography of The Rolling Stones’ Charlie Watts

Product Information

Charlie Watts of the Rolling Stones during a rehearsal in New York, May 1978. Michael Putland/Getty Images After art college Watts secured a job as a designer with a London advertising agency, Charlie Daniels Studios, in 1960. In more recent years, Watts formed an old school blues band called the ABC&D of Boogie Woogie, preferring to play in intimate clubs. He nevertheless continued to play with the Stones, most recently on the European leg of the band’s “No Filter” tour in 2018.

Revolution: The new sports biography revealing the incredible

While working at the agency he was lured away from jazz by Alexis Korner, who recruited him for his band Blues Incorporated in 1962.Charlie was no stadium afficionado, but he understood the basic economics. Otherwise, he mused in a 1998 conversation, ‘You’d be playing a month in a town to play to 30,000 people. Where would you play, in a 3,000-seater hall? So it’s to accommodate that, and hopefully you can fill it up. And that’s what we’ve become. It’s our own fault, or pleasure, or whatever you call it. That’s how we’ve directed what we do. That’s how the world of doing what we do has gone. Watts kept a huge collection of suits in London, and in Devon. “I remember once when [Watts’s wife] Shirley was going up the stud farm, Charlie put on a beautiful Savile Row suit. She said, why are you dressed like that? He said, we’re the bosses; we might as well look the part. But all the staff there loved him. He commanded a lot of respect, in the band too.” Browsing through the catalogue for the forthcoming auction begs the question of whether Watts actually read all, or any, of the books he collected. 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. 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.

Charlie Watts, drummer for the Rolling Stones, dies at 80 | CNN Charlie Watts, drummer for the Rolling Stones, dies at 80 | CNN

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. Drummer Steve Jordan, a former member of the house bands for “Saturday Night Live” and “Late Night with David Letterman,” is scheduled to take Watts’ place for the Stones’ upcoming tour, which is scheduled to start on September 26 in St. Louis.The two-part auction of more than 500 lots will take place at Christie’s in London on 28 September, and an online sale will be open for bidding from 15 to 29 September. Jazz memorabilia, such as an annotated printed score for George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, will be on sale alongside the books. He married Shirley Ann Shepherd in 1964, and the couple had one daughter, Seraphina. They remained married until Watts’ death.