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A Man Of Wealth And Taste
Family-endorsed biography of the gentlemanly, eccentric, jazz-loving Stone.
By Pat Gilbert.
Mr Nice Guy: Charlie Watts takes a fag break, April 8, 1964.
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Charlie’s Good Tonight ★★★★
Paul Sexton
HARPER COLLINS. £25
CHARLIE WATTS’ passing after a short illness in August 2021 felt particularly sorrowful because, as his obituaries hammered home, the Stones’ drummer wasn’t just one of the nice guys in rock’n’roll, he was most probably the nicest. Who couldn’t love this shy, dapper, intensely private homebird who openly admitted his band’s music “wasn’t really his cup of tea”? He preferred jazz, of course, and in 1966 levelled with Rave magazine that his gig in a group, then only second to The Beatles in popularity, was “just a job that pays good money”.
All of which means writer Paul Sexton has his work cut out to turn Watts’s stor y into anything other than a big, fluffy Charlie love-in, a task potentially made harder by the involvement of Watts’s devoted family. Yet, commendably, he turns the situation to his advantage, painting an intimate, highly detailed portrait of a man whose life may not have the drama of Mick or Keef ’s but was equally full of strange eccentricities and entertaining stories.
Central to Charlie’s endearing oddness, it transpires, was his OCD tendencies and life-long insomnia. Though these traits were less evident in his years growing up listening to jazz and sketching compulsively in the family’s prefab in Wembley, by the Stones’ lift-off they were in full effect. Bill Wyman recalls the group vaulting down a staircase during a manic Hard Day’s Night-style chase, only to find Watts returning to the top step to retrace his flight. Charlie packing his suitcase, says Keith Richards, was “like watching a Buddhist ceremony”. Years later, an inability to sleep on tour saw him regularly walking the streets alone; once he took refuge in an Indian restaurant, finally fell asleep, and was woken up a few hours later by local police. “Where am I?” he enquired. “Toronto.” “What the fuck am I doing in Toronto?” he puzzled.