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

Product Information

American first edition inscribed by the author: “With A Conan Doyle’s kindest recollections of pleasant partnership in travel June 13 th/91.” 8. All the Sad Young Men, F Scott Fitzgerald (1926) 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. First edition, inscribed by the author: “I perambulated Dartmoor before I wrote this book, A Conan Doyle.” 4. The Thirteen Problems, Agatha Christie (1932) 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.”

Charlie Watts: the calm, brilliant eye of the Rolling Stones Charlie Watts: the calm, brilliant eye of the Rolling Stones

For all the absurdity of a man yearning to be performing in a jazz club playing to a combined total on the two legs of the tour of 5.5 million people, Charlie told me soon afterwards that doing those gigantic shows was painless. ‘The Stones are very easy to play with. In this day and age it’s very easy to play, because …’ Here came another of his unexpected pauses and changes of direction. ‘Let’s see … I blame Led Zeppelin for the two-hour-long show. Now, you see, we jumped in a few years from doing 20 minutes, all the hits and off – the Apollo Revue, we’ll call it – we went from doing club dates which are two sets a night, which was great fun, to doing two minutes, because you got pulled off the stage, to doing 20-minute Apollo-type shows to doing, thanks to Led Zeppelin, this two-hour long show. 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. Eventually, his reticence became something of what would now be called a brand, his unruffled, beautifully tailored calmness and detachment as characteristic in its own way as Richards’ dissolution.

If you consider Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett and Charlie Parker and Duke Ellington, I think Charlie would have drawn a comparison between the style of those books and the style of the jazz musicians he admired so much – the understated gracefulness in both those cases,” says Sexton. Volumes up for auction include the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas’s own copy of his first collection, 18 Poems. The book is inscribed three times: once saying it is his copy, “once when he’s presenting it to his first serious girlfriend, and he crosses that out and then he presents it another time to a next girlfriend”, explains Wiltshire. Watts, says King , “was a very quiet, under-the-radar collector; you never knew what he was up to.”

Charlie Watts obituary | Charlie Watts | The Guardian Charlie Watts obituary | Charlie Watts | The Guardian

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 In the 80s and 90s, as the Rolling Stones’ tours became ever-more extravagant son-et-lumière displays involving pyrotechnics, huge inflatables and cantilevered bridges, the vast screens at the side of the stage would occasionally focus on Watts. Watts circa 1965: ‘The Stones’ ascent to stardom was swift.’ Photograph: Icon and Image/Getty Images It could be said that there are two basic species of collector. On the one hand, there are ‘completists’ who aim to amass perfect sets within their field of interest: an artefact from every Apollo mission, say, or a print of all known Ravilious woodcuts. On the other hand are the ‘eclecticists’, who are curious about all aspects of human creativity and endeavour, and so will happily acquire a dinosaur skull or a Chinese jadeBuddha just because it might look well on their Danish sideboard. Charlie Watts of the Rolling Stones during a rehearsal in New York, May 1978. Michael Putland/Getty ImagesHe 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. Fisher was the founder of Stufish, the set designers whose relationship with the Stones continued all the way to 2022’s SIXTY festivities. As the company prepared for the launch of that European itinerary – sadly without Charlie’s new input – modern-day chief executive Ray Winkler told the Guardian about Steel Wheels. In the 1980s Watts finally found time to pursue his passion for jazz and formed a 32-piece band called the Charlie Watts Orchestra. Their first gig was in the legendary London jazz club Ronnie Scott’s, where Watts was a frequent, if undercover, visitor. And sometimes, his playing seemed to show an innate understanding of what the song was about. On Get Off Of My Cloud, he plays exactly the same fill every two bars throughout the song’s verses: there’s something relentless about it, which fits perfectly given Get Off Of My Cloud is about frustrated anger.

Charlie’s Good Tonight by Paul Sexton review - The Guardian

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. King says that “Charlie was a very down-to earth, straightforward bloke. He wasn’t snobby in any sense of the word, but he definitely liked the good things in life. He was a total gentleman, and he liked other gentlemen.” He numbered among his friends Alexis von Rosenberg, Baron de Redé – the banker, aesthete, collector and socialite. It was de Redé who pointed Watts in the direction of George Cleverley, bespoke shoemaker to the Duke of Windsor – and subsequently to Charlie Watts. He went on to acquire several pairs of the Duke’s shoes, and two of his suits. 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.Browsing through the catalogue for the forthcoming auction begs the question of whether Watts actually read all, or any, of the books he collected.