Drummer Charlie Watts, the measure of the Rolling Stones – franceinfo

The musician is “died peacefully in a London hospital” Tuesday 25 August, “surrounded by his family”, announced his agent Bernard Doherty. He had already warned in early August that he would miss the group’s US tour in the fall after suffering “an intervention”.

Charlie Watts was the “measure” of the Stones in every sense of the word: unanimously recognized for his talent in binary rhythm, he also offered on stage, ToWith his impassive face and legendary elegance, the perfect counterpoint to the frantic swaying of Mick Jagger and the electric antics of guitarists Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood.

Born June 2, 1941 in London, Charlie Watts comes to music through jazz. It was his neighbor Dave Green who introduced him at 13 years old. Thirty years later they will form the quartet The A, B, C & D of Boogie-Woogie. “We were listening to Duke Ellington, Chet Baker and Charlie Parker together and that was everything we dreamed of doing”, tells this swing enthusiast in 2011.

Self-taught in drums, the musician learns to play by ear, watching players in London jazz clubs. “I’ve never been to a school to learn to play jazz. It’s not what I like. What I like about jazz is the emotion.” Throughout his career with the Rolling Stones, the one who held his drumsticks upside down while hitting with the big end, continued jazz in parallel. He recorded several discs under his name with a quintet (Charlie Watts Quintet) then a dixtuor (Charlie and the tentet Watts).

After studying art, he worked as a graphic designer in a large advertising agency and played, for a fee, with a host of jazz groups in Copenhagen, then in London. He ended up being convinced in 1963 to join the Rolling Stones, then a small formation in its infancy. “I am blessed”, Keith Richards was saying. “The first drummer I started with 40 years ago is one of the best in the world. With a good drummer, you are free to do whatever you want.”

But Charlie Watts has always displayed unwavering modesty. For him, “playing in an intimate jazz quartet and in stadiums with the Rolling Stones is not that different”. Over time, he became indifferent, at least on the surface, to the prospect of separation from the group. “Announcing a final concert would not be a particularly sad moment for me. I will continue to be who I was yesterday or today”, he confided in 2018 to the magazine New Musical Express (NME), while the band of septuagenarians was preparing a new tour.

While his friends were multiplying “divorces, addictions, arrests and crazy shouts”, According to an inventory compiled by the Mirror, Charlie Watts, the quiet, spent a serene life alongside Shirley Shepherd, his wife of 50 years, and their daughter Seraphina, at their thoroughbred Arabian stud in Devon, England. “For fifty years of chaos, drummer Charlie Watts portrayed calm in the midst of the Rolling Stones storm, both on and off stage,” estimated the British tabloid in 2012.

The musician was not, however, completely impervious to the group’s addictions: in the 1980s, he underwent detoxification with heroin and alcohol. But he claims to have completely dropped out. “It was very short for me. I just quit, it was not something for me”, confided this taciturn musician who survived throat cancer in 2004.

The one who was dubbed as the twelfth best drummer of all time by Rolling Stones magazine honestly admitted that he had wanted to leave the band several times. “At the end of each tour, I was going. We worked for six months in the States and I said, it’s over, I’m coming home. Then, two weeks later, I was going to shoot. in circles and my wife was like, ‘Why don’t you go back to work? You’re a nightmare’ “.