Proper Charlie Charlie Watts has always marched to a different drum than the rest of the Rolling Stones. He has been happily married for 36 years, he had a drug habit when the others had quit, and a pathological fear of screaming girls. Now he has returned to his other first love, the drummers of the bebop era
Barbara Ellen Sunday July 9, 2000 The Observer
You'd be hard pressed to find anybody with a bad word to say about Charlie Watts. He's a Rolling Stone, of course - and so, by definition, a legend - but there's more to it than that. After all, Mick Jagger is a Rolling Stone and people queue up to say bad things about him.
Certainly, for a lot of drummers, Charlie Watts is the stick-wielding colossus by whom all others should be judged. I should know, I lived with a former drummer for years and had to sit through many a misty-eyed eulogy in the small hours. It was like a crash course in Charlie studies. Why Charlie was so talented. Why Charlie was such a class act. Why Charlie was so unassuming. Why Charlie was the undisputed God of backbeat. Hey, I wanted to scream (and sometimes did), screw Charlie, what about me? The 'Charlie effect' seems to carry through to people who have only the most glancing interest in the Stones. We might have a grudging soft spot for the ludicrous Mr Jagger. We might warm to charming, riff-crunching Keith Richards and his craz-eee sidekick Ronnie Wood. Some might even mourn the departure of Bill Wyman, who resigned in 1993, or, more pertinently, the death of Brian Jones, who drowned in his swimming pool in 1969, mere days after the official announcement that the Stones had sacked him.
Charlie's the one, though. Charlie's the Stone who is so universally well liked that he commands instant respect without even trying. I remember the Manic Street Preachers once telling me how they'd bumped into Charlie Watts briefly at a recording studio, and what a 'gentleman' he'd seemed. To put this small compliment into perspective, it should be noted that the Manic Street Preachers is a band so hard to impress, if Elvis Presley rose from the dead and wanted to jam with them, they'd tell him to bring his own beer. It all seems to boil down to a certain quality which is as rare as hen's teeth in the music business, but which Charlie Watts is perceived to have in abundance. In a word, decency. You've got to hand it to a 59-year-old man who's played with the world's most infamous rock'n'roll band for 38 years, and stayed happily married to his wife, Shirley, for 36 of them. A man who, moreover, remains resolutely determined not to take his elevated position too seriously.
'There's a lot more interesting people around than rock'n'roll bands,' Charlie Watts tells me in no uncertain terms, over a lazy pub lunch.
'There's this huge cult grown up around rock'n'roll, but I never saw it myself. I don't mean I never saw it going on, I mean I just didn't "get" it.'
And then, the drummer whose own rock'n'roll band inarguably rates among the most significant musical forces in global pan- cultural history, shifting literally hundreds of millions of records along the way, stares into his espresso, and ponders apparently without irony:
'What have we got to be so egotistical about?'
Charlie and I meet first at The Observer photographer's studio in a small street in Islington which my A-Z hasn't heard of. I have to bang on a couple of graffiti-strewn doors before I finally find it, and by then I'm 15 minutes late. This isn't good, I think, as I barge my way into the studio. Charlie Watts has always seemed so organised and precise. The other Stones might have spent the best part of their careers resembling dishevelled tarts in a rock-themed brothel, but not Charlie Watts. He could be the type to take offence at the late arrival of a journalist. I needn't have worried.
'I didn't even know you were late,' says Charlie, when we're introduced.
And with that, he gives one of his mellow grins, and trudges back to his stool for more photographs. Later, during the course of our conversation, Charlie Watts is to demonstrate again and again how important appearances are to him.
Marvin Gaye: 'The coolest-looking man - the epitome of a black American.' Elvin Jones: 'Beautiful!' Duke Ellington: 'Stylish.' Kenny Clarke: 'Chic, like Fred Astaire.' Zoe Ball: 'She's really ugly, isn't she?' That last one, muttered as a casual aside during our drive to the pub-restaurant, was clearly an aberration for Charlie.
He's definitely one for praising rather than denigrating, especially where his musical heroes are concerned.
'All the musicians I love look beautiful,' he says. 'The way a man looks as he plays, his style , is very important to me.'
Charlie himself makes a point of being nicely turned out. The day I meet him, his sharp blue suit speaks of timeless chic and East End betting shops. The eyes are gentle, the swept-back silver hair is thinning but hanging in there. Then there's those Slavic cheekbones, and the delicate, surprising body.
All the Stones are renowned for being shorter than you'd expect, but Charlie's slightness makes him seem shorter still. Right now, though, his body is rather less noteworthy than his body language.
Staring into the camera lens, Charlie manages to look both serene and agonised - like a small boy having a tooth pulled at the dentist, who's determined not to cry in front of his mother.
'I hate doing things like this,' he admits later. 'Interviews, videos, pictures, all of it. I'd prefer Keith to do it for me, but he can't really, can he?'
Seeing as Charlie is promoting his latest solo project a tribute album - honouring jazz drummers, put together with fellow aficionado Jim Keltner - Keith Richards' sudden appearance in the publicity schedule might indeed be surprising. It's Charlie who's had the lifelong love for jazz, and who's done various acclaimed tours and albums with his own Charlie Watts Quintet. All these years on, the drummer still seems totally besotted by the genre that bit him first, long before he'd even heard the name Rolling Stones. Nor could anyone dismiss this latest outing as a simple case of 'vanity publishing'. A second CD features diverse contemporary ambient-techno-drum'n'bass mixes by artists such as Coldcut and The Propellorheads. However, the main record is a muso bath of purist excellence put together with obvious taste and passion.
'I'd like it to sell,' says Charlie. 'Nobody ever brings a record out not wanting people to buy it. My wife doesn't like it, though,' he smiles.
'She prefers the Stones.'
And which does Charlie prefer?
'I love both,' he says instantly.
'With the jazz, it's great being onstage with such wonderful players, and with the Stones, it's great being up there with your friends. I stand firmly with my rock'n'roll band - though I have to say,' his eyes narrow thoughtfully,
'I have always considered the Stones to be a great blues band - rock'n'roll to me is Little Richard.'
We're sitting in the restaurant in the back of the pub. By now, Charlie has relaxed considerably. When we first came in, he'd sat, fidgeting, eyes averted, unable to make up his mind whether he wanted the interview to start or not.
Usually, when you hear that a world-famous celebrity is 'shy', you take it with a pinch of salt, but Charlie's reserve seems genuine. When he finally thaws, he is friendly and courteous to a fault, but initially, his paralysing shyness hangs between us like an exclamation mark. You wouldn't believe any other Stone, but you trust Charlie Watts when he tells you that he never enjoyed the female attention the band got in the early days.
'Girls chasing you down the street, screaming... horrible!' he says.
But Charlie, I say, isn't that supposed to be every man's dream?
'Maybe it is,' he shrugs. 'But I hated it. It was quite flattering, I suppose. And it's fantastic to play to audiences like that. For me, that was the whole point of being chased down the street... Playing the drums was all I was ever interested in. The rest of it made me cringe. The girls only really loved Mick, Brian and Keith anyway,' he continues sagely. 'Bill and I were older, and Bill looked it then. He looks much younger now.' Charlie cackles. 'Bill used to have this terrible Tony Curtis haircut - Keith does this great impression of it.'
The Stones themselves didn't seem to make much impression on Charlie in the very early days:
'I used to play with loads of bands, and the Stones were just another one. I thought they'd last three months, then a year, then three years, then I stopped counting.'
He remembers them travelling together in a small van:
'Me and Keith were in the back, on a ledge, under a blanket. Brian conned his way into the front on account of his asthma.'
Does he have any nostalgia for those years?
'No,' says Charlie. 'We tour very well now - first class and Rolls-Royces, and that's the only way to do it. Those were valuable times, though, because that's how you became a working band. And we still are. There's bigger gaps between work, but we're still a working band.'
Even when the Stones started to become a serious proposition, Charlie continued to consider them a blues band, and remained stubbornly resistant to the allure of rock'n'roll:
'To me, it was about as interesting as something like flower power,' he says.
His eyes twinkle wickedly: 'That's just me, though.'
Charlie Watts was born in 1941, the son of a British Rail lorry driver. He studied graphic design at Harrow Art College, then took a job in a West End advertising agency. Around this time, he started playing the drums for local acts, including Alexis Korner, and the Rolling Stones.
He also met his future wife, Shirley - an art student and sculptress. They married, and had one daughter, Seraphina, born in 1968. Still very much together, Charlie and Shirley now live on their 16th-century stud farm in Devon, along with numerous horses and rescued greyhounds. Seraphina adjusted very badly when the Watts first returned from tax exile in France and, by all accounts, became a bit of a wild child. She got expelled from Millfield public school for smoking pot, but has since calmed down, and become a mother.
'It's difficult to be a good father when you're away from home so much,' says Charlie sadly.
Recently, the Watts had to prosecute the husband-and-wife managers of their stud farm for fraudulent accounting. Apart from that, life Chez Charlie seems almost surreally idyllic. If the drummer reads at all, it's detective novels, or books on Hollywood in the 40s. His favourite music is jazz, or anything from Stevie Wonder to Stravinsky. The mood most likely to inspire him to put a record on is 'loneliness'.
'Not in a negative way,' says Charlie quickly. 'Just that feeling of being alone.' Solitude? 'Yes.'
When I ask Charlie if he would prefer to live in London to be more 'in the centre of things', he points out:
'It isn't the centre of things for me, and hasn't been for 30 years.'
Later, Charlie adds that London, along with America, is the place he feels least safe. Not that anywhere is totally safe these days for a rock star. The stabbing of Beatle George Harrison, last year, on his country estate in Henley- on-Thames, Oxfordshire, left Charlie very shaken. For those unfamiliar with the case, it was reported that Michael Abram broke into the house and stabbed Harrison, who fought him off with the help of his wife Olivia.
'But what George really went through was not in the papers,' says Charlie. 'I spoke to Ringo about a month after it happened and he told me exactly what went on, and it was horrific. George was stabbed about 40 times. It happened outside his bedroom on the landing. He would have been dead if he'd been lying in bed, he wouldn't have been able to fight. The papers did say that one wound punctured his lung, but a lot of the others were just as horrific. The man was slashing him everywhere. George's wife hit him again and again on the head with this brass lamp, but he just wouldn't stop. There was blood everywhere.'
Charlie shakes his head ruefully: 'I think George is still going through trauma,' he says. 'He's bound to - he's lived in that house for 30 years. It's just so shocking that it should happen to a guy who's so...' he gropes for the right word - 'inoffensive. George has never been nasty to anyone, he's only ever preached love and peace. He's not like John Lennon: he's never made statements or anything.' Charlie sighs, bemused. 'He's just a very nice guitar player.'
He doesn't say it but, going by the look on his face, Charlie obviously believes that anything that could happen to the bass player of the Beatles could also happen to the drummer of the Stones. Not that he's about to let it blight married bliss with Shirley. The Watts have long been considered to be among rock's most loving couples. While other Stones were busy going mad in the carnal and pharmaceutical sweetie shops of the 60s and 70s, Charlie was famous for retiring to his room to pine for his wife. Around this time, he developed a habit of drawing each bed he sleeps in on tour.
'It's a way of marking time,' he says. 'It's become such a fetish, I couldn't bear to miss one.'
Charlie's devotion to Mrs Watts doesn't show any sign of abating. Shirley told an interviewer not so long ago how Charlie still tells her he loves her every single day and never, ever criticises her. This is precisely the sort of story that makes even the most music-illiterate of people worship Charlie Watts. Was it love at first sight? Charlie considers for a moment, pushing back his silver hair.
'Well, it was obviously very sexual, and I suppose that's love as well. I just_' he hesitates, ' wanted her, I suppose. She was so funny and clever, and she had the most infectious laugh you'd ever heard. And I loved the world she was in, the world of art and sculpting. I just admired Shirley very, very much.' He smiles. 'I still do.'
Shirley was the main reason Charlie cites for coming back from the brink in the mid-80s when, inexplicably, he decided to go off the rails just as the other Stones were starting to calm down. Today, Charlie has a coffee, while I have a red wine. He hasn't drunk, smoked, or taken drugs for 15 years, and dismisses the period when he suddenly started overindulging as 'a mid-life thing, it must have been'. One thing's for sure, Charlie wasn't short of bad influences.
Many of his jazz heroes, including Charlie Parker, succumbed to drugs, and the Rolling Stones entourage was famously packed solid with 24/7 party people. Charlie's personal slide started with drinking too much.
'Probably a normal day's quota for most people, but too much for me. Then it became regular.'
From there, Charlie went on to booze, amphetamines and heroin. His daughter would look at him most mornings and declare he reminded her of Dracula. Shirley was in despair and on the verge of leaving. It lasted for about two years. That's quite a long time to be_ I hesitate, wondering how to politely finish the sentence.
'That out of it?' says Charlie helpfully. I tell him I could imagine him boozing, but I couldn't imagine him getting involved with heroin. 'Well, I did,' says Charlie. 'Very easily. And drugs are very hard to give up. For me, anyway. I didn't even take that many. I wasn't that badly affected, I wasn't a junkie, but giving up drugs was very, very hard. Much, much harder than the rest of it.'
The turning point came when he broke his ankle. 'I was drunk,' says Charlie. 'I slipped down the steps when I was in the cellar getting a bottle of wine. I happened to be booked for a jazz show at Ronnie Scott's in six weeks' time, and it really brought it home to me how far down I'd gone. I just stopped everything - drinking, smoking, taking drugs, everything, all at once. I just thought, enough is enough .'
The Stones have had other troubles in recent times. In 1998, they were universally castigated as 'greedy' for axeing the British leg of their last 'Bridges To Babylon' tour, to avoid an unexpected £10m tax bill brought about by a new budget. The Stones played the dates the following year, but the damage was done.
'We didn't cancel that tour,' says Charlie, exasperated. 'They moved the goalposts, and we moved them again.'
He's drily cynical about why people persist in wanting to see the Stones play live after all these years. 'Maybe they're hoping we'll fall over at long last. It would be an occasion, wouldn't it?'
There's also the fact that, offstage as well as on, the Stones continue to put on a good show. There was Mick Jagger's divorce from Jerry Hall, and his much-publicised love child with Brazilian model Luciana Morad.
'Mick's a very strict, very good father,' reveals Charlie. 'Very much "Do As I Say, Not As I Do".'
Then, a week or so after I talk with Charlie, Ron Wood is in the papers, having checked into the Priory for the usual 'tired and emotional' problems. However, when Charlie and I speak, all is calm in the Stones' camp, and the drummer talks warmly of his bandmates, commending Jagger's 'zest for life' and Wood's 'lovely, fun-loving' nature.
'Keith is the most interesting, the most different of us all, though,' says Charlie. 'He's a man of vision, and one of the few people who hasn't really changed over the years. Wherever he goes, whatever he does, he's always Keith. He'll be in his room and all the stuff that makes him Keith will be there. The music's going, the wine's there, his guitar's there, and he'll be sitting in the middle of it all like some wonderful sultan. ' Charlie beams. 'It's fantastic. It's not a new thing, it's the way he's always been.'
And what about Brian Jones, I ask, do you ever think of him?
'No,' says Charlie quite sharply, and his face clouds over. 'Well, actually, yeah,' he says, after a second's pause.
'Of course I think about Brian. Now and again, I'll see something which reminds me of him and I'll remember the laughs we used to have. He was a bit fey, though,' says Charlie pointedly. 'And he could be very cruel, contrary to his angelic looks. He was a terror with girls. People could be dropped in the most awful way. I always used to wonder how he coped with the worry of it all, the babies and whatever. He obviously didn't even think of it. 'Brian had this horrible streak,' says Charlie. 'John Lennon had it, too. John could be one of the nicest, most hilarious people you'd ever meet, but he could also be a cruel bugger. He used this terrible rapier-like wit to kick people down. Obviously, a very talented man, but, to me, John was just like everybody I went to art school with - funny, flippant, but he'd walk over anybody who got in his way.' Charlie sighs. 'Not the nicest person in the world, and Brian was the same.'
What about the conspiracy theories that Brian was murdered? Charlie says: 'All that about Brian being knocked off is rubbish. I know a lot of people would have willingly knocked him off, but it didn't happen. Brian was just very weak. He was asthmatic, unhealthy. The stuff he took - uppers, downers, leapers, bleepers, whatever they were too strong for his body. He couldn't take it. And his swimming pool was about 70 degrees or something - it used to shimmer with heat. You'd drive down there on a spring morning and the heat would be rising off the top. And he got in there, and I suppose it was like getting into a warm bath, and he fell asleep. And_ that's how he died.'
Charlie's voice trails away. He suddenly looks very tired. Are you surprised, I ask, by the number of casualties there have been in and around the Stones' camp over the years?
'Surprised?' says Charlie wryly, looking me straight in the eye. 'I'm amazed there haven't been more.'
It's time for Charlie to leave. He has to go and record a Radio 2 interview with his old friend, jazz maestro George Melly. 'Good!' cries Charlie, with blatant relief, when I click the tape recorder off. I slip it quickly into my bag to save him the displeasure of looking at what is so obviously an instrument of torture.
'Are you coming along?' asks Charlie, smiling. 'George is hilarious. Very jazz !'
Charlie is right. Melly is hilarious and probably 'very jazz' too, whatever that means.
Charlie certainly seems to relax beautifully when he's with Melly - the pressure is off, and all he has to think about are his favourite jazz records. When we all go to the bar after the radio show, I initially sit slightly apart from Melly and Charlie, thinking they'll appreciate some privacy. Charlie will have none of it.
'Come and sit here!' he orders, thumping the table, all kind bossiness. I switch the tape recorder on a couple more times, when the conversation turns interesting, but Charlie looks so pained, it's soon banished to my bag for good. Then the change in Charlie Watts is quite amazing. He loses his haunted, wary look, and becomes playful, fun, delighted when Melly teases me, pretending to be entranced by my 'ideal' colouring:
'A raven bleeding to death in snow,' booms Melly.
'What do you think, Charlie?'
He just chuckles merrily, and gives me and the rest of the room a dazzling smile that is a wink, a grin, and a leap for joy combined.
I'm Charlie Watts, the smile seems to be saying - I'm perfectly relaxed, totally 'jazz'.
• Charlie Watts's album, Charlie Watts/Jim Keltner Project, is released on Monday by Virgin
Barbara Ellen Sunday July 9, 2000 The Observer
You'd be hard pressed to find anybody with a bad word to say about Charlie Watts. He's a Rolling Stone, of course - and so, by definition, a legend - but there's more to it than that. After all, Mick Jagger is a Rolling Stone and people queue up to say bad things about him.
Certainly, for a lot of drummers, Charlie Watts is the stick-wielding colossus by whom all others should be judged. I should know, I lived with a former drummer for years and had to sit through many a misty-eyed eulogy in the small hours. It was like a crash course in Charlie studies. Why Charlie was so talented. Why Charlie was such a class act. Why Charlie was so unassuming. Why Charlie was the undisputed God of backbeat. Hey, I wanted to scream (and sometimes did), screw Charlie, what about me? The 'Charlie effect' seems to carry through to people who have only the most glancing interest in the Stones. We might have a grudging soft spot for the ludicrous Mr Jagger. We might warm to charming, riff-crunching Keith Richards and his craz-eee sidekick Ronnie Wood. Some might even mourn the departure of Bill Wyman, who resigned in 1993, or, more pertinently, the death of Brian Jones, who drowned in his swimming pool in 1969, mere days after the official announcement that the Stones had sacked him.
Charlie's the one, though. Charlie's the Stone who is so universally well liked that he commands instant respect without even trying. I remember the Manic Street Preachers once telling me how they'd bumped into Charlie Watts briefly at a recording studio, and what a 'gentleman' he'd seemed. To put this small compliment into perspective, it should be noted that the Manic Street Preachers is a band so hard to impress, if Elvis Presley rose from the dead and wanted to jam with them, they'd tell him to bring his own beer. It all seems to boil down to a certain quality which is as rare as hen's teeth in the music business, but which Charlie Watts is perceived to have in abundance. In a word, decency. You've got to hand it to a 59-year-old man who's played with the world's most infamous rock'n'roll band for 38 years, and stayed happily married to his wife, Shirley, for 36 of them. A man who, moreover, remains resolutely determined not to take his elevated position too seriously.
'There's a lot more interesting people around than rock'n'roll bands,' Charlie Watts tells me in no uncertain terms, over a lazy pub lunch.
'There's this huge cult grown up around rock'n'roll, but I never saw it myself. I don't mean I never saw it going on, I mean I just didn't "get" it.'
And then, the drummer whose own rock'n'roll band inarguably rates among the most significant musical forces in global pan- cultural history, shifting literally hundreds of millions of records along the way, stares into his espresso, and ponders apparently without irony:
'What have we got to be so egotistical about?'
Charlie and I meet first at The Observer photographer's studio in a small street in Islington which my A-Z hasn't heard of. I have to bang on a couple of graffiti-strewn doors before I finally find it, and by then I'm 15 minutes late. This isn't good, I think, as I barge my way into the studio. Charlie Watts has always seemed so organised and precise. The other Stones might have spent the best part of their careers resembling dishevelled tarts in a rock-themed brothel, but not Charlie Watts. He could be the type to take offence at the late arrival of a journalist. I needn't have worried.
'I didn't even know you were late,' says Charlie, when we're introduced.
And with that, he gives one of his mellow grins, and trudges back to his stool for more photographs. Later, during the course of our conversation, Charlie Watts is to demonstrate again and again how important appearances are to him.
Marvin Gaye: 'The coolest-looking man - the epitome of a black American.' Elvin Jones: 'Beautiful!' Duke Ellington: 'Stylish.' Kenny Clarke: 'Chic, like Fred Astaire.' Zoe Ball: 'She's really ugly, isn't she?' That last one, muttered as a casual aside during our drive to the pub-restaurant, was clearly an aberration for Charlie.
He's definitely one for praising rather than denigrating, especially where his musical heroes are concerned.
'All the musicians I love look beautiful,' he says. 'The way a man looks as he plays, his style , is very important to me.'
Charlie himself makes a point of being nicely turned out. The day I meet him, his sharp blue suit speaks of timeless chic and East End betting shops. The eyes are gentle, the swept-back silver hair is thinning but hanging in there. Then there's those Slavic cheekbones, and the delicate, surprising body.
All the Stones are renowned for being shorter than you'd expect, but Charlie's slightness makes him seem shorter still. Right now, though, his body is rather less noteworthy than his body language.
Staring into the camera lens, Charlie manages to look both serene and agonised - like a small boy having a tooth pulled at the dentist, who's determined not to cry in front of his mother.
'I hate doing things like this,' he admits later. 'Interviews, videos, pictures, all of it. I'd prefer Keith to do it for me, but he can't really, can he?'
Seeing as Charlie is promoting his latest solo project a tribute album - honouring jazz drummers, put together with fellow aficionado Jim Keltner - Keith Richards' sudden appearance in the publicity schedule might indeed be surprising. It's Charlie who's had the lifelong love for jazz, and who's done various acclaimed tours and albums with his own Charlie Watts Quintet. All these years on, the drummer still seems totally besotted by the genre that bit him first, long before he'd even heard the name Rolling Stones. Nor could anyone dismiss this latest outing as a simple case of 'vanity publishing'. A second CD features diverse contemporary ambient-techno-drum'n'bass mixes by artists such as Coldcut and The Propellorheads. However, the main record is a muso bath of purist excellence put together with obvious taste and passion.
'I'd like it to sell,' says Charlie. 'Nobody ever brings a record out not wanting people to buy it. My wife doesn't like it, though,' he smiles.
'She prefers the Stones.'
And which does Charlie prefer?
'I love both,' he says instantly.
'With the jazz, it's great being onstage with such wonderful players, and with the Stones, it's great being up there with your friends. I stand firmly with my rock'n'roll band - though I have to say,' his eyes narrow thoughtfully,
'I have always considered the Stones to be a great blues band - rock'n'roll to me is Little Richard.'
We're sitting in the restaurant in the back of the pub. By now, Charlie has relaxed considerably. When we first came in, he'd sat, fidgeting, eyes averted, unable to make up his mind whether he wanted the interview to start or not.
Usually, when you hear that a world-famous celebrity is 'shy', you take it with a pinch of salt, but Charlie's reserve seems genuine. When he finally thaws, he is friendly and courteous to a fault, but initially, his paralysing shyness hangs between us like an exclamation mark. You wouldn't believe any other Stone, but you trust Charlie Watts when he tells you that he never enjoyed the female attention the band got in the early days.
'Girls chasing you down the street, screaming... horrible!' he says.
But Charlie, I say, isn't that supposed to be every man's dream?
'Maybe it is,' he shrugs. 'But I hated it. It was quite flattering, I suppose. And it's fantastic to play to audiences like that. For me, that was the whole point of being chased down the street... Playing the drums was all I was ever interested in. The rest of it made me cringe. The girls only really loved Mick, Brian and Keith anyway,' he continues sagely. 'Bill and I were older, and Bill looked it then. He looks much younger now.' Charlie cackles. 'Bill used to have this terrible Tony Curtis haircut - Keith does this great impression of it.'
The Stones themselves didn't seem to make much impression on Charlie in the very early days:
'I used to play with loads of bands, and the Stones were just another one. I thought they'd last three months, then a year, then three years, then I stopped counting.'
He remembers them travelling together in a small van:
'Me and Keith were in the back, on a ledge, under a blanket. Brian conned his way into the front on account of his asthma.'
Does he have any nostalgia for those years?
'No,' says Charlie. 'We tour very well now - first class and Rolls-Royces, and that's the only way to do it. Those were valuable times, though, because that's how you became a working band. And we still are. There's bigger gaps between work, but we're still a working band.'
Even when the Stones started to become a serious proposition, Charlie continued to consider them a blues band, and remained stubbornly resistant to the allure of rock'n'roll:
'To me, it was about as interesting as something like flower power,' he says.
His eyes twinkle wickedly: 'That's just me, though.'
Charlie Watts was born in 1941, the son of a British Rail lorry driver. He studied graphic design at Harrow Art College, then took a job in a West End advertising agency. Around this time, he started playing the drums for local acts, including Alexis Korner, and the Rolling Stones.
He also met his future wife, Shirley - an art student and sculptress. They married, and had one daughter, Seraphina, born in 1968. Still very much together, Charlie and Shirley now live on their 16th-century stud farm in Devon, along with numerous horses and rescued greyhounds. Seraphina adjusted very badly when the Watts first returned from tax exile in France and, by all accounts, became a bit of a wild child. She got expelled from Millfield public school for smoking pot, but has since calmed down, and become a mother.
'It's difficult to be a good father when you're away from home so much,' says Charlie sadly.
Recently, the Watts had to prosecute the husband-and-wife managers of their stud farm for fraudulent accounting. Apart from that, life Chez Charlie seems almost surreally idyllic. If the drummer reads at all, it's detective novels, or books on Hollywood in the 40s. His favourite music is jazz, or anything from Stevie Wonder to Stravinsky. The mood most likely to inspire him to put a record on is 'loneliness'.
'Not in a negative way,' says Charlie quickly. 'Just that feeling of being alone.' Solitude? 'Yes.'
When I ask Charlie if he would prefer to live in London to be more 'in the centre of things', he points out:
'It isn't the centre of things for me, and hasn't been for 30 years.'
Later, Charlie adds that London, along with America, is the place he feels least safe. Not that anywhere is totally safe these days for a rock star. The stabbing of Beatle George Harrison, last year, on his country estate in Henley- on-Thames, Oxfordshire, left Charlie very shaken. For those unfamiliar with the case, it was reported that Michael Abram broke into the house and stabbed Harrison, who fought him off with the help of his wife Olivia.
'But what George really went through was not in the papers,' says Charlie. 'I spoke to Ringo about a month after it happened and he told me exactly what went on, and it was horrific. George was stabbed about 40 times. It happened outside his bedroom on the landing. He would have been dead if he'd been lying in bed, he wouldn't have been able to fight. The papers did say that one wound punctured his lung, but a lot of the others were just as horrific. The man was slashing him everywhere. George's wife hit him again and again on the head with this brass lamp, but he just wouldn't stop. There was blood everywhere.'
Charlie shakes his head ruefully: 'I think George is still going through trauma,' he says. 'He's bound to - he's lived in that house for 30 years. It's just so shocking that it should happen to a guy who's so...' he gropes for the right word - 'inoffensive. George has never been nasty to anyone, he's only ever preached love and peace. He's not like John Lennon: he's never made statements or anything.' Charlie sighs, bemused. 'He's just a very nice guitar player.'
He doesn't say it but, going by the look on his face, Charlie obviously believes that anything that could happen to the bass player of the Beatles could also happen to the drummer of the Stones. Not that he's about to let it blight married bliss with Shirley. The Watts have long been considered to be among rock's most loving couples. While other Stones were busy going mad in the carnal and pharmaceutical sweetie shops of the 60s and 70s, Charlie was famous for retiring to his room to pine for his wife. Around this time, he developed a habit of drawing each bed he sleeps in on tour.
'It's a way of marking time,' he says. 'It's become such a fetish, I couldn't bear to miss one.'
Charlie's devotion to Mrs Watts doesn't show any sign of abating. Shirley told an interviewer not so long ago how Charlie still tells her he loves her every single day and never, ever criticises her. This is precisely the sort of story that makes even the most music-illiterate of people worship Charlie Watts. Was it love at first sight? Charlie considers for a moment, pushing back his silver hair.
'Well, it was obviously very sexual, and I suppose that's love as well. I just_' he hesitates, ' wanted her, I suppose. She was so funny and clever, and she had the most infectious laugh you'd ever heard. And I loved the world she was in, the world of art and sculpting. I just admired Shirley very, very much.' He smiles. 'I still do.'
Shirley was the main reason Charlie cites for coming back from the brink in the mid-80s when, inexplicably, he decided to go off the rails just as the other Stones were starting to calm down. Today, Charlie has a coffee, while I have a red wine. He hasn't drunk, smoked, or taken drugs for 15 years, and dismisses the period when he suddenly started overindulging as 'a mid-life thing, it must have been'. One thing's for sure, Charlie wasn't short of bad influences.
Many of his jazz heroes, including Charlie Parker, succumbed to drugs, and the Rolling Stones entourage was famously packed solid with 24/7 party people. Charlie's personal slide started with drinking too much.
'Probably a normal day's quota for most people, but too much for me. Then it became regular.'
From there, Charlie went on to booze, amphetamines and heroin. His daughter would look at him most mornings and declare he reminded her of Dracula. Shirley was in despair and on the verge of leaving. It lasted for about two years. That's quite a long time to be_ I hesitate, wondering how to politely finish the sentence.
'That out of it?' says Charlie helpfully. I tell him I could imagine him boozing, but I couldn't imagine him getting involved with heroin. 'Well, I did,' says Charlie. 'Very easily. And drugs are very hard to give up. For me, anyway. I didn't even take that many. I wasn't that badly affected, I wasn't a junkie, but giving up drugs was very, very hard. Much, much harder than the rest of it.'
The turning point came when he broke his ankle. 'I was drunk,' says Charlie. 'I slipped down the steps when I was in the cellar getting a bottle of wine. I happened to be booked for a jazz show at Ronnie Scott's in six weeks' time, and it really brought it home to me how far down I'd gone. I just stopped everything - drinking, smoking, taking drugs, everything, all at once. I just thought, enough is enough .'
The Stones have had other troubles in recent times. In 1998, they were universally castigated as 'greedy' for axeing the British leg of their last 'Bridges To Babylon' tour, to avoid an unexpected £10m tax bill brought about by a new budget. The Stones played the dates the following year, but the damage was done.
'We didn't cancel that tour,' says Charlie, exasperated. 'They moved the goalposts, and we moved them again.'
He's drily cynical about why people persist in wanting to see the Stones play live after all these years. 'Maybe they're hoping we'll fall over at long last. It would be an occasion, wouldn't it?'
There's also the fact that, offstage as well as on, the Stones continue to put on a good show. There was Mick Jagger's divorce from Jerry Hall, and his much-publicised love child with Brazilian model Luciana Morad.
'Mick's a very strict, very good father,' reveals Charlie. 'Very much "Do As I Say, Not As I Do".'
Then, a week or so after I talk with Charlie, Ron Wood is in the papers, having checked into the Priory for the usual 'tired and emotional' problems. However, when Charlie and I speak, all is calm in the Stones' camp, and the drummer talks warmly of his bandmates, commending Jagger's 'zest for life' and Wood's 'lovely, fun-loving' nature.
'Keith is the most interesting, the most different of us all, though,' says Charlie. 'He's a man of vision, and one of the few people who hasn't really changed over the years. Wherever he goes, whatever he does, he's always Keith. He'll be in his room and all the stuff that makes him Keith will be there. The music's going, the wine's there, his guitar's there, and he'll be sitting in the middle of it all like some wonderful sultan. ' Charlie beams. 'It's fantastic. It's not a new thing, it's the way he's always been.'
And what about Brian Jones, I ask, do you ever think of him?
'No,' says Charlie quite sharply, and his face clouds over. 'Well, actually, yeah,' he says, after a second's pause.
'Of course I think about Brian. Now and again, I'll see something which reminds me of him and I'll remember the laughs we used to have. He was a bit fey, though,' says Charlie pointedly. 'And he could be very cruel, contrary to his angelic looks. He was a terror with girls. People could be dropped in the most awful way. I always used to wonder how he coped with the worry of it all, the babies and whatever. He obviously didn't even think of it. 'Brian had this horrible streak,' says Charlie. 'John Lennon had it, too. John could be one of the nicest, most hilarious people you'd ever meet, but he could also be a cruel bugger. He used this terrible rapier-like wit to kick people down. Obviously, a very talented man, but, to me, John was just like everybody I went to art school with - funny, flippant, but he'd walk over anybody who got in his way.' Charlie sighs. 'Not the nicest person in the world, and Brian was the same.'
What about the conspiracy theories that Brian was murdered? Charlie says: 'All that about Brian being knocked off is rubbish. I know a lot of people would have willingly knocked him off, but it didn't happen. Brian was just very weak. He was asthmatic, unhealthy. The stuff he took - uppers, downers, leapers, bleepers, whatever they were too strong for his body. He couldn't take it. And his swimming pool was about 70 degrees or something - it used to shimmer with heat. You'd drive down there on a spring morning and the heat would be rising off the top. And he got in there, and I suppose it was like getting into a warm bath, and he fell asleep. And_ that's how he died.'
Charlie's voice trails away. He suddenly looks very tired. Are you surprised, I ask, by the number of casualties there have been in and around the Stones' camp over the years?
'Surprised?' says Charlie wryly, looking me straight in the eye. 'I'm amazed there haven't been more.'
It's time for Charlie to leave. He has to go and record a Radio 2 interview with his old friend, jazz maestro George Melly. 'Good!' cries Charlie, with blatant relief, when I click the tape recorder off. I slip it quickly into my bag to save him the displeasure of looking at what is so obviously an instrument of torture.
'Are you coming along?' asks Charlie, smiling. 'George is hilarious. Very jazz !'
Charlie is right. Melly is hilarious and probably 'very jazz' too, whatever that means.
Charlie certainly seems to relax beautifully when he's with Melly - the pressure is off, and all he has to think about are his favourite jazz records. When we all go to the bar after the radio show, I initially sit slightly apart from Melly and Charlie, thinking they'll appreciate some privacy. Charlie will have none of it.
'Come and sit here!' he orders, thumping the table, all kind bossiness. I switch the tape recorder on a couple more times, when the conversation turns interesting, but Charlie looks so pained, it's soon banished to my bag for good. Then the change in Charlie Watts is quite amazing. He loses his haunted, wary look, and becomes playful, fun, delighted when Melly teases me, pretending to be entranced by my 'ideal' colouring:
'A raven bleeding to death in snow,' booms Melly.
'What do you think, Charlie?'
He just chuckles merrily, and gives me and the rest of the room a dazzling smile that is a wink, a grin, and a leap for joy combined.
I'm Charlie Watts, the smile seems to be saying - I'm perfectly relaxed, totally 'jazz'.
• Charlie Watts's album, Charlie Watts/Jim Keltner Project, is released on Monday by Virgin
