Worse for wear in an Amsterdam hotel, the Rolling Stones frontman phoned up Charlie Watts’ room and demanded, “Where’s my drummer?”
Twenty minutes later, Watts had appeared at his door, dressed to the nines in a Saville Row suit, clean-shaven and wearing cologne. “Never call me your drummer again,” he told Jagger. “You’re my singer.”
According to Keith Richards’ 2010 memoir, Watts then hauled Jagger up by the lapels “and gave him a right hook”.
“Mick fell back onto a silver platter of smoked salmon on the table and began to slide towards the open window and the canal below it.”
It was a rare display of emotion from the usually unshakeable drummer, who shunned the flamboyant, showbiz lifestyle of his colleagues.
Even when he gave in to drug addiction in the mid-80s, Watts handled it with characteristic poise – ditching all of his vices in one go, after breaking his ankle retrieving a bottle from his wine cellar.
“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,” he told The Guardian in 2000. “I just stopped everything – drinking, smoking, taking drugs, everything, all at once. I just thought, ‘enough is enough.’
He was equally stoic about his success with The Rolling Stones – which he once described as “five years of work and 20 years of hanging around”.
But Watt was a vital part of the band. His jazz-inflected swing gave the Stones’ songs their swagger, pushing and pulling at the groove, and creating room for Jagger’s lascivious drawl.
On tracks like Honky Tonk Women and Brown Sugar, he created some of rock’s strongest grooves, and the isolated drum track from Gimme Shelter is a masterclass in timekeeping and musicality.
“As much as Mick’s voice and Keith’s guitar, Charlie Watts’s snare sound is the Rolling Stones,” Bruce Springsteen once wrote. “When Mick sings, ‘It’s only rock ‘n’ roll but I like it,’ Charlie’s in back showing you why!”
As the world absorbs the sad news of his death at the age of 80, here are some of his best moments from The Stones’ back catalogue.
