Charlie Watts: Rock music’s most stylish man
Keith Moon, John Bonham, Ginger Baker, Tommy Lee, Tré Cool, Animal from The Muppets—being the drummer in a rock band gave a generation of people the carte blanche to go completely mental and never look back. Maybe it’s the surge of primal adrenaline that comes from hitting an instrument for a living, but the drummer has historically been the chaos engine of the band they’re in. Drinking, snorting, shagging or, in Moon’s case, sticking a cherry bomb wherever possible and watching them blow up with a demented, Puckish glee, the wild tales of rock drummers often precede their reputation as musicians. Then, on the flip side, somehow, you get Charlie Watts.
Watts, despite being in The Rolling Stones, the literal poster band for rock ‘n’ roll excess and chaos, was the complete antithesis of everything a rock drummer should be. He was an outlier even at his kit. While others were content to thrash out manic, caveman beats with ten-minute solos on the side, Watts was always in service to the song, no matter how many times Jagger called him “the Wembley Whammer”. A jazz drummer at heart, it’s not for nothing that Pete Townshend dubbed Watts as the reason The Stones “swung like a Basie band!”
It wasn’t just his subtle, swinging drumming that made him stand out from his peers, though—he was the sensible Stone from the beginning. While his bandmates spent the 1960s developing the hellraising, “Would you let your daughter marry a Rolling Stone?” reputation, somebody’s daughter did, in fact, marry Charlie Watts in 1964. Watts remained married to Shirley Shepherd for 57 years until his death in 2021. That marriage only wobbled once in his life when the normally steadfast Watts shockingly developed a heroin addiction in 1986. In typical Watts fashion, he was able to steady the ship himself without any of it becoming public knowledge.
The truth is, though, you only had to look at a picture of the band to see why Watts stood out from the rest, which was due to his superlative fashion sense. Watts made dressing like an old-school English dandy look outrageously cool, which, considering his competition was Keith Richards, is saying a lot. While ‘The Glimmer Twins’ were out there dressed as bohemian pirates with the lack of hygiene to match, a day Watts spent not wearing a cravat was a day wasted.
He elaborated on this in an interview with GQ in 2012. “I have a very old-fashioned and traditional mode of dress… I always felt totally out of place with The Rolling Stones. Not as a person—they never made me feel like that. I just mean the way I looked. Photos of the band would come back—I’ll have a pair of shoes on, and they’ve got trainers. I hate trainers, even if they’re fashionable.”
He took this deadly seriously, too, as Phil Collins recalled in a 2016 interview with BBC 6 Music. In it, he talked about a Parisian jazz gig he had made a guest appearance for around 1998, during which The Stones were also based in the same city. Collins said, “He [Watts] called me, and he said, ‘You’re playing the big band show tonight, and I’d love to come’, so I said, ‘Please come.’ He called just before we were supposed to leave and he said, ‘I can’t leave my clothes, they arrived, and I have to lay everything properly’, and I said, ‘OK’… Anyway, he did turn up; he was the most [stylish] I’ve seen of any drummer.”
That may not sound like a massive bar to clear, but Watts did so with aplomb and not just with his fashion sense. The dignity and class with which he carried himself were visible in every aspect of his life. He’s the sole rock drummer one can take seriously as a role model, behind and beyond the kit.
