Tom Dunne: I was too upset to play Stones songs when I heard the news
The Rolling Stones posing with a group of ladies, during rehearsals for ABC's 'Thank Your Lucky Stars' TV pop music show at Teddington Studios, London, 11th November 1964. From left to right, Bill Wyman, Keith Richards, Mick Jagger, Brian Jones and Charlie Watts. (Photo by Terry O'Neill/Getty Images)
Charlie Watts’ death banjaxed me. I tried to play Rolling Stones' songs on the show when I heard, but I had to stop. I was too upset.
It begs the old question: why do people in bands mean so much to us? Why do we care? It makes sense in your teens but I’m not in my teens. “I’m an adult now,” as The Pursuit of Happiness once sang, “I’ve got the problems of an adult, on my head and on my shoulders, I’m an adult now.”
I discovered the Stones via older siblings at Christmas 1976. Asking their advice on what to spend record tokens on they were unanimous: Rolled Gold, The Very Best of The Rolling Stones. Double vinyl, the hits in chronological order from 1963’s ‘Come On’ to ‘Gimme Shelter’ in December 1969.
These dates seemed as far back in time as the steam engine. The last hit on here was half my lifetime ago. My siblings told me they were like the Beatles only “dangerous”. They were right. And that first time you hear ‘Satisfaction', or ‘Paint it Black', well, oh my Lord.
‘Adult-themed lyrics’ suggest odd things to a teenage mind. You don’t understand but It becomes clear that relationships between men and women contain more shootouts than a Sunday afternoon western. Then you write ‘The Rolling Stones’ on your school bag and the atmosphere around you changes.
I first noticed Charlie during the ‘It’s Only Rock and Roll’ video. He was wearing a sailor suit in a sea of bubbles. I had managed to at last see past Mick (magnificent), Keith (scary) and Bill Wyman (too cool for school) to the man at the back. It was my first time seeing ‘cool detachment'. I was mesmerised.
When the punk rock wars ignited young punks were eager to throw the Stones under the bus. I was greatly bemused by this. Which of us was going to tell Charlie he isn’t cool any more? “Good luck with that,” I thought.
The Stones' Some Girls album in 1978 saw them dismiss both the threat of Punk and Disco simultaneously. Charlie was at the heart of it. Looking utterly disinterested in the ‘Miss You’ video he seemed to be saying of disco, ‘Well if you thought rock was beneath me!’
“Form is temporary,” he said with every brush of the snare, “but class leaps off the screen.”
It wasn’t that I saw myself in him, but he was the only one I could at all relate to. Mick was overwhelming, Keith scary, but to be like Charlie seemed attainable. Attainable that is if you were half man, half Kray twin, apart and yet utterly central.
I liked that he eschewed the lifestyle, that he hated when they played the Playboy Mansion, didn’t want to do Glastonbury because it had no roof, said he didn’t remember the Sixties as a time of dex and frugs and rock and roll because he wasn’t that type of person. And he stayed married, true not just to the beat, but himself. Yep, that’s the one I’d be.
The last I saw The Stones was Croke Park 2018. It was a surreal night. Everyone agreed they had never been better. You looked on, privileged to see that band play those songs, ‘Gimme Shelter', ‘You Can’t Always Get What you Want', ‘Ruby Tuesday'. The gears just seemed to change up and up.
I have a tendency to step outside myself at these moments, to look around, at the faces, the lights, the stars. To think, ‘this is us now, alive in the world.’ My eye kept going back to the stage, Keith’s shapes, Mick’s voice and at the back, that little engine of dependability, driving it all forward, Charlie, The Stones’ beating heart.
I can’t imagine that drumkit without Charlie behind it and I can’t imagine what Mick or Keith will think if they ever go onstage again as The Stones and have occasion to look back, over their shoulders. His absence is simply immense.
Time moves on. Recently my 15-year-old confided in me that there might be a boy on the horizon. “Don’t be annoyed, Da,” she said, “but he plays guitar and likes The Rolling Stones.”
Would it be overly dramatic of me if I slipped him my 1976 copy of Rolled Gold and said “You take this son, it’s your time now?”
Don’t worry, he will take that album only from my cold dead hands. God Bless you Charlie, wherever you are.
