Charlie's Good Tonight: The Authorised Biography of The Rolling Stones’ Charlie Watts

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It is particularly striking how the collection comprises mostly books and jazz artefacts from the 1920s to the 1950s – spanning the period from immediately before Watts was born, through to his teenage years. It’s “no coincidence”, says Wiltshire, that the outstanding item in the collection, The Great Gatsby, is the novel that defines the Jazz Age. While working at the agency he was lured away from jazz by Alexis Korner, who recruited him for his band Blues Incorporated in 1962. He was given his first drum kit as a Christmas present in 1955, and while other kids were shaking a leg to Bill Haley or Elvis Presley, he dreamed of playing drums with Davis, or stepping into Art Blakey’s shoes with the Jazz Messengers.

Charlie Watts’ book collection to be sold at Christie’s

While touring and studio work with the Stones continued as ever, in 2009 he began playing with the ABC&D of Boogie Woogie – the name came from the first-name initials of its members, who were the pianists Axel Zwingenberger and Ben Waters and bassist Dave Green. They recorded the albums The Magic of Boogie Woogie (2010) and Live in Paris (2012). Charlie Watts meets the Danish Radio Big Band was recorded live in Copenhagen in 2010 and belatedly released in 2017.

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He was very proud of this sense of being a completist. I think he started with the authors, fell in love with the text and in the way so many of us do when we have a particular author that we love, he wanted to get as close as he could to their lives and the interaction they’d had with that copy of a book. And sometimes, his playing seemed to show an innate understanding of what the song was about. On Get Off Of My Cloud, he plays exactly the same fill every two bars throughout the song’s verses: there’s something relentless about it, which fits perfectly given Get Off Of My Cloud is about frustrated anger. If you consider Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett and Charlie Parker and Duke Ellington, I think Charlie would have drawn a comparison between the style of those books and the style of the jazz musicians he admired so much – the understated gracefulness in both those cases,” says Sexton.

Charlie Watts’s prized book and music Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts’s prized book and music

Jazz is where Watts’s enthusiasm for collecting first began as a teenager, searching out hard-to-find records by his musical heroes in specialist shops in Soho. Collecting became an obsession. Over the years he would collect American Civil War armaments, Horatio Nelson memorabilia, vintage Tailor & Cutter pattern books, suitcases, hats, Stuart silver, and cars, including several Rolls-Royces, a Bugatti Atlantic and a 1937 Lagonda – although he never learnt to drive. He married Shirley Ann Shepherd in 1964, and the couple had one daughter, Seraphina. They remained married until Watts’ death. A very sad day. Charlie Watts was the ultimate drummer,” John wrote in a tweet. “The most stylish of men, and such brilliant company. My deepest condolences to Shirley, Seraphina and Charlotte. And of course, The Rolling Stones.”In 2004 came Watts at Scott’s, a live recording of the Charlie Watts Tentet at Ronnie Scott’s club in London. The disc appeared as news emerged that Watts had been undergoing surgery and radiotherapy for throat cancer. The treatment proved successful and the cancer went into remission. Never do the authorised biography,” a colleague once told me. “You’ll find out where the bodies are buried, metaphorically speaking, but you won’t be allowed to publish their location.” That advice surely applies double when the act under consideration is the Rolling Stones, a group who have left in their wake a trail of outrage, depravity, misogyny, addiction and a few real-life cadavers. There has been some decent music at times, too. The group’s incendiary past gets scant airtime here – the hellish Altamont concert of 1969, for example, with its on-film crowd murder, was merely “an event waiting to go wrong”. Even the Stones’ music gets little attention. There are lists of who guested at which shows and on which albums, praise for Charlie Watts’s unerring timing and ability to hold together a rowdy, loose-limbed band (bassist Bill Wyman gets rare praise for his part too) and some commentary on drum technique, but the impact and meaning of the Stones’ music stays unremarked. For all the absurdity of a man yearning to be performing in a jazz club playing to a combined total on the two legs of the tour of 5.5 million people, Charlie told me soon afterwards that doing those gigantic shows was painless. ‘The Stones are very easy to play with. In this day and age it’s very easy to play, because …’ Here came another of his unexpected pauses and changes of direction. ‘Let’s see … I blame Led Zeppelin for the two-hour-long show. Now, you see, we jumped in a few years from doing 20 minutes, all the hits and off – the Apollo Revue, we’ll call it – we went from doing club dates which are two sets a night, which was great fun, to doing two minutes, because you got pulled off the stage, to doing 20-minute Apollo-type shows to doing, thanks to Led Zeppelin, this two-hour long show. American first edition inscribed by the author: “With A Conan Doyle’s kindest recollections of pleasant partnership in travel June 13 th/91.” 8. All the Sad Young Men, F Scott Fitzgerald (1926)

Revealed: Rolling Stone drummer Charlie Watts’s ‘simply

The collection also includes a first edition of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles with an inscription reading “I perambulated Dartmoor before I wrote this book.” Conan Doyle’s inscriptions are “often very formulaic,” said Wiltshire, so this is “really quite special”. Charlie was no stadium afficionado, but he understood the basic economics. Otherwise, he mused in a 1998 conversation, ‘You’d be playing a month in a town to play to 30,000 people. Where would you play, in a 3,000-seater hall? So it’s to accommodate that, and hopefully you can fill it up. And that’s what we’ve become. It’s our own fault, or pleasure, or whatever you call it. That’s how we’ve directed what we do. That’s how the world of doing what we do has gone. Watts circa 1965: ‘The Stones’ ascent to stardom was swift.’ Photograph: Icon and Image/Getty Images The Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts performs on stage during their "No Filter" tour at NRG Stadium on July 27, 2019 in Houston, Texas. (Photo by SUZANNE CORDEIRO / AFP) (Photo credit should read SUZANNE CORDEIRO/AFP via Getty Images) SUZANNE CORDEIRO/AFP/Getty ImagesHe also distracted himself from the squabbles and struggles of the Stones by putting together the Charlie Watts Big Band, which featured many top British jazz players.