The Rolling Stones had been going for a year in January 1963 when drummer Charlie Watts played with them for the first time. He is held in such high regard by his band-mates that they class that night as the real beginning.
It was the official birth of the world’s greatest rock’n’roll band. Or as he said, the start of “decades of seeing Mick’s bum running around in front of me”.
After that night in the smoke-filled Ealing Blues Club in London, when Charlie, at the second time of asking, picked up his drumsticks for the fledgling band, that their climb to stratospheric levels of fame began.
Months later, they had their first hit single. Within two years, they had conquered America, causing riots as they landed after their first No1 there with (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.
What is your best Rolling Stone memory? Have your say in the comment section
Charlie’s rock solid drumming was a key part of their success.
But while the Stones were famed for rock’n’roll excess, with the band making as many headlines for controversy as for their music, Charlie played to a very different beat.
He once said: “I’m not really a rock star. I don’t have all the trappings of that. Having said that, I do have four vintage cars and can’t drive the bloody things. I’ve never been interested in being seen.”
Bandmate Bill Wyman wrote in his memoir: “Being a Rolling Stone has almost passed him by.
“He has never courted fame. Inside a band of powerful personalities he remains a true British eccentric.”
Born in 1941, the son of a lorry driver, Charles Watts grew up in Kingsbury, North West London, where he attended a secondary modern school.
He loved football and cricket, and devloped a passion for jazz in his teens, saving up to buy 78s by artists such as Charlie Parker and Jelly Roll Morton.
He started out playing banjo, then, inspired by a jazz drummer playing for Gerry Mulligan, put his banjo head on a stand and used it as a snare drum.
His parents bought him his first proper drum kit when he was 14, and he began playing with a jazz band called the Jo Jones All Stars in coffee shops while studying at Harrow Art School, and then working as a graphic designer for Charles Daniels Studios.
Aged 20, Charlie’s life could have taken a different path altogether after he took a graphic designer job in Denmark, but when blues musician Alexis Korner invited him to join his new band Blues Incorporated he returned to London.
It was while playing in clubs that he met Brian Jones, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, and a year after they first began asking him, agreed to drum in their new band.
Charlie later admitted he thought it would be just another drumming gig that wouldn’t last.
“I thought it would be good fun, and I liked the other band members,” he once said. “I didn’t at all think it would be a lifetime job. How could I?”
Within months the band were megastars. Early Stones concerns often descended into mayhem as female fans stormed the stage, and Charlie often found himself trying to maintain the beat with a couple of girls hanging onto his arms.
But while Jagger and his other bandmates famously indulged in their sex symbol status, Charlie rejected the charms of the hordes of groupies, remaining faithful to his wife Shirley, who he had married in 1964.
He later admitted: “Girls chasing you down the street, screaming... horrible! I hated it.
“It was quite flattering, I suppose. Playing the drums was all I was ever interested in. The rest of it made me cringe.”
His time living in the band’s infamously squalid flat in Edith Grove, Chelsea, was short lived.
Once the band had recorded their first chart hits - Come On and I Wanna Be Your Man - he moved into an flat overlooking Regent’s Park.
He married his girlfriend, Shirley Shepherd, a sculpture student at the Royal College of Art who he met before finding fame, in 1964.
However, he never seemed entirely comfortable with the praise of being a rock and roll star and was often self-deprecating and down-to-earth.
Richards once said: “He’s modest and shy and the idea of stardom horrifies him.”
And he famously stayed faithful to Shirley despite all groupie temptations. Even when the Stones visited the Playboy Mansion in 1972, Charlie spent his time there in the games room.
He once said: “I’ve never filled the stereotype of the rock star. Back in the ’70s, Bill Wyman and I decided to grow beards, and the effort left us exhausted.”
Watts’ fashion sense was often at odds with his bandmates, preferring finely-tailored suits over the bohemian chic of Jagger and Richards.
An enduring passion was cricket.
Of all the group, he was reportedly the one that struggled most when they went into tax exile in France during the recording of their 1972 album Exile on Main St, so much did he miss England.
Charlie, estimated to be worth £80million, was the only band member besides Mick Jagger and Keith Richards to appear on every single studio record, and continued touring with the Stones until the band’s 2019 No Filter Tour. His last ever performance was on August 20, 2019 at Miami’s Her Rock Stadium.
The band were believed to be planning a 60th anniversary tour next year.
Get all the latest celeb news sent to your inbox. Sign up for the free Mirror newsletter
In 2018 he said he never thought about retiring”
In between the Stones tours he continued to indulge his lifelong love of jazz, writing an illustrated biography of jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker and recording a musical tribute, playing and recording with jazz musician friends and big bands.
But Charlie, who used his design skills to help produce album covers for the band such as Between the Buttons, wouldn’t let anyone minimise his importance in the band.
Most famously, he responded to a late-night drunken phone call from Jagger, asking ‘Where’s my drummer’ by shaving, putting on a suit and tie, going to the singer’s hotel room, knocking on the door and punching him on the face, telling him: “Don’t ever call me your drummer again. You’re my f***ing singer!”
But while he was the most self-controlled during the Stones’ most heady days, later in life - when the rest of the band were clean-living, Charlie went off the rails with drinks and drugs, leading to heroin addiction. His daughter Seraphina, was expelled from the prestigious Millfield public school for smoking cannabis.
He later quipped: “It got so bad that even Keith Richards, bless him, told me to get it together.”
He worked through his problems, while living a quiet life with his wife on a farm in Devon where they bred Arabian horses.
He was also once president of the North Wales Sheepdog Society, and indulged a passion as an antiques collector of everything from American Civil War memorabilia to old classic cars - even though he had never learned to drive.
Not exactly rock’n’ roll. But as Charlie, named one of the World’s Best Dressed Men in 2006, once said: “It’s supposed to be sex and drugs and rock and roll. I’m not really like that. I’ve never really seen the Rolling Stones as anything.”