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

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It’s “no coincidence”, says Wiltshire, that the outstanding item in the collection, The Great Gatsby, is the novel that defines the Jazz Age. Listen to his playing on 1968’s Jigsaw Puzzle, which simultaneously drives the song along and punctuates it with a series of apparently effortless drum rolls.

Charlie Watts: the calm, brilliant eye of the Rolling Stones Charlie Watts: the calm, brilliant eye of the Rolling Stones

At the same time, Watts played in a band with Alexis Korner, the founding father of the British blues scene, in Ealing, west London, where the late Stones member Brian Jones, Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton were also guest musicians. Sorting through one chest of drawers she came across objects including Edwardian glasses and carved pipes. Volumes up for auction include the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas’s own copy of his first collection, 18 Poems.One of the most intriguing is a copy of Christie’s By the Pricking of My Thumbs inscribed to PG Wodehouse, “with reverence, admiration and many long years of deeply enjoyed reading – no one like you! In the 80s and 90s, as the Rolling Stones’ tours became ever-more extravagant son-et-lumière displays involving pyrotechnics, huge inflatables and cantilevered bridges, the vast screens at the side of the stage would occasionally focus on Watts. Watts’s career with the Stones ran from the cramped clubs of Britain’s early-1960s blues boom to the international stadium tours that became their metier. Now reaping the dividends of their peerless fame as they never did on their first go-round, they may have been en route to the status later disdainfully described by the New York Times as ‘an organization with long off-seasons and unending profits’. Talking to me in 2013, during his temporary reintroduction to the fold for the Stones’ 50th-anniversary celebrations and beyond into the 14 on Fire tour, he mused: ‘I’d say the beginning of the modern-day Stones in terms of theatre presentation was … well, it was always very theatrical and musical as well, but in terms of big presentation and stage lighting, there was such a huge development between ’69 and the ’80s.

Sympathy for the Drummer: Why Charlie Watts Matters Sympathy for the Drummer: Why Charlie Watts Matters

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. The group maintained enormous popularity for decades with classic albums like “Aftermath” (1966), “Sticky Fingers” (1971), “Some Girls” (1978) and “Tattoo You” (1981), and with massive stadium tours that took them all over the world.Paul Sexton, author of the highly acclaimed biography Charlie’s Good Tonight, believes that Watts’s fascination with the printed word sprang from the same source as his love of music.