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

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This is when the modern-day touring industry was born – when architecture and music came together to create these rock spectaculars. Watts’s particular fondness for detective and spy fiction and American noir is reflected in books by Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Agatha Christie of which there are more than 80 titles in the collection. Thomas has scrawled the words ‘my own copy’ inside the front cover — but at some point decided to give ‘this pawky book’ to his girlfriend, Pamela Hansford Johnson.

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

The band enjoyed a string of hit singles well into 1966, including “Paint It Black,” “19th Nervous Breakdown,” “Get off My Cloud,” “Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby,” and “Lady Jane.Renowned as the quiet, sensible one, he never strayed into the limelight if he could avoid it, though the title of Peter Whitehead’s documentary film Charlie Is My Darling, shot when the Stones visited Ireland in 1965, acknowledged that Watts projected his own quiet mystique. The family (including his sister, Linda) lived in Wembley, north-west London, in a prefabricated home. Everyone who met him in life agrees that he was a truly likeable man — self-effacing and gentlemanly in a very English way.

Charlie Watts, Bedrock Drummer for the Rolling Stones, Dies Charlie Watts, Bedrock Drummer for the Rolling Stones, Dies

On the dark, waning-of-the-60s masterpiece Gimme Shelter, he offered a masterclass in restraint while Mick Jagger and the backing vocalists wailed about rape and murder: the eye at the centre of the apocalyptic storm. On the other hand are the ‘eclecticists’, who are curious about all aspects of human creativity and endeavour, and so will happily acquire a dinosaur skull or a Chinese jadeBuddha just because it might look well on their Danish sideboard. The edition was inscribed by a personal message on the title page from Conan Doyle himself, who wrote: “I perambulated Dartmoor before I wrote this book.He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with the Stones in 1989, and was voted into Modern Drummer magazine’s Hall of Fame in 2006.