‘No fancy gymnastics, just feel for the music’: why Charlie Watts was the best drummer in rock

“Charlie’s always there, but he doesn’t want to let everybody know. There’s very few drummers like that,” said Keith Richards in 1979 of Charlie Watts, who passed away on Tuesday, aged 80. And this was the deceptive genius of The Rolling Stones’s drummer: his playing may have been unshowy and restrained but he held the band’s ragtag sound together for 58 years.

Tributes have poured in from fellow musicians, most of whom commented on Watts’s effortless playing style. Queen drummer Roger Taylor described him as “the immaculate beating heart of The Rolling Stones”. He was, said Elton John, “the ultimate drummer” while Paul McCartney said his drumming was “steady as a rock”. Chic legend Nile Rodgers called him “a smooth brother”.

But what precisely was it about Watts’s playing that made him such a great?

“The simplicity of it all. He just played what was needed to be played. He never over-elaborated, and that’s what I took into my drumming as well,” says Paul Cook, the drummer in the Sex Pistols. Although the Pistols’s angry punk howl was a world away from the Stones’s bluesy rock, Cook and Watts shared a tidy drumming technique.

“He hardly plays any fills [decorative flourishes between the beats] but you know it’s him when you hear it,” says Cook, playing a beat on his knees down the phone. “You hear Get Off Of My Cloud and you think ‘Aah, that’s Charlie. It’s great.’ Even on slower stuff like Wild Horses, he had this languid style. But it was never out of time or lazy.”

“You can have a band with a lousy guitar player and get away with it," John Densmore, drummer in The Doors, tells me. "You can’t have a band with a lousy drummer. Because it’s the foundation. The bass and drums are what everything else is built on. The pulse. And that’s Charlie. He’s a f------ beautiful metronome, with heart.” .

Watts eschewed the sonic histrionics and – God forbid – drum solos of players like The Who’s Keith Moon or Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham. His kit was simple: bass drum, snare drum, a mounted ‘rack’ tom, a floor tom, cymbals and a hi-hat, which he’d open up with a ‘kich-oop’ in unexpected places. Rather than show off, Watts would swing. “Charlie’s probably got the smallest drum kit in rock and roll,” former Stones bassist Bill Wyman once said. “Drummers today have about 50 or 60 items. He’s an economist.”

Nick Mason, the Pink Floyd drummer, described Watts as “possibly the most underrated” of all the great rock ‘n’ roll drummers. “No masterclasses or territorial hooks, no solos or fancy gymnastics, just exactly the right feel for the music,” Mason said.

This “right feel” came from Watts’s love of jazz, and particularly the relaxed tempos of post war "cool jazz". He grew up listening to Gerry Mulligan, Chet Baker and Miles Davis, and decided he wanted to drum when he heard American jazz drummer Chico Hamilton play on a track called Walking Shoes.

He made his first drum by breaking the neck off a banjo and playing the skin with a pair of brushes. At the time, Watts told BBC Radio 4’s Kaleidoscope in 1994, he thought rock was “the naffest thing you could do”. But he started playing blues and met the future Stones in the clubs of west London. The rest is history.

"He used an old-school jazz stick grip and also did not hit his hi-hat with his right hand when he hit the backbeat with his left," says John Densmore, another jazz drummer who ended up in a rock band. "Those two quirks gave Charlie his unique feel."

According to Mike Edison, author of the book Sympathy for the Drummer: Why Charlie Watts Matters, Watts’s sound was unique because he played along to Richards’ guitar rather than to Bill Wyman’s (and latterly Darryl Jones’s) bass. (A typical rhythm section involves the drummer and bassist playing "in the pocket" with each other). And while Richards would always play slightly ahead of the beat, Watts would play fractionally behind it, creating a sound that Edison calls “the wobble”.

The result is a sense of urgency and anticipation that is almost impossible to replicate, which is why Edison says so few Stones songs are successfully covered by other bands. People think Watts’s simple playing is easy to do, but it’s not.

“It’s like pizza,” Edison told the Drum History podcast. “[People think] it has only got three ingredients so how do you screw it up? Yet there’s so much bad pizza in the world.”

As Watts himself said, “It's terribly simple what I do, actually. I'm not a paradiddle man. I play songs. It’s not technical, it’s emotional. One of the hardest things of all is to get that feeling across.”

Watts would make mistakes. Listen to the opening bars of Start Me Up. He and Richards fall over each other and the drums come in on the wrong beat. But they immediately rectify it. The imperfection became part of the fabric of one the band’s most loved tracks. Edison points out that Watts’s drums became more central to the Stones’s sound from the Eighties onwards. Eight tracks on 1994’s Voodoo Lounge start with Watts’s drums. By 2005’s A Bigger Bang, his kit sounded gargantuan.

"Charlie was, like me, not a solo drummer," says Densmore. "He was an ensemble drummer. And that is what we do: we spur on the soloist of whoever’s singing and support them and push them."

Certainly, Watts was always humble. “I am a drummer. I wish I’d have been a better one. I mean, it’s just rubbish how people say how great you are. All you’ve done is pick your pair of drumsticks up. It’s very nice. But it’s a load of old rubbish, really,” he told Kaleidoscope.

Humble – and also wrong. This languid, smooth and economical drummer was one of the finest we’ll ever see.