Chapter Four
It wasn’t a JFK moment. You’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise. Where was I when I heard? Taking a power-walk across Blackheath towards Greenwich Park, a daily constitutional. How did I hear? My son texted me. 24 August 2021, 17:49.
‘Charlie Watts has died?!’
‘WHAT? Where did you hear that?’
‘Instagram. You heard it here first, Mumma. Piers Morgan posted it about seven minutes ago.’
‘Shit.’
Everywhere you looked. The all-pervasive coverage of Charlie’s demise was more fitting of a pontiff or a head of state than a rock star. Anyone with an inkling of Watts’s significance in the pantheon was seized upon to expound, in the press, over the internet, on radio and on television. It was relentless. I did five radio broadcasts about Charlie in one morning the day after his death was announced, including BBC Radio 5 Live, BBC Scotland, and Robert Elms’s show on BBC Radio London. And that was just me. We were all at it. There were obituaries in every newspaper. Retrospectives and think pieces graced the most serious of journals. Documentaries and tributes were broadcast back-to-back. His passing was universally acknowledged as the greatest loss to the music industry since the assassination of John Lennon, forty-one years ago. I couldn’t help but think that Charlie would have been amazed.
What must Jagger’s lips and tongue have made of all this? As I pondered Mick’s possibly nose-out-of-joint reaction to ‘his drummer’s’ coverage1 – greater in death than it had ever been during his lifetime, on account of the fact that Charlie hated interviews; and of potentially finer, more affectionate quality than Mick himself might receive, come his own end – Diana, Princess of Wales sprang to mind. Her royal funeral procession on 6 September 1997 had been rehearsed on a regular basis for twenty-two years. Known as ‘Operation Tay Bridge’, it was activated in response to the necessity for an unexpected royal despatch. It had not actually been for Diana, but for HRH the Queen Mother. Who was said to have retorted, after the ceremony concluded, ‘She’s just had my funeral.’ QM’s own departure and broadcast thereof, when it came five years later, was modest. As the call, so the echo.
Why did Charlie matter? Because he was the backbone, the metronome of the Rolling Stones. What made him such a great drummer? He wasn’t the best drummer in the world, but he was the best drummer for the Stones. He played with swing and swagger, crisply and cleanly. He was mild, but took no crap, and was a law unto himself. He never performed drum solos because he couldn’t stand them. He didn’t go in for flash-git-ness, he let the others do all that. He refrained from pontificating in the few interviews he granted, and never tried to blind his interrogators with batter heads and X-hats. Charlie was the dignified Stone, the antithesis of a rock star, and a joyous contradiction. It’s why we loved him. He never made a song and dance about it. He just sat there, doing his job, ‘watching Mick’s bum’. Drummers often refer to their rear-centre upstage position as ‘the best seat in the house’. Charlie was no exception.
What else did he have? The thing that all great drummers tell you great drummers have to have: he had feel. What is feel? It’s challenging to understand if you’re not a drummer. A drummer with feel doesn’t just play the song. He wears the song. He breathes it. It gets under his skin and into his heart. It plays him. He goes at his kit with his whole being, with his gut and his grit and his nerves. He plays with his face, not just his hands. It was all there, in Charlie’s expressions: the jaw clenched, the cheeks sucked, the lips rolled inwards and fixed in a thin horizontal line. What’s that thing of him playing a tad too slowly, behind the beat a bit? It’s complicated. Always is. But yeah, it’s a thing that Charlie did. He played behind the backbeat.2 How so? Charlie’s bass drum tended to be a little ahead of the beat, actually, with his snare drum backbeats behind. There was drag in the feel and volume in the whole. He had technique, a groove, innate ability. It had to do with the way he heard a song, how he processed it, and how he converted its energy into rhythm. He made it look effortless. That was Charlie.
DJ Andy Kershaw pays social media tribute, addressing our man directly. ‘I’ll never forget, when I worked on the Rolling Stones’ Roundhay Park concert, in Leeds, in 1982, how you brought the whole preposterous caper back down to earth,’ he says.
‘Amid all the ridiculous extravagance and corporate self-importance, there was, on the morning of the gig, set up on a stage the size of an aircraft carrier, a tiny little drum kit of a bass drum, a snare, a tom-tom, a hi-hat and a couple of other cymbals. Not for Charlie Watts the willie-waving rock drummer’s conventional gear of the time: double bass drums, and a forest of cymbals. It was the drum kit of a 1940s dance band drummer. For that’s what, at heart, Charlie was.
‘When I once talked to Keith Richards we agreed on many things. But uppermost was that all bands know how to rock, but few know how to roll. Charlie Watts had that roll. Thanks Charlie. And so long, brother.’
Brian Bennett calls me. The legendary Shadows drummer is upset. ‘I loved Charlie, though I never really spent any time with him,’ he reflects.
‘You loved a man you never really got to know?’
‘That was Charlie.’
‘What was his secret?’
‘I loved the Stones mainly because of Charlie,’ says Brian. ‘He is the epitome of cool. He looks as if he’s doing nothing, but he is doing everything. Working for the song. A pure minimalist. His drums are all rare, retro Gretsch kits. Very cool. Manny’s in New York had the best collection of drums old and new. It’s closed now, but Charlie would have gone there. It was his kind of place.3 I think his secret is that he seems to do nothing but in fact he does everything. He is Mick’s solid ground.’
‘What about Keith?’
‘Ah, well … he was the one who said that the Stones didn’t even exist until they played their first gig with Charlie. He also said, “Charlie Watts is the musical bed that I lay myself down on.”’
‘Exactly.’
We had an inkling that things were not right when Charlie pulled out, at the beginning of August 2021, of the band’s resuming thirteen-plus-date No Filter US tour. ‘For once, my timing has been a little off,’ deadpanned the octogenarian thumper as he confirmed his withdrawal for rest and recuperation. A statement bare-boned that he had just emerged from a ‘successful procedure’ at a London clinic, following a routine pre-tour medical that had flagged up an issue. This would be the first Stones tour Charlie had missed since 1963. ‘No one saw this coming,’ they said, and we wondered. His stand-in would be an acclaimed session drummer, Stones collaborator and friend of many years, sixty-four-year-old New Yorker Steve Jordan.
‘It is an absolute honour and a privilege to be Charlie’s understudy and I am looking forward to rehearsing with Mick, Keith and Ronnie,’ enthused Steve. ‘No one will be happier than me to give up my seat on the drum-riser as soon as Charlie tells me he is good to go.’
Charlie himself had chosen Steve, so no arguments. The Sun reported that Watts would rejoin his bandmates for their sixtieth anniversary bonanza across Europe in July 2022, when they planned to release their first album of all-original material for seventeen years. It was not to be. Within three weeks, Charlie had left the Stones forever. No cause of death was officially given. Speculation was relentless that the throat cancer for which he had been treated in June 2004 had returned. The once excessive smoker who had quit his lifelong habit had found a lump on the left-hand side of his neck. A biopsy was performed at London’s Royal Marsden cancer hospital.
‘It was benign, but [the doctor] said we should take it out,’ Charlie told Ultimate Classic Rock in 2011. ‘On the slide, it had tiny cancer cells on it. He said, “You have cancer of the whatever.” And that night, I thought I was going to die. I thought that’s what you did. You get cancer and waste away and die.’
There was a follow-up operation to remove the lymph nodes.
‘The muscles go,’ Watts explained to Rolling Stone. ‘Then you sit around for eight weeks in treatment. You can’t lift your arm. It’s like being minor-ly paralysed. It was a worry, because of what I do for a living. We’ve got a tour, and I don’t know if I could get through a song. You can’t stop once you get going, if you’re a drummer … I didn’t know if I could make it … but it’s amazing how quickly your body heals.’
His funeral was a private, family affair, no details or images leaked. The media had no part to play in this one. We expected his bereaved bandmates to ditch the tour. But the show must go on, and it did. Bad call? Many thought so, lambasting the remaining Stones for their ‘heartlessness’ and ‘lack of respect’. Damned if you do … Again, I thought about Mick, who had relinquished heavy drinking and drug-taking years earlier. He had also reinvented himself as an extreme fitness fanatic, and had only recently survived heart valve replacement surgery. I thought of Keith, who had overcome levels of alcohol and drug addiction that might have killed the rest of us, and who had fractured his skull in 2006 after falling from the low-hanging branch of a tree on an island off Fiji. Suffering acute subdural haematoma, he was flown to New Zealand for surgery, and survived, because he is Keith. I remembered that Ronnie, another lifelong smoker, had beaten cancer twice, if ‘beating’ that disease is what humans do. Their former bassist Bill Wyman popped into my head, as I recalled that the thirty-fags-a-day man who had started smoking at seventeen had held his own against prostate cancer. Old rockers richer than they could ever in a lifetime spend, but who can’t buy time because not even they can; who are nose to pane with their own mortality; who couldn’t give a sod what anyone thinks of them; and who have always knuckled down and got on with it against all odds: guys like these don’t go cancelling the tour that might turn out to be their last. Not for any reason. As Keith has so often insisted, they’ll rock ’til they croak.
So on they rolled, qué será, será. Missing Charlie so hard, it hurt, but whaddya gonna do about it? They did so with the blessing of one of the greatest drummers of his generation. It was what he would have wanted. That was Charlie.
He was in so many ways the most unlikely Stone. Mick called him ‘the Wembley Whammer’, because that was where young Charlie lived. Born in London’s University College Hospital to former factory girl Lillian and named after his lorry driver father, he spent his earliest years in a damp, cramped and basic West London prefab.4 He had a sister, Linda, to whom he remained close throughout his life. His best mate from junior school, Dave Green, likewise. When Charlie was eleven, his close-knit family relocated to Kingsbury in Brent, north-west London, where he enrolled at Tylers Croft Secondary Modern School.5 Academic lessons he could take or leave, but he was artistic, musical and sporty. He loved football and cricket; collected jazz records, in particular old 78s, of Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis and Jelly Roll Morton.
Inspired by American drummer Chico Hamilton, he took tentative steps on bits of improvised kit. He got a proper drum kit from his parents for his fourteenth Christmas. Ah, the never-look-back moment. Charlie taught himself to play by drumming along to his collection of jazz records. He left school at fifteen, found his way to Harrow Art School6 and took a job as a graphic designer with the Charlie Daniels Studios advertising agency. All the while, he tinkered away with local bands in down-the-road clubs, pubs and coffee shops. It was a stint with jazz band Jo Jones All Stars that lured him into rhythm and blues.
All of which led Charlie to his maker, the enabler of all the original Stones. They met in 1961, when Alexis Korner asked Charlie to join his new band, Blues Incorporated. Becoming part of that line-up in February 1962, he still didn’t give up his day job: by this time, as a designer with another ad agency, Charles Hobson and Grey Ltd. Within months, Charlie had met, on the R&B circuit, Brian Jones as Elmo Lewis, pianist Ian Stewart, and the Dartford boys, Jagger and Richards. In January 1963, he became a Rolling Stone. His first performance with the band as their drummer for life was at the Ealing Jazz Club on 2 February 1963.
But, if there is such a thing, Charlie was never ‘just a drummer’. He was arguably the most enigmatic and most interesting Stone. He doubled up from the earliest days as a designer for the band’s record sleeves. He would later co-curate and design their stand-out stage sets. He never renounced jazz for rock’n’roll, but invested in his first love, continuing to record and perform it throughout his other career, with Mick and the boys. We could go so far as to say that Charlie was never a rock star, not in the truest sense. He was a one-woman man for a start, keeping himself only unto the bride he took in 1964, sculptress Shirley, until the day he died. Immune to the sex-drugs-rock’n’roll lifestyle (apart from a blip, which we will come to), he ignored the come-ons from whores and groupies, spent his free time sketching every hotel room he ever slept in, and collected rare records, first-edition books and classic and vintage cars he couldn’t drive because he never learned. His fleet included the lemon-yellow Citroën 2CV driven by Roger Moore as 007 in For Your Eyes Only, and a 1937 Lagonda Rapide Cabriolet, one of only twenty-five ever made. The Wattses would later breed Arabian horses and care for rescue greyhounds on their peaceful Devonshire farm. The rural life grew on him.
The most fascinating thing about Charlie, for me, was his image transformation: from dirt-poor prefab sprout to impeccable linen-, silk- and flannel-draped style icon and latter-day Great Gatsby, flaunting magnificence and presence via his clothes. Small, square-shouldered and five feet eight inches tall, Charlie was a Savile Row man, frequenting the ateliers of tailors the likes of Huntsman, Chittleborough & Morgan, Tommy Nutter and Henry Poole. He owned several hundred suits; as many pairs of shoes, most of them handmade at George Cleverley of London’s Royal Arcade; and hundreds of bespoke shirts and handmade silk ties. His finely woven socks always echoed his shirt. He favoured old clothes over new. He collected, cherished and rarely disposed of them, confessing that he still wore garments he’d owned for thirty or forty years, and rarely settled for off-the-peg. When he did so, the item tended to come with a Prada or Ralph Lauren label. He even purchased, and stepped out in, suits once worn by an abdicated king, Edward VIII, which he acquired from an auction of the Duke of Windsor’s effects at Sotheby’s in Paris.
The image that Charlie projected was suggestive of a lifestyle that did not exist. Not for him, anyway. He looked sophisticated, highly educated, cultured and to the manner born,7 but was none of those things. It was an act. He had only to open his mouth and spill a few glottal syllables to reveal so. The contradiction defined him. He never signed up for elocution lessons. The only thing Charlie had in common with those born to privilege was enormous wealth. For which one had to admire him. He already had, in Shirley, his Daisy Buchanan.8 It was not as though he felt the need to project a desirable alter ego in order to win his perfect woman, the ultimate prize. The look was a guise rather than a disguise. There was no disappearing of the original. He wasn’t kidding anybody, least of all Charlie. He dressed and projected the way he did to please nobody but himself.
What prompted his sartorial obsession? His lorry-driving father had his own tailor. You heard. ‘A little Jewish guy in the East End of London,’ said Charlie, as if it were the most normal thing in the world for a trucker to retain a bespoke outfitter. He ‘stitched him things.’ Little Charlie used to accompany his dad to the tiny Dickensian off-Brick Lane tailor’s shop. In that setting from a bygone, ‘proper’ age, he would bed down among the fabric swatches, smoothing thick tweeds and glossy worsteds between fingers and thumb, inhaling their mustiness, their peaty fragrance, and imagining. The idea of having clothes made to measure enchanted him. He later fell for the style and substance of Hollywood icons, and of 1950s and ’60s jazzmen, in particular Dexter Goodman.
‘He made a record called Our Man in Paris, and he had one of these pins through his collar, which I now have hundreds of,’ Charlie told GQ magazine. ‘The lovely thing about all of them, though, was that their clothes were worn. They weren’t just put on, to the office and back. They sat all night in the things. They played in those suits. How they played in those suits, I don’t know.’
This all called to mind my encounters during the 1990s with another sartorial obsessive, the tempestuous footballing legend Stanley Bowles. His heyday was at Queens Park Rangers during the 1970s. He was later voted their all-time greatest player. The gambling addict and ladies’ man routinely spent his last five hundred quid on a greyhound and yet another bespoke three-piece. ‘It’s as my old man used to say to me, “It’s not a crime to be poor,”’ he told me. ‘But it’s a crime to look poor. I never will.’
Charlie Watts performed in short-sleeved shirts and slacks or plain T-shirts and shorts, as I witnessed on numerous occasions. Never in trainers, always in shoes. Brown leather loafers, more often than not. ‘But I still imagine that I’m playing in a club in New York,’ he said. ‘The Apollo, or somewhere in Chicago.’ In other words, he was dressing the part in his head.
As for Bill Wyman. The so-called ‘Quiet One’ had never seemed that interesting. Not until I met him. Bassists are not as peculiar as they are sometimes painted. Those inclined to dismiss them as ‘failed guitarists’ forget Paul McCartney, Jack Bruce, John Paul Jones, John McVie, Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Suzi Quatro and the rest. Queen’s John Deacon never had much to say. Frank Allen of the Searchers more than holds his own. The Who’s John Entwistle was a livewire, I hung with him often. He and Wyman had for years been bosom pals.
Bill was the first member of the Stones I’d ever encountered face to face. He was out there, in a way that Mick, Keith and Charlie were not. His was a familiar face in London’s places to be and on the celebrity circuit. You’d run into him at Tramp, Langan’s Brasserie, the Caprice and in Joe Allen. He would soon open his own Kensington restaurant, Sticky Fingers, named for that Stones album, and serving the bland American fare that his own gut could stand. It was more of a mini-museum showcasing Stones and Wyman memorabilia than a restaurant. He was the accessible Stone, the one who accepted invitations to gallery openings, album launches, opening nights and after-shows. He liked to say he wasn’t into all that. I wasn’t aware of any doppelgänger.
A friend of a friend worked as his personal assistant, in the office of his flat at 344 Kings Road. This was the apartment to which coiffeur to the stars John Frieda rocked up once a month to dye and style his strange aubergine-mahogany hair. The flat topped the building that stood opposite a women’s boutique, Joanna’s Tent, where Bill was in the habit of buying quite feminine garments, and next door to a French restaurant, Thierry’s, where he often hosted lunches and suppers. I was co-presenting a rock magazine show on Channel 4 at the time – 1984 – and making the most of the fifteen minutes of ‘fame’. Bill saw me on television and asked his PA to contact me, not realising that she knew me. Her oldest friend and I had been colleagues at Chrysalis Records, where I had until recently worked for artist John Pasche, designer of the original Stones’ lip-and-tongue logo. Round and round we go.
We went out for dinner a couple of times, to Thierry’s and to the iconic original Ivy on London’s West Street. He would apologise for his painfully plain tastes as he plumped for a burger or a bit of bland chicken over anything ‘with sauce on’. He spoke of his childhood in the manner of John Cleese, Eric Idle, Michael Palin and Terry Jones in the ‘Good Old Days’/‘Four Yorkshiremen’ sketch, in which Cleese et al send up the classic prosperous old men trying to outdo each other with the most deprived childhood, exaggerating the depths of their poverty. Only Bill wasn’t exaggerating. I laughed out loud when he told me he had consumed both whale meat and horse as a child. I assumed that he was joking. No, he insisted, he really had. But those were ‘luxuries’, apparently. Most of the time it was bread and dripping: leftover fat from the roasting of meat.
He later wrote about all this convincingly, or at least his ghostwriter Ray Coleman did, in his memoir, Stone Alone. This time I believed him. He also said that the only food he still liked from his childhood was bread pudding.9 It amused him no end to see primped-up versions of the working-class ‘afters’, made with brioche, panettone, gourmet chocolate drops and Fortnum & Mason candied fruit, on the menus of gilded restaurants. He almost always had a cigarette on the go. That or chewing gum. He didn’t believe in health foods, supplements, gyms or even sleeping very much. He was too busy for all that lying around, he said. He never went to work on an egg, preferring to swallow a couple of cups of builder’s tea washed down with a few more fags.
There was nothing weird about hanging with him. The London music scene was a cosy world back then. Artists, record-company people and media folk overlapped and socialised together routinely. We discussed the possibility of Bill appearing on our show, and he agreed to do it. I was also working on a book for Sony, alongside radio producer Phil Swern and pop journalist Robin Eggar, for which Bill offered to write the foreword.
He seemed to relish his reputation as rock’s most prolific shagger. Three or four women a night when the Stones were on the road, he was wont to boast. Three or four at a time, sometimes. He wasn’t shy about it. Women threw themselves at him. You’d be sitting there having a quiet meal and random females would sidle over and practically force themselves on him. I could never fathom it. He’d shrug it off with a smile, making a joke of his ‘irresistible sex appeal’. I searched for it incessantly, but it never revealed itself to me. He would throw in the odd stat, such as that he’d been with more women than Willie Nelson and Julio Iglesias put together. Which sounds like an eye-boggling lot. He was animated on the subject of artist Marc Chagall, his neighbour in St Paul de Vence in the south of France where Bill had built a house. He was ‘doing a book about him’. He was also championing the cause of various young musicians and doing his bit for the ARMS charity, Action Research for Multiple Sclerosis, the disease that had cut short the career of Small Faces and Faces bassist, his close friend Ronnie Lane.
Bill had left a lot behind to be who he had become. I was fascinated by all that he had to say about his roots and his childhood. He was at times reluctant to divulge. You could tell there was pain there.
He was born William George to bricklayer William Perks and mother Kathleen May, known as Molly, in Lewisham Hospital, South London in October 1936 – which made him the oldest Stone, and the only one to have vivid memories of the Second World War. He, his mother and two siblings (there would be three more) were evacuated to Pembrokeshire, south-west Wales, and later to Nottingham in the north, while his father was in the army. His childhood was bleak, his education minimal. His maternal grandmother Florrie, with whom he lived at one point, taught him times tables by rote and how to read and write. His family inhabited an unheated, infested, bathroomless terraced house with a backyard privy on a brutal Penge backstreet.
While gang warfare raged around him, he claimed to have taken piano lessons from the age of ten. God knows how his parents could have afforded it, there was barely the money to put basic food on the table. Family hygiene was a once-a-week, in-out, one-after-the-other shared bath in a zinc tub on the kitchen floor; a single toothbrush between them and salt instead of toothpaste. There were fleas, scabies and terrible tooth decay. Clothes were hand-me-downs, infrequently washed. Despite which, Bill went to Sunday school, was a Wolf Cub and had a milk round, enabling him to contribute to the family purse. Even as a child, he was cataloguing the few books the family owned, showing early signs of the collector, archivist and historian he would become.
Bright enough to pass the Eleven Plus exam, he attended Beckenham and Penge County Grammar School10 from the age of eleven, which in Bill’s day was situated on dingy Penge High Street. He was small, and was bullied. He was good at maths and art, learned the clarinet, loved football and cricket, fishing and ‘building things’. He also joined a church choir. At thirteen, he had his appendix out. Me too: we had some mileage out of that one. He frequented a local church youth club, and couldn’t keep his eyes off the girls. Just before he was due to sit his GCE exams, which could have led him on to A levels and even to university, his bitter, often-unemployed and physically abusive father hoicked him out of school and shoved him into work, to help support the family. So damaged was Bill by this unforeseen injustice that he kept the letter the headmaster wrote to his father, begging him to change his mind. Clinging to the proof of what William the elder had deprived him of, in terms of a full education and a promising future, prevented Bill from getting over it. He nursed his anger. Resentment gnawed at him for years, he said. That loss of confidence, the fall-out nervousness, must have fuelled his nicotine addiction.
‘I think he did it out of spite,’ Bill would reflect of his father, later. ‘There was that resentment about me going to a posh school, trying to talk posh, and wearing a uniform that he had to pay for. He was very working class, and a very cold person.’
He went to work for a London bookmaker. He sold his precious stamp collection to purchase a second-hand record player, took to hanging around the local coffee bars, and booked himself dance lessons at the Beckenham Ballroom. An early girlfriend had a brother with a great record collection, exposing Bill to his first recorded jazz. During his stint of National Service in Germany during the fifties, he saw the Stan Kenton Band in Bremen, got into Elvis Presley, bought a cheap guitar and started a skiffle group. Post-demob, he worked for a firm of meat importers, became a regular at Royston Ballroom in Penge run by dance stars Frank and Peggy Spencer, became a champion jiver no less.
In 1959, when he was twenty-three, he married his dancing partner, eighteen-year-old bank clerk Diane Cory. He landed a job with a company of diesel engineers and settled down to making-ends-meet married life. Threadbare and poorly accommodated, he moved jobs yet again to work at a department store, where he befriended a colleague who played guitar. It prompted Bill to hire-purchase one of his own, his first electric. A little Beckenham group came together, fell apart, and other musicians crept in. Bill HP’d himself an amp. They performed at weddings, parties and youth clubs, taking what they could get. A line-up gelled as the Cliftons, with drummer Tony Chapman. A chance dance on a visit to his sister’s in Aylesbury brought Bill face to face with the group the Barron Knights. He was so impressed by their bass guitarist that he realised, aged twenty-four, what he wanted to be. He bought a second-hand bass and customised it, leaving the frets out, thus creating what he believed to have been the first fretless bass guitar in the country.
Tony Chapman was the first among their little gang to come across the embryonic Rollin’ Stones. Having rehearsed with them in Soho, he told Bill in December 1962 that they were looking for a bass player. The pair trolled along together to see the band at the Red Lion pub in Sutton, Surrey. Through heavy snowdrifts a couple of days later, Bill and Tony traipsed to the Wetherby Arms in Chelsea for a Stones rehearsal.11 They were a right bunch of scruffs at point-blank range. Neatly-coiffed and turned-out Bill couldn’t imagine for the life of him what he might have in common with this lot. And Mike Jagger, Keith and Brian were equally dismissive of Bill. Until, that is, he lugged in his impressive Vox AC30 amp from the car. They got into his kit; Bill got into their twelve-bar blues vibe. It wasn’t until he changed his surname legally by deed poll in 1964 – to that of his best friend in the forces, Lee Whyman, dropping the ‘h’ – that he located his confidence, let go of his hang-ups and began to hope that he might be deserving of a future in music. Already a dad and unhappy at home, he almost instantly became the Stones’ resident shagger.
But was he any good (at the music)? He must have had something. He would not have lasted for thirty-odd years with the Rolling Stones otherwise. He was noticeably older than and different from his bandmates. He lacked formal training. He projected as somewhat pedestrian and conformist, compared with these dynamic, insolent, out-there upstarts … Mick, Brian and Keith, at least. The fact that he had already ‘settled down’ set him apart from them. It made him the ‘grown-up’, for which they sneered at him and tended to put him down. As a bassist he was a basic plodder. Isn’t that the idea?
Most of the musicians I asked rate him as average, while conceding that he and Charlie made a fantastic rhythm section. It is true that Wyman was quite often missing from recording sessions, when Keith, Mick Taylor or Ronnie Wood would stand in for him. Bill’s contributions to ‘Miss You’ and ‘Bitch’ lend weight to the argument in his favour. But that’s Keith, solid and insistent, all over the bass on ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’, despite the persistent rumour that Bill coined the song’s main riff. ‘Sympathy for the Devil’? It’s Richards on the bass again, flamboyant and daring, while Bill is relegated to shakers. Keith created the original groove on this track, and no one else has ever matched it live. ‘Street Fighting Man’? That’s Keith yet again, echoing ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ on electric bass. Wyman wasn’t there for the recording, they say. Wasn’t he? He says that’s him on the Hammond organ. If it is true that Bill stepped up more reliably during the Let It Bleed era, his heart was by then no longer in the Stones. That was 1969, leaving him only a quarter of a century to go. ‘Tumbling Dice’, my favourite Stones track? It’s not even Wyman on that one, disappointingly. Ladies and gentlemen, on bass, Mr Mick Taylor.