R.I.P Charlie Watts

 As I've always said from day one on this blog we don't do much talking about music or the arts generally as the focus is very much on me and this life, which given the traumatic history of my tumblr accounts you'll realize I need a safe place to talk around that without posts and accounts just going.

Still, sometimes we break that rule such as when we looked at artists that played a part in some aspect of my life and this week it is the same.

The Rolling Stones were many things, outlaws of society, cultural icons, a part of the development of youth culture that still impacts on today's youth as it did in ours but above all else a part of the soundtrack of our lives for decades.

I grew up listening to the Rolling Stones with my first recollections including hearing Brown Sugar on the radio when I was very young and almost certainly heard Honky Tonk Woman as we watched Top of the Pops and it would of featured on the end of year program and the best sellers pop chart rundown being a bit over four fingers and a thumb years of age.

I had the music bug then, which may of been connected to my at the time undiagnosed autism so within the limits of my development over those years followed artists such as the Rolling Stones who as we moved further into the seventies were seen as more the established acts compared to our likes of The Rollers, Gary Glitter, Sweet and Slade.

What as the years went by I appreciated was Charlie's drumming, the rhythm section is at the core of jazz and rock music, driving it forward which was not particularly showy but was as Joan Jett put it neither too little or too much - just right.

Unlike Rush's Neil Peart, Charlie had no formal credited input into the Stones' songs so their were few moments to highlight his contribution but then Charlie always saw himself as the drummer of the band and that was the extent of his involvement, preferring to step outside the rock star lifestyle spending time with his family and pursuing hobbies such as breeding Arabian Horses, collecting classic cars and so on.

This said listen to the playing on say Far Away Eyes, Hot Stuff and Flight 505 and you can hear his jazz influences showing in how he played percussion.

He was by training a graphic designer having gone to Art School to study it and when he joined the band was employed working for one, one of the few Stones who had a 'proper' job and his abilities showed with this 1966 singles sleeve design and his involvement in designing stage sets and tour launching events

It probably means at the end of the postponed tour that just prior to his hospitalization he said he'd need to be at hospital but felt the fans needed the tour with how the pandemic had affected people agreed to a substitute drummer, the Rolling Stones will cease to be a touring and recording entity.

Thus his death as said as it is is also an end of an era one we can be thankful for what he and the remaining Rolling Stones contributed to our lives.