It is particularly striking how the collection comprises mostly books and jazz artefacts from the 1920s to the 1950s – spanning the period from immediately before Watts was born, through to his teenage years. He was very proud of this sense of being a completist. I think he started with the authors, fell in love with the text and in the way so many of us do when we have a particular author that we love, he wanted to get as close as he could to their lives and the interaction they’d had with that copy of a book. HG Wells is a very good example. In the copy of The War of the Worlds, Wells has obviously spent some time drawing quite an elaborate caricature on one of the endpapers. Charlie would have loved the fact that these were copies that meant something to the authors themselves.”

Charlie Watts, drummer for the Rolling Stones, dies at 80 | CNN Charlie Watts, drummer for the Rolling Stones, dies at 80 | CNN

Quiet and under the radar. It seems the perfect description of Charlie Watts, the most modest and unassuming Stone of all. And sometimes, his playing seemed to show an innate understanding of what the song was about. On Get Off Of My Cloud, he plays exactly the same fill every two bars throughout the song’s verses: there’s something relentless about it, which fits perfectly given Get Off Of My Cloud is about frustrated anger. Watts kept a huge collection of suits in London, and in Devon. “I remember once when [Watts’s wife] Shirley was going up the stud farm, Charlie put on a beautiful Savile Row suit. She said, why are you dressed like that? He said, we’re the bosses; we might as well look the part. But all the staff there loved him. He commanded a lot of respect, in the band too.” Almost invariably stone-faced as he played, he seemed to give off an ineffable air of slightly aloof bemusement, as if he thought it was all completely ridiculous and might have been more content pursuing his love of jazz, something he confined to downtime between grossing hundreds of millions in the world’s arenas and stadiums.Charlie Watts of the Rolling Stones during a rehearsal in New York, May 1978. Michael Putland/Getty Images In 2004 came Watts at Scott’s, a live recording of the Charlie Watts Tentet at Ronnie Scott’s club in London. The disc appeared as news emerged that Watts had been undergoing surgery and radiotherapy for throat cancer. The treatment proved successful and the cancer went into remission. Jazz is where Watts’s enthusiasm for collecting first began as a teenager, searching out hard-to-find records by his musical heroes in specialist shops in Soho. Collecting became an obsession. Over the years he would collect American Civil War armaments, Horatio Nelson memorabilia, vintage Tailor & Cutter pattern books, suitcases, hats, Stuart silver, and cars, including several Rolls-Royces, a Bugatti Atlantic and a 1937 Lagonda – although he never learnt to drive. If you consider Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett and Charlie Parker and Duke Ellington, I think Charlie would have drawn a comparison between the style of those books and the style of the jazz musicians he admired so much – the understated gracefulness in both those cases,” says Sexton.

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

Watts’s ambiguity was there from the outset. He grew up in a prefab in a drab north London suburb, and jazz, his first love, became a passport to a world of crisply dressed cool and dazzling artistry, his heroes alto saxophonist Charlie Parker – jazz’s Picasso – and drummer Chico Hamilton. One of a talented pool orbiting around blues pioneer Alexis Korner in the early 1960s, Watts was headhunted by Jagger, Jones and Richards but faltered. “Should I join this interval band?” he asked his fellow travellers, relenting only after the trio secured enough gigs to match his wage in an advertising agency. Art – his only O-level – remained a passion. He sketched every tour hotel room he occupied, and later advised on the Stones’ elaborate stage sets. Watts, says King , “was a very quiet, under-the-radar collector; you never knew what he was up to.” The Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts performs on stage during their "No Filter" tour at NRG Stadium on July 27, 2019 in Houston, Texas. (Photo by SUZANNE CORDEIRO / AFP) (Photo credit should read SUZANNE CORDEIRO/AFP via Getty Images) SUZANNE CORDEIRO/AFP/Getty ImagesIt’s “no coincidence”, says Wiltshire, that the outstanding item in the collection, The Great Gatsby, is the novel that defines the Jazz Age. Charlie, like all the Stones, made everything seem instinctive. But a great deal of rehearsal and symbiosis goes into mastering a two-and-a-half-hour set containing people’s cherished musical memories, and Leavell has been instrumental in that process. ‘Charlie played on some of the most iconic records ever made, obviously,’ he says. ‘But when we would go to present those things live, he couldn’t always remember all the exact things he did, or where the changes would come.

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

Eventually, his reticence became something of what would now be called a brand, his unruffled, beautifully tailored calmness and detachment as characteristic in its own way as Richards’ dissolution. The collection also includes a first edition of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles with an inscription reading “I perambulated Dartmoor before I wrote this book.” Conan Doyle’s inscriptions are “often very formulaic,” said Wiltshire, so this is “really quite special”. Charlie was no stadium afficionado, but he understood the basic economics. Otherwise, he mused in a 1998 conversation, ‘You’d be playing a month in a town to play to 30,000 people. Where would you play, in a 3,000-seater hall? So it’s to accommodate that, and hopefully you can fill it up. And that’s what we’ve become. It’s our own fault, or pleasure, or whatever you call it. That’s how we’ve directed what we do. That’s how the world of doing what we do has gone.

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First edition, inscribed by the author: “I perambulated Dartmoor before I wrote this book, A Conan Doyle.” 4. The Thirteen Problems, Agatha Christie (1932) He loved clothes,” says King. “He had so many beautiful things made. I think he knew he was only going to wear them once, but he liked the gentleman experience of going to Huntsman or Joseph, his tailor in Savile Row, and being measured and fitted and choosing the buttons.” A very sad day. Charlie Watts was the ultimate drummer,” John wrote in a tweet. “The most stylish of men, and such brilliant company. My deepest condolences to Shirley, Seraphina and Charlotte. And of course, The Rolling Stones.”

Charlie’s Good Tonight by Paul Sexton review - The Guardian

He married Shirley Ann Shepherd in 1964, and the couple had one daughter, Seraphina. They remained married until Watts’ death. In the 1980s Watts finally found time to pursue his passion for jazz and formed a 32-piece band called the Charlie Watts Orchestra. Their first gig was in the legendary London jazz club Ronnie Scott’s, where Watts was a frequent, if undercover, visitor. First edition, first printing, inscribed by the author: “W.L. Shelton / with Best Wishes / F Scott Fitzgerald”. 9. The Dain Curse, Dashiell Hammet (1929) Charlie was born at University College Hospital, London, to Charles Watts, a lorry driver, and his wife Lillian (nee Eaves). The family (including his sister, Linda) lived in Wembley, north-west London, in a prefabricated home. Watts circa 1965: ‘The Stones’ ascent to stardom was swift.’ Photograph: Icon and Image/Getty Images

He also distracted himself from the squabbles and struggles of the Stones by putting together the Charlie Watts Big Band, which featured many top British jazz players. 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. In the small pool of the nascent British “blues boom”, the future Stones Jagger and Brian Jones (then calling himself Elmo Lewis) made appearances with Korner’s band, before Jones branched off to start his own group that included the Stones’ unsung but faithful pianist, Ian Stewart. Watts’s passion for jazz is reflected in rare recordings, sheet music, gelatin prints and books. There is the sheet music for Rhapsody in Blue and An American in Paris, along with the score for Acts 1 and 2 of Porgy and Bess, signed by George Gershwin. A copy of Negro Folk Songs As Sung by Lead Belly, by John A Lomax and Alan Lomax, is signed by Huddie Ledbetter – Lead Belly – himself. The two-part auction of more than 500 lots will take place at Christie’s in London on 28 September, and an online sale will be open for bidding from 15 to 29 September. Jazz memorabilia, such as an annotated printed score for George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, will be on sale alongside the books.