Mick Jagger and Ron Wood revealed their final conversations with the Rolling Stones' late-drummer Charlie Watts. Watts died of cancer on August 24th, 2021 at the age of 80. London's Daily Mirror quoted some of Jagger and Wood's recollections as featured in Paul Sexton's Charlie’s Good Tonight: The Authorized Biography Of Charlie Watts, coming on October 11th.
Mick Jagger looked back to 2021 and Charlie Watts falling ill: “It was all so quick. That was the shocking part of it. One minute I was speaking to him about the tour and what the logo was going to be and the next minute he was gone.”
Jagger recalled that despite his health issues, Watts had originally planned to play on the band's last tour, telling Jagger, “'You’re the cheerleader of the group and if you say I should do it, I’ll do it. Of course I will. I’m happy to.'”
Jagger went on to remember, “I was speaking to him in hospital and, because he was so untechnical, I sent him a big iPad to watch the cricket on. I set it all up with the apps and he watched some of it on that. But Ronnie (Wood) had had a similar illness and got better and that’s why I guess I was so confident Charlie was going to do the same thing.”
Ron Wood spoke candidly about the point in which Watts realized he had taken a turn for the worse: “The last few days of his hospitalization, he was like, 'I don’t like this,' because he went to a certain level of treatment, then they decided to do some extra work on him. We were already well into rehearsals when we got the news. We had a day off and thought, well, Charlie doesn’t want us to sit around and mope. We’ll just get on with it.”
Not too long ago, drummer Charlie Watts told us he found it hard to believe so much time had gone by for the Rolling Stones: “Y'know, three decades just go like that, really, when you're there. You're looking going, 'it's stretching in front of you forever, isn't it?' It's just, I mean, it's something I've enjoyed that I've done, y'know? It's difficult to explain.”