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  • Charlie's Good Tonight

  • The Authorised Biography of Charlie Watts
  • By: Paul Sexton
  • Narrated by: Paul Sexton
  • Length: 7 hrs and 10 mins
  • 4.6 out of 5 stars (29 ratings)
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Charlie's Good Tonight cover art

Charlie's Good Tonight

By: Paul Sexton
Narrated by: Paul Sexton
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Summary

Featuring forewords from bandmates Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, this is the official and fully authorised biography of the world’s most revered and celebrated drummer.

Mid-1962. The newly formed Rolling Stones are on the hunt for a permanent drummer. Their sights are set on Charlie Watts, a jazz musician already well-known within London’s rhythm and blues clubs. Fortunately for future Stones fans the world over, they persuade him to take on the job.

Once installed at the drum seat, Charlie would not miss a beat for the rest of his life. He was there throughout the swinging sixties as the Stones reached superstardom and for the well-documented debauchery of the 1970s, typified by the iconic album Exile on Main St. Battling his own demons by the eighties, Charlie emerged unscathed, cementing his reputation as the thoughtful, cultured but no less compelling counterpoint to his more raucous bandmates.

For almost 60 years—through all the band bust-ups, bereavements and changes in personnel both on stage and off—Charlie remained the rock at the heart of the Rolling Stones. At the same time, he was the antithesis of the rock-star archetype, an intensely private man who valued his family above all else.

Drawing on new interviews with his family, friends and former bandmates—including Mick Jagger and Keith Richards—Charlie’s Good Tonight is the remarkable life story of Charlie Watts: official, authorised and as it’s never been told before.

©2022 Paul Sexton (P)2022 HarperCollins Publishers Limited

Critic reviews

"An affectionate portrait, one that recognises Watts as musician, colleague, family man, obsessive collector and immaculate dresser." (Sunday Times)

"Sexton, a longtime Stones chronicler, tells Watts’s story with warmth and diligence." (Observer)

"Exhaustively researched…crammed with telling incidental information." (Telegraph)

What listeners say about Charlie's Good Tonight

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

"Five and a half decades in a suitcase."

A fan of the music of the Stones since the mid 1960s, and especially of their jazz oriented drummer, I knew nothing about Charlie Watts other than his notorious desire for privacy. Now I can also add to that his generosity, love of family, an outrageous collecting newness and a sense of both style and design.
Much of the book covers the bare bones of fifty plus years of the Rolling Stones as a group - how could it not when this was so much of Charlie's life - but a life spent being himself is still glimpsed, with the help of his family and quotes from those who knew and loved him, including his fellow band members: 'An enigma,' Keith called him. It made me wish I'd met the man, not something I usually feel at the end of a biography.

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

Charlie 's good to night

Loved Charlie watts. Musicians and early band members would enjoy reading this. Too much for me to absorb. The narrator was monotonous.

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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A great listen

What a different person to what you imagine. Jazz at heart but the beating heart of the rolling stones

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