CHARLIE WATTS - rip

The drummer performed with the band since 1963.

Charlie Watts, the longtime drummer of the Rolling Stones, died today at a London hospital, his spokesperson announced.

A cause of death was not provided.

The drummer’s death comes just a few weeks after the band announced he would not participate in the upcoming No Filter tour. Charlie Watts was 80 years old.

Charles Robert Watts was born in London in June 1941.

He became interested in drumming after befriending his neighbor Dave Green, now a jazz bassist.

“I bought a banjo, and I didn’t like the dots on the neck,” Watts once said.

“So I took the neck off, and at the same time I heard a drummer called Chico Hamilton, who played with Gerry Mulligan, and I wanted to play like that, with brushes.

I didn’t have a snare drum, so I put the banjo head on a stand.”

Watts drummed in local jazz bands in the late 1950s before he joined Alexis Korner’s band Blues Incorporated in 1961.

One night in 1962, so the story goes, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards went to a club in Ealing, West London, where Blues Incorporated were performing.

Jagger and Richards left the show impressed with Watts and his bandmates Brian Jones and Ian Stewart, who also made their way into the Rolling Stones.

Watts joined the Rolling Stones in 1963 and played on their 1964 debut.

Watts’ work with the Stones stretched across decades and earned him three Grammy Awards.

He and the band were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1989.