The letter that asked Charlie Watts to join the Rolling Stones

A polite letter to Wembley

A handwritten letter in which Brian Jones tried to persuade Charlie Watts to join the band that became the Rolling Stones is to be auctioned in New York in December. The letter has stayed in the Watts family for more than six decades and has never been seen in public, Nadia Khomami reported for The Guardian.

It was written in 1962 and addressed to "Mr. C. Watts" at the drummer's childhood home in Wembley, north-west London. Jones opens carefully: "Dear Charlie, if you consider this letter rather impertinent, please excuse me." The letter comes with its original envelope and has been consigned to Sotheby's by the late drummer's sister, PA Media reported.

According to PA Media, the letter was written in June 1962, just weeks before the band's first live performance that July. It will go on public view at Sotheby's New York from 2 to 8 December, with online bidding open from 2 December until the Rock & Pop sale on 15 December. The auction house estimates it will fetch between $70,000 and $80,000, about £52,000 to £60,000.

Nadia Khomami reported this first for The Guardian. Checked against The Guardian: 'Dear Charlie': letter revealing move to snare future Rolling Stones drummer up for auction.

"Our present drummer is atrocious!"

At the time, Watts was a designer at a London advertising agency who played drums in the evenings with Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated, one of the leading groups in the capital's new rhythm and blues scene. Jones, who was very much the leader of his young band, had to sell the idea of leaving a steady gig, Beth Simpson wrote for MusicRadar.

He asks about Watts's commitments to Korner, and then makes his pitch. "We are looking for a good drummer," he writes. "Already we consider our band far better than Alex's." He adds that the band was getting "a very tightly-knit sound".

In a postscript, Jones sets out the line-up as it stood: two guitars, harmonica, piano and drums, with a plan to add a bass guitar later. Then comes his verdict on the man behind the kit: "Our present drummer is atrocious!" The drummer is not named in the letter.

MusicRadar listed the band at that point as Jones, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Dick Taylor, who later formed the Pretty Things, and Ian Stewart on piano. The group had not yet settled on a name when Jones wrote, according to The Guardian.

Seven months of persuasion

The letter did not work straight away. Watts was cautious about leaving Korner, and it was another seven months before he joined the Rolling Stones, in January 1963. By then the bassist Bill Wyman had also joined, completing the rhythm section at the heart of the band's sound, and Taylor had gone back to art college.

On 2 February 1963 the Rolling Stones played with their early six-man line-up of Watts, Wyman, Jones, Richards, Jagger and Stewart, The Guardian reported. MusicRadar wrote that the new line-up played its first gig at the Ealing Jazz Club that month, took on Andrew Loog Oldham as manager in May, and signed to Decca soon afterwards.

Richards later recalled how much the band wanted Watts. In his autobiography, Life, he wrote that the musicians cut back on food so they could afford to pay him. "We starved ourselves to pay for him!" he wrote.

Craig Inciardi, the music and pop culture specialist at Sotheby's, said that few documents bring us as close to the formation of a legendary band. He said the letter captured "the excitement and ambition of a band on the cusp of history", and called it a first-hand record of the moment Jones set out to recruit the drummer whose sound would help shape the group.

The jazz fan who kept time for the Stones

Watts was born at University College Hospital in London in June 1941, the son of a lorry driver, and grew up in a prefabricated home in Wembley with his parents and his sister, Adam Sweeting wrote in his Guardian obituary of the drummer. He fell for jazz as a boy. He once said that hearing Gerry Mulligan's Walking Shoes, with Chico Hamilton on drums, was what made him want to play. At 14 he bought a banjo and turned it into a snare drum, and he was given his first kit for Christmas in 1955.

He studied at Harrow School of Art, and as part of a course assignment drew a children's book about the saxophonist Charlie Parker, Ode to a High Flying Bird, which a London publisher printed in 1964. After art college he joined a London advertising agency as a designer in 1960, and it was from there that Korner recruited him for Blues Incorporated in 1962.

Sweeting wrote that Watts spent more than 60 years doing his second-favourite job. What he always wanted to do was play jazz, and his heroes were Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington and Miles Davis. With the Stones he became the band's steady heartbeat, and the crisp economy of his drumming, swinging but muscular and without frills, left room for the rest of the band, and for Richards's guitar in particular.

His art school training stayed useful. He created artwork for some early Stones releases and worked with Jagger on the designs of the band's stage sets for tours from Steel Wheels in 1989 to A Bigger Bang in 2005 to 2007. Away from the band he led the Charlie Watts Big Band and the Charlie Watts Quintet, and recorded a live album with his Tentet at Ronnie Scott's in London.

He was famously the quiet one. Sweeting wrote that Watts watched the band's rise from the back of the stage, allowing himself the odd quizzical smile, and stayed detached from the excess and headlines that followed the group around the world. Peter Whitehead's documentary of the band's 1965 visit to Ireland was called Charlie Is My Darling, a nod to the quiet mystique he carried. Conversations with him tended to wander between Savile Row tailoring, cricket at Lord's and the Oval, and the Arabian horses he and his wife bred at their farm in Devon, before coming back to jazz.

There was one dark period. During the recording of the Dirty Work album in 1985, with Jagger and Richards at loggerheads and the band's future in doubt, Watts began drinking heavily and developed a heroin habit. He later said he hit an all-time low towards the end of 1986 and nearly lost his family. He weaned himself off drugs before the problem became public and built a family life in Devon, Sweeting wrote.

He kept playing jazz to the end. From 2009 he played with the ABC&D of Boogie Woogie, a group named after the initials of its members, which included his childhood neighbour and lifelong friend, the bassist Dave Green. In 2006 he was voted into Modern Drummer magazine's Hall of Fame, and in the same year Vanity Fair added him to its International Best Dressed List Hall of Fame.

He married Shirley Shepherd in 1964 without telling his bandmates, and the marriage lasted until his death. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with the Stones in 1989, and was treated for throat cancer in 2004 before going into remission. Watts died in August 2021, aged 80, shortly after it was reported that he had had surgery and that Steve Jordan would take his place on the band's No Filter tour of the US.

Brian Jones, the founder

The letter is also a reminder of how central Jones was to the band's beginnings. He had appeared with Korner's band under the name Elmo Lewis, Sweeting wrote, before branching off to start his own group, which included Stewart. A meeting with Jagger and Richards led to the formation of the Rolling Stones.

Jones played with the band for almost seven years. He left in June 1969 and died less than a month later, aged 27, after he was found drowned in his swimming pool, PA Media reported. He was succeeded on guitar by Mick Taylor, who played on Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main St, before Ronnie Wood, formerly of the Faces, joined in 1975, Ella Bennett reported for LBC. Wyman left the band in the early 1990s.

The band today

More than 60 years after Jones wrote to Wembley, the Rolling Stones are still making records. Their latest album, Foreign Tongues, was announced in May with a release date of 10 July 2026, and features Paul McCartney, the Cure's Robert Smith and Steve Winwood, as well as an appearance by Watts, according to LBC. It followed Hackney Diamonds in 2023, and both albums were produced by Andrew Watt.

The current band is Jagger, Richards and Wood, with their core collaborators Darryl Jones, Matt Clifford and Steve Jordan. Jagger said the album was recorded over a few intense weeks at Metropolis studios in London, and Richards called the sessions "a month of concentrated punch".

The Rolling Stones have had eight UK Number 1 singles and 14 UK Number 1 albums, PA Media reported. Their best-known songs include (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction, Jumpin' Jack Flash, Brown Sugar and Start Me Up.

No new Rolling Stones tour dates have been announced. If the band announce shows, they will appear on our Rolling Stones page, where you can set an alert to get an email when new dates are listed.