Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts has made candid confessions in past interviews about the period of time when he used the most illegal drugs: in the late 1970s to mid-1980s.
But in a December 2011 interview with BBC6, Watts goes into few details about how he was on heroin when the Stones were recording their 1978 album 'Some Girls." Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards was notoriously addicted to heroin, especially during the late 1960s through the 1970s, and Watts says that Richards advised him not to do heroin.
Watts said in the BBC6 interview:
“I was lucky that I never got that hooked that bad. I went through a period of taking heroin. I used to get off it whenever I went home, when my marriage started to go a bit wobbly, and my wife noticed I wasn’t the same ... I fell asleep on the floor during maybe [the recording of] ‘Some Girls’ and Keith [Richards] woke me up and said, ‘You should do this when you’re older.’ Keith telling me this! But it stuck and I just stopped, along with everything else.”
Watts also described surviving throat cancer in 2004:
"I had two operations and radio therapy, which is the way to do it. I had a lump on my throat, which I'd had for a couple of years. I went to see, actually, Mick's throat guy. I went to see the best man in the world: Peter Rhys Evans, who's a surgeon and throat man. They looked, and it was benign, and 'we should take it out.' He took it out, looked on the slide, it had tiny cancer cells on it.
"He said, ‘You have cancer of the whatever ...’ And that night I thought I was going to die. I thought that’s what you did. If you get cancer, you waste away and die. I had another operation to take the lymph nodes out. And then I went on radio therapy, which was six weeks long, every week, every month, every year. Now it’s five years clear.”
In 2011, Watts toured Europe with his jazz band the A, B, C & D of Boogie Woogie. As previously reported, Watts will join Richards and Rolling Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood for a December 2011 jam session at a London studio. Rolling Stones lead singer Mick Jagger may or may not attend the session, but Richards says that Jagger is invited.
There is continued speculation that the Rollling Stones will do at least one public performance together in 2012 to celebrate the band's 50th anniversary, but nothing has been announced yet. The last time that the Rolling Stones performed together in public was in 2007 at the end of their tour for "A Bigger Bang."
In the BBC6 interview, Watts said that the Rolling Stones are still together for this simple reason: "No one wants to quit."
The remainder of this BBC6 interview will air on December 25, 2011.
Charlie Watts at the Ambassadors Theatre in London on March 9, 2011
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Video: Charlie Watts: 2011 BBC6 Radio interview excerpt
