Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards has confirmed Charlie Watts recorded his parts on a number of songs for the band's next album before his death in August.
"Let me put it this way," Richards told the Los Angeles Times. “You haven’t heard the last of Charlie Watts."
Richards and bandmates Mick Jagger and Ronnie Wood opened up about the loss of Watts, who died Aug. 24 at 80.
Wood said he was one of the last people to see Watts in hospital. “We watched horse racing on TV and just shot the breeze,” he recalled. “I could tell he was pretty tired and fed up with the whole deal. He said, ‘I was really hoping to be out of here by now,’ then after that there was a complication or two and I wasn’t allowed back. No one was.”
Richards remembered Watts as "one of the funniest guys I've ever known and the most unlikely man to be famous. He hated that side of the job and used to savagely take the piss out of it."
Jagger brushed off calls for the band to retire in the wake of Watts' death. "I don’t think that’s a movement," he said. "No band is the same when you lose someone. But the Stones is a very resilient band. We’ve been through a lot of ups and downs through the years, and we’ve had changes of personnel, as have a lot of bands."
Jagger said Watts urged the Stones to carry on with the No Filter tour.
“When you’re a band for this long, it’s unlikely you won’t have any changes. Of course, this is probably the biggest one we’ve had,” said Jagger. "But we felt — and Charlie felt — that we should do this tour. We’d already postponed it by a year, and Charlie said to me, ‘You need to go out there. All the crew that have been out of work — you’re not gonna put them out of work again.’
“So I think it was the right decision to keep going.”