I found this interview recently and I know some of you, especially older fans, have seen this before.


"I love Charlie more than when we married 33 years ago - but I'm still a bit bemused by all this Rolling Stones stuff"

Daily Mail (London, England), The, March 17, 1998

THE year was 1964 and The Rolling Stones were filming a Ready Steady Go! television special in Montreux with the hit show's dancers.

Space was at a premium on the charter flight to Switzerland and even the Stones had been ordered to leave their girlfriends in London.Professional rebels Mick Jagger and Keith Richard, who had booked their stunning model girlfriends Chrissie Shrimpton and Linda Keith on the next flight, promptly disappeared for 'an early night'. As drummer Charlie Watts, not a natural rebel, watched them go, his lugubrious face fell.He was pining for art student Shirley Ann Shepherd, the offbeat blonde he had dutifully left behind. Inconsolable, he disappeared on a bender.

The return flight left without him - he was unfit to fly. 'Food poisoning,' said Mick, chirpily trying to explain it away.

'More like alcoholic poisoning,' said Brian Jones, sotto voce.

When a young man is surrounded by nubile teenage dancers and goes on a monumental drinking binge because he is separated from his girlfriend for two days, it really must be love. Thirty-four years later, Charlie and Shirley Watts are still together.

'He tells me that he loves me every day of my life,' she says. 'I love Charlie even more than when we married. I'm so mad about him. He has an incredible depth of sweetness in his nature. 'We think we're very ordinary but we've been called a sexy couple. I suppose if people are deeply in love they do give that impression.' It is not your usual rock star marriage.

Nor has Shirley, a sculptor, ever been your average rock chick.

This was never more evident than in the summer of 1990 when the top rock photographer Annie Leibovitz assembled the five blondes in the lives of The Rolling Stones for a magazine spread. And what did Shirley - married before some of them were born - do to upstage them all effortlessly? She tucked her cropped ash-blonde hair under a bowler, donned an immaculate riding rig, complete with crop, and posed with Halim, a milk-white stallion from her stud of Arabian horses. In her drawing room.

'That's where I brought him in,' she says, waving at the French windows of her 17th-century home in north Devon.

There are eight elegant greyhounds draped on the sofas among the tapestry and velvet cushions, their eyes fixed on Shirley. Another 15 dogs are locked in the kitchen, asleep on the beanbags by the Aga.

Apart from two rough collies that arrived in a Christmas box from Elton John, all the dogs are rescued retired greyhounds.

SHIRLEY'S life is dominated by dogs, horses and her enduring love for the man she met at an early Stones gig when Charlie was still a graphic artist at an advertising agency by day and she was studying at the Royal College of Art.Charlie is currently in Japan on the Stones's Bridges To Babylon world tour.'It's a very lonely life on the road,' says Shirley. 'It's lonely for the one on the road and the one left at home. I miss Charlie as much as I did in the early days.' Shirley is pushing 60, but you would never guess. She has a natural elegance and sophisticated air.

But she shudders at the memory of her wedding outfit, hastily assembled for the secret ceremony at Bradford Register Office on October 14, 1964, when she was 26.

'I was very angry with Charlie when he came back from Montreux,' she recalls.'He brought some plants as a peace offering and I threw them through the window. But we were always going to marry.'The ceremony took place at 9am and there were just two witnesses - friends who lived in Bradford. As we left, Charlie threw his coat over my head in case we were mobbed, but there was no one there.

Looking at the pictures our friend took, it's just as well. I was an art student who was always wore jeans and T-shirts so it was so unusual for me to wear a dress. So when I went to buy one, I hadn't a clue.'I wore a black and yellow dress with a shocking pink coat. Trying to look more grownup, I'd had my long hair chopped. It did nothing to improve my appearance.' They had an one-day honeymoon in London before the band went off to play in Paris - Shirley's long battle for her husband to spend more time with her than the Stones had begun in earnest.Above all, she wanted to share her life with a man like her father, a North London plasterer who raised his ten children to be independent and to use their talents.

'I value the experience of those early days, not because I was married to a Rolling Stone but because we were young together,' she says.'I'm still a bit bemused by it all. I wasn't like the other girls who followed them on tour with stars in their eyes. I was a few years older and I felt much older. I wasn't wanted on tour - it was made very, very difficult for me. I just wasn't interested in hanging on to someone else's shirttails.' It was Charlie's need to spend as much time as possible with Shirley and their only child Seraphina, who was born in 1968, that kept him away from casual sex and drugs if not rock 'n' roll - in the Sixties.

In 1971, the Stones became the first rock tax exiles, moving en masse to France. Settled in a farmhouse in the Cevennes in Southern France, the Watts family bloomed.

A decade later, they were back in Britain and Shirley was lamenting the biggest mistake of her life. "We were so happy in France. I've had to rebuild our lifestyle here. We came back for all the wrong reasons. We thought Seraphina ought to go to school here,' she says.

But Seraphina couldn't settle and went through a wild child period. She was expelled from Millfield, the most expensive public school in the country, for allegedly smoking cannabis, and began to drift. And Charlie succumbed to the drink and drugs surrounding the Stones. 'It took him a long time to admit to himself it was getting out of hand,' Shirley says softly. He stopped phoning her every day when he was on tour. Shirley developed a drink problem, until Jerry Hall urged her to seek help. Slowly, the Watts family got back on track.

When Charlie phones home, he doesn't want to hear about fancy parties - 'We never, never entertain,' insists Shirley - but everything that has been happening to their beloved horses and dogs.

'We always have at least ten dogs on the bed when Charlie is home. I try to kick them off, but he always calls them back. He even moves over to give them more room. Fortunately, we have a very big bed,' says Shirley.

For years, Charlie has been taking a sketchbook with him on tour. All he ever draws in it are his hotel beds - empty. 'He's an obsessional person,' says Shirley. 'On tour, he spends hours checking his socks, which he has packed perfectly and colour-coded. 'Keith is a great Charlie-watcher.

He says Charlie puts everything he needs in a holdall on tour to convince himself he's going home.

'Actually, the most irritating habit he has is chewing his nails. He never, ever criticises me so he's never told me what I do to irritate him.That's frustrating, too. It's a side of him I can't get to grips with.' Shirley says her dogs help keep her sane when her husband is away.'They're always so pleased to see me - they are great morale boosters.' But each of her pets has a tragic history.

AN UNHAPPY dog arrives and with love and training you can turn its situation right round,' she says.

Shirley was originally alerted to the plight of greyhounds by a Daily Mail campaign. Sadly, much of the dog-racing world sees greyhounds only as moneymaking machines on legs - even a champion can be thrown on the streets when its career ends.

Through the dogs, Shirley has recreated the bustling family home she grew up in. But looking at the burgeoning families of the other Stones, it is hardly surprising that there is a wistful note in her voice when she says: 'We wanted more children, but it was not to be.' She is content with their life in the country. 'We're not a very interesting couple, not glamorous like Mick and Jerry and Keith and Patti. I don't find my life boring. We like a quiet life.

'When you're young, you take the giving and taking of love for granted.

Then when you grow up you realise that it's much rarer than you thought it was.

'I wanted a man as loving as my father and I found him. Charlie has made everything possible for me, not just financially but by supporting me so that I have been able to grow. The only thing missing from my life is having a little girl around.' Now what she wants for her daughter is a man as good as Charlie. Seraphina lives with her 18-month-old daughter Charlotte in Bermuda; the father, Michael Duffy, an oriental carpet salesman, is no longer around.

'When Seraphina was little, she was enchanting. Then between the ages of 16 and 24 she had an awful adolescence,' says Shirley. 'Now we have that enchanting daughter back again, and she has a child as delightful as herself, just like she was at the same age. 'I don't think she'll ever come home again. She's happy where she is. But I miss her terribly. Charlie is the most besotted grandfather.'

Shirley and Charlie will not see each other again until next month when the band leaves Japan and heads to America. If, as she says, he gets lonelier all the time, why doesn't he quit touring?

'He'd never let down Mick and Keith. I can't compete with all that male bonding. They're his second family,' she says.

http://findarticles.com/p/news-articles/daily-mail-london-england-the/mi_8002/is_1998_March_17/love-charlie-married-33-years/ai_n35936476/?tag=content;col1

Top notch all the way.  Unpretentious and giving.