"He stayed courtly and soft-spoken. The Stones would go out regularly, playing larger and larger shows...."

"Watts remained himself, observing life from the drummer’s chair. 'To have to live with being some teenybop idol for Charlie is very difficult, because he’s not like that at all,' [Keith] Richards wrote of Watts. 'Charlie Watts to me is the most honest man in the world — to himself, to everybody. He never even wanted to be a pop star. It still makes him cringe.'.... Watts didn’t survive the Stones’ famously toxic environment entirely. He is said to have eschewed drugs from the start; but during the 1980s (during the dark years of Jagger’s solo efforts), he began drinking and ended up a heroin addict.... He dressed well; by the 1990s. he might wear a bespoke double-breasted suit onstage, and ultimately he ended up in Vanity Fair’s International Best-Dressed Hall of Fame. But he didn’t flail the drums or mug for the crowd; the idea of a Charlie Watts drum solo at a Rolling Stones concert was unthinkable. He just did his job; he never missed a show in his entire career drumming for the band...."

From "Charlie Watts Held the Rolling Stones Together for Half a Century" by Bill Wyman — the journalist, not the Rolling Stones bass player — in New York Magazine.