Charlie Watts on jazz and cleaning up (1986):
“The jazz orchestra was a good band in the end – during the period we were playing I had cleaned up, so the first phase was completely barmy and the second phase was totally straight: it was the first band I had played with for years where I was completely straight. I would have died if I had continued using drugs… I just stopped everything. I barely ate for two months, because I’d started to get fat from the drinking…

…Drugs are very hard to give up. For me, anyway. I didn’t even take that many. I wasn’t that badly affected, I wasn’t a junkie, but giving up was very, very hard. Much, much harder than the rest of it… I stopped when I slipped down the steps when I was in the cellar getting a bottle of wine… It really brought it home to me how far down I’d gone. I just stopped everything – drinking, smoking, taking drugs, everything, all at once. I just thought, enough is enough.”

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