The Police and Bruce Springsteen drummers share memories of their late Rolling Stones counterpart, explaining his technical brilliance, his verve – and his clothes-folding skills

I’m an early-period Stones fan, and not so much because of losing interest in them, but because when you’re 16, music is 100 times more important – and the Rolling Stones were right there when I was 16. Humans are sort of like ducks. A duck comes out of the shell, the first warm thing it sees is mama; for adolescent teenage humans, the first raucous sound of rebellion, that’s daddy. And in my generation, that sound was the Stones.

Unruffled amid excess, personality clashes and musical disputes, the Rolling Stones’ exceptional drummer used technique to deepen the meaning and power of their songs

• Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts dies aged 80
• A life in pictures
• Obituary

By any standards, Charlie Watts was an unlikely candidate for rock stardom.

He was quiet, drily funny and unfailingly modest, characteristics theoretically better suited to his initial profession as a graphic designer than the scream-rent world of 60s pop. Furthermore, by his own admission, he didn’t particularly care for rock’n’roll (“I didn’t know anything about it … I used to hate Elvis Presley. Miles Davis – that’s what I considered someone,” he told an interviewer in 1993) and had initially had to have the rhythm and blues so beloved of his bandmates explained to him: “I didn’t know what it was. I thought it meant Charlie Parker, played slow”.