Contents

Information Page

About The Author

Prologue: Onlooker

1    Drums

2    Art

3    Blues

4    Stones

5    Beat

6    Silence

7    Marriage

8    Houses

9    Jamming

10  Exile

11  Boogie

12  Return

13  Trouble

14  Swing

15  Modern

16  Bridges

17  Project

18  Classic

Eplogue: Indweller

Notes

Prologue

Onlooker

His membership of The Rolling Stones will always remain central to any consideration of Charlie Watts as a figure in time’s fabric. Nevertheless, he was often a mere onlooker, a bit-part player at most, during many of the more conspicuous events that have punctuated the group’s four decades as one of the showbusiness sensations of the past century. Neither has he ever commented much either on, say, the drugs busts that all but destroyed the Stones in the late 1960s; the crisis at Altamont that threatened to ruin their reputation, the business in Canada with the prime minister’s wife… Therefore, I make no apologies for telescoping these and other episodes for literary and chronological convenience.

Moreover, as George Harrison had been categorised for all time as the ‘Quiet Beatle’ in 1963 – with Ringo Starr a close second – so some pressured journalist chronicling the mayhem surrounding The Rolling Stones in 1964, came up with ‘the Silent Stone’ as a description for Charlie. This phrase stuck, fuelled as it was by media frustration at his reluctant and, seemingly, bored utterances in interviews and when a stick-mic was thrust at his mouth every time the Stones had been through customs at an airport.

He opened up to specialist outlets in the 1980s after he’d formed the first of several critically acclaimed amalgams to indulge his abiding passion for jazz, but, until then, Watts provided little ‘good copy’ beyond raw information and bald aphorisms such as the oft-quoted, ‘A career in rock ’n’ roll comprises five years playing and twenty years hanging about.’²

Not surprisingly, it was without much hope that I attempted to elicit Charlie’s assistance with this biography. He did not deign to reply to my letter assuring him that mine was to be a respectful account, concentrating mainly on his professional career and artistic output, that it would not peter out after the swinging ’60s, that I was not some scum reporter, but an artiste like himself. I wanted him to like it. His silence was galling, but a recent biographer of William Rufus hadn’t spoken to his subject either, and there was far more information available about Charlie than about William, much of it from press archives and conversations with many of those with whom Watts and his Rolling Stones were associated.

For most of my research concerning modern drumming and insight into Charlie Watts’ impact on same, I went first and last to Alan Barwise, drummer and philosopher with Billy And The Conquerors, Clayson And The Argonauts and other ventures, quixotic and otherwise, which I have instigated over the past 30-very-odd years.

Please put your hands together, too, for Iain MacGregor, Laura Brudenell, Rachel Holmes, Dicken Goodwin, Albert DePetrillo, Michael Wilson, Kathleen Meengs and, particularly, Chris Harvey for patience and understanding about a deadline that I almost-but-not-quite met.

Thanks are also in order for Pat Andrews, Dave Berry, Don Craine, Keith Grant-Evans, Phil May, Dick Taylor and Twinkle for their candour and intelligent argument.

Whether they were aware of providing assistance or not, let’s have a round of applause, too, for these musicians: Roger Barnes, Peter Barton, Cliff Bennett, Clem Cattini, Mike Cooper, Tony Dangerfield, the late Lonnie Donegan, Chris Gore, ‘Wreckless’ Eric Goulden, Brian Hinton, Robb Johnston, Garry Jones, Graham Larkbey, Tom McGuiness, Brian Poole, Jim Simpson, John Steel, Mike and Anja Stax, the late Lord David Sutch, John Townsend, Paul Tucker and Pete York – plus three cheers for Carlo Little, former Cyril Davies All-Star, Lord Sutch Savage and – just – Rolling Stone.

It may be obvious to the reader that I have received help from sources that prefer not to be mentioned. Nevertheless, I wish to thank them, as well as Robert Cross of Bemish Business Machines, Stuart and Kathryn Booth, Peter Doggett, Ian Drummond, Katy Foster-Moore, Richard Hattrell, Michael Heatley, Dave Humphries, Rob Johnstone, Allan Jones, Mick and Sarah Jones, Iris Little, Elisabeth McCrae, Russell Newmark, Mike Ober, Mike Robinson, Hilary Stafford-Clark, Anna Taylor, Michael Towers, Warren Walters, Gina Way and Ted Woodings, and of course Inese, Jack and Harry Clayson for suffering by proxy the cruel and unusual personal traumas I endured during the writing of this book.

Alan Clayson
February 2004

1 Drums

He’d finish 1964 neck and neck with Dave Clark as the second most famous drummer in the world. The first, of course, was Ringo Starr – and like The Beatles’ most junior partner, Charlie Watts had been sucked into a vortex of events that hadn’t belonged even to speculation when he came to consciousness in a city neighbourhood that unfurled on to the mud banks of a working river.

Charles Robert Watts had entered the world in Islington’s University College Hospital on 2 June 1941, the overcast and unseasonably cool day that clothes rationing was introduced to help the country pay for the downfall of Hitler. Until well into the 1950s, a meal with chicken was a rare treat – though the Welfare State was to provide gratis third-pint bottles of lukewarm milk for morning break at school. Yet some items would be so scarce that you could only buy them with weeks of saved-up ration coupons.

Another so-called stop-gap measure was the construction between 1945 and 1949 of nearly 200,000 lookalike ‘prefab’ homes to accommodate young families. The assembly of a single such estate of small, unprepossessing bungalows could take less than a fortnight, but some proved more enduring than the more permanent housing promised by the government as soon as postwar labour could be mobilised.

‘As much thought has been put into this plan as was put into the invasion of North Africa,’ enthused Prime Minister Churchill, who didn’t have to live in a prefab as Charlie and his sister Linda would with mother Lilian and father Charles Richard, a lorry driver for British Rail’s parcels division. From the cradle, the children caught and held a Cockney accent, but theirs was not a cor blimey environment of pubs, back streets, ’ello-’ello-’ello policemen and sub-criminal adult dialogue revolving around booze, dog racing and dodges for making easy money – as portrayed in The Blue Lamp, Passport To Pimlico and similar black-and-white Ealing Studios output.

While Charlie remembered the prefab as ‘tiny but very cosy’,² it was situated on the edge of pasture in rural London – not quite the contradiction in terms it might seem in the capital’s present-day austere and functional aesthetic of tower blocks and right-angled grids of inner distribution roads. Indeed, as Charlie observed half a century later, the district where he’d grown up had ‘gone back to fields again now – which is very unusual’.²

In 1948, however, the family moved to Kingsbury, as much Middlesex as London, where the patches of green were not farmland, but country parks, sports grounds and play areas within earshot of the North Circular Road and, more so, the clattering national and internal railway connections across a lugubrious suburb that was becoming indistinguishable to outsiders from any other on the north-western fringes of the metropolis.

By the time he started at Tyler’s Croft Secondary Modern four years later, Charlie’s upbringing had been as undramatic and free from major calamities as that of any seemingly ordinary bloke who could ‘give the impression of being bored, but I’m not really. I’ve just got an incredibly boring face.’³ Just above middle height with brown hair and blue-grey eyes, he was as self-effacing about his abilities at school where he was recognised as a talented soccer player who preferred cricket. His ambidextrous bowling was impressive enough to gain him a try-out for the Middlesex county club. He also won trophies for sprinting. Less laudable was Charlie’s skill, apparently, at settling playground altercations with his fists as much as reasoned argument – an inclination that would rear up in heated moments during his adult life too. At Tyler’s Croft, he may have been in the mood for a fight after physical education – because ‘What I hated were the gym classes: all that drag about getting changed, and leaping and running and jumping. I mean, it didn’t get you anywhere.’⁴

Similarly, while he proved to be sound academically too – with end-of-term prizes for Art and English – he didn’t join the school choir or do particularly well at music, which was then taught as a kind of mathematics whereby a dotted crotchet, say, was expressed diagrammatically by ‘three of the little milk bottles you have at school’.⁵

Neither were ‘musical evenings’ of any description a frequent occurrence – if they ever occurred at all – in the Watts household, even before television became an indispensable domestic fixture. ‘I reckon the only instrument any of them could play at home was the gramophone,’ laughed Charlie.⁴ Yet music started to become central to his life from around the age of 11.

It began with the BBC Light Programme’s diet of pre-rock ’n’ roll pop aimed principally at children and, especially, the over-30s. There was little middle ground between ‘How Much Is That Doggie In The Window’ and ‘Love And Marriage’. Now and then there’d be lewd outrages like ‘Such A Night’ by Johnnie Ray, ‘the Prince of Wails’, but otherwise you jumped from nursery rhymes to Frank Sinatra as if the intervening years were spent in a cultural coma.

The radio music that most captivated the adolescent Watts was the kind that bordered on jazz. When the tip of classic rock’s iceberg was sighted, he found the white executants less impressive than their black counterparts, but was otherwise ‘of the school that never listened to rock ’n’ roll – or refused to until I was about twenty-one. I never followed the charts.’²

He was, however, very taken with 1952’s million-selling ‘Flamingo’ by saxophonist Earl Bostic, former sideman with drummer Lionel Hampton, who had emerged from the big bands of the ‘swing era’ that was petering out after the war. Within months of hearing ‘Flamingo’, Charlie’s imagination had been captured by jazz as surely as Don Quixote’s had by the windmills of Castile. ‘I never had any trouble listening to it,’ he explained. ‘It’s very easy for me.’²

The spiral into dependency became breakneck. He came to love all its roots and branches – ragtime, traditional, mainstream, modern, avant-garde, ‘cool’, ‘hot’, New Orleans, Kansas City, New York, Chicago – whether the orchestral euphoria of Duke Ellington and Count Basie, the white swing of Benny Goodman and Woody Herman – for whom Stravinsky composed Ebony Concerto – vocal dare-devils such as Sinatra, Buddy Greco, Billy Eckstine and Anita O’Day and, when he was able to obtain them on import, the differing textural complexities of Ornette Coleman and Roland Kirk. Charlie travelled too the vinyl road to the ‘hard bop’ of The Jazz Messengers and, inevitably, freeform via the ‘be-bop’⁶ – or just plain ‘bop’ – of John Coltrane, Charlie Mingus, Thelonius Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis – and, above all, alto saxophonist Charlie ‘Yardbird’ Parker. Indeed, so far as Charlie Watts ever had a boyhood hero, it was the late Parker he admired as other lads might footballer Stanley Matthews – ‘the Wizard of Dribble’ – or champion boxer Freddie Mills.

How do such interests start? How about yours? Was it because your first remotely romantic encounter – a chaperoned kiss under the mistletoe – was soundtracked by Session With The Dave Clark Five? Perhaps a teacher on whom you had a crush supported Sheffield Wednesday. Charlie Watts has never revealed whether any specific incident or person turned him on to the endlessly inventive Parker, only that, ‘He sort of epitomised an era in my life. Even now, although I may only play him once a month, I still get that good feeling.’⁷

As well as listening to what was in the grooves of the discs, Watts became preoccupied with their creators, seeking insights into artistic conduct, clarification of obscurer melodic – and, if relevant, lyrical – byways, and generally searching for information about what made the musicians tick. He wished for the impossible: ‘I’d like to have gone to the Savoy Ballroom – Chick Webb, I think. I’d love to have seen Ellington at the Cotton Club and have dressed up for the occasion. I’d love to have seen Charlie Parker at the Royal Roost or something like that…Louis Armstrong, probably at the Roseland Ballroom in Chicago in the 1930s with a big band behind him…’.⁸

The nearest he could get was reading reminiscences about the old days when dramatis personae – some from the form’s ragtime dawn – were interviewed on the jazz pages of Melody Maker or in Downbeat, the US jazz periodical – and by listening to the records over and over again, sometimes focusing on maybe only the piano or bass, then just the horns. Furthermore, while he enjoyed the tactile sensation of handling the packagings of The Duke Plays Ellington, The Benny Goodman Story Volume One, Charlie Parker Plays Cole Porter and more of the new plastic 10- or 12-inch 33 1/3 rpm long players – LPs – he also made myriad private observations while learning much from sleeve notes, composing credits and listings of personnel. This often led him to the canons of associated players. Having invested that amount of cash – the equivalent of a fortnight’s newspaper-round earnings for every LP – Charlie intended to get his money’s worth.

Perhaps the most singular road-to-Damascus moment was when the 14-year-old heard ‘Walkin’ Shoes’, a 1956 instrumental of ‘cool’ persuasion by The Gerry Mulligan Quartet. If a little ‘Light Programme’ to the undiscerning ear, and with saxophone and trumpet solos to the fore, Charlie homed in on the scuffed snare and tom-tom propulsion of Chico Hamilton, ‘the first guy that I ever heard on record that made me want to play the drums’.² As a result, he began concentrating less on Ellington, Goodman, Parker, Davis, Monk et al than on a particular fellow wielding the sticks behind them on their respective LPs: ‘Kenny Clarke is probably my favourite drummer. No one had a touch like him, especially on cymbals. It was a float, a touch that he invented. 9 I would have been about fifteen when I first heard him, and that would have been the Charlie Parker stuff. He did four tracks with Parker. One of the faults of listening to great players is that you know you could never accomplish that.’²

Rather than being particularly thrilled by drum solos, Watts came to realise that while it was, say, a trumpeter or saxophonist who gave a number its outward shape and direction, it was often the drummer that made the truest difference – and that the best of them did not merely maintain a precise backbeat, but lifted a band off the runway, allowing it to glide easily on the strongest musical winds.

Chico Hamilton notwithstanding, Charlie’s first drumming idol was Joe Morello – ‘all taste and elegance’⁸ – best known to the man in the street for accompanying Dave Brubeck, one of the few modern jazz pianists to reach the pop charts without compromising his stylistic determination.¹⁰ Nevertheless, everyone who sat at the head of the table in the Valhalla of North American jazz percussion was worthy of the attention of a young man half a world away.

Off-the-cuff examples are Count Basie’s most renowned drummer, ‘Papa’ Jo Jones – despite his hurling an angry cymbal at Charlie Parker’s high-velocity blowing in which the tune had been lost – hunchbacked Chick Webb, whose orchestra once rivalled Goodman’s; Roy Haynes who was with both Coltrane and Kirk; audacious Philly Jo Jones, dragging and accelerating the beat behind Miles Davis; Big Sid Catlett – as enthralling on brushes as he was with sticks – Earl Palmer and snappy dresser Shelly Manne, omnipresent in the recording studios of Hollywood; Chicago’s Dave Tough from Woody Herman’s first Herd, who planted successful feet in both the swing and be-bop camps – Mingus’s Dannie Richmond – ‘The rhythms would turn inside each other – because Mingus would make it do that’¹¹ – and Art Blakey. A master of dynamics, Blakey could create, gasped Charlie, ‘deafening noise and then he’d come down, and your breathing would be louder than his playing, but there’d be no let up in the intensity’.² Blakey’s Jazz Messengers were to be the flagship act of Blue Note, a US jazz record label of such prestige that hearts would pound in anticipation at the sight of its logo in a rack at Dobell’s, the jazz specialist shop along London’s Charing Cross Road.

Successive editions of Downbeat also sold well at Dobell’s. Charlie saw Max Roach, the most adventurous of all early bebop drummers, in all his glory on the front page of a special drumming issue in 1956. Without breaking sweat, Roach could drum like a rhythmically integrated octopus. ‘Maybe only another drummer can understand exactly what he is doing and how well he does it,’ thought Watts, ‘but I can listen to a brilliant drummer for hours on end.’⁴

In doing so, he appreciated rather than liked band leader Buddy Rich – every smart alec’s notion of percussive splendour – and Gene Krupa, such a jazz legend that he was to be the subject of a 1960 bio-pic: ‘Everything he did was exaggerated. Every move was a big deal – but he was one of the best.’⁷

Therefore, in reveries that no one could penetrate, Charlie Watts was not Rich or Krupa commanding the stage alone under his own voodoo spell for minutes on end, but ministering unobtrusively to overall effect behind a genius like Parker.

He decided to put action over daydreaming. Other boys might have gone no further than smiting the furniture to music from the radio, but Charlie began exploring avenues with wider implications than inadvertently annoying houseproud parents. Apart from rattling about on biscuit tins (with Cadbury’s Roses giving the most authentic snare drum sound), the cheapest option was a Viceroy ‘tapbox’, advertised in the New Musical Express, with miniature drum, washboard, cowbell and hooter that, for 39s 11d, was ‘ideal for parties and playing with radio or gramophone’. There was also a Broadway ‘Kat’ snare-and-cymbal set costing £10/4s.

Impressed by neither, Charlie pondered. Somehow or other, he’d acquired a banjo, but during cursory attempts to teach himself to play, ‘couldn’t get the dots on the frets right. It drove me up the wall.’⁷ One day, he removed the strings and the connecting screw to the neck, and was left with an object with metal rim, vellum skin and resonator. It was an approximation of a small snare drum.

After constructing a stand from a Meccano set, he bought a pair of not sticks, but wire brushes – because those were what Chico Hamilton had used for the subtleties of ‘Walkin’ Shoes’. As Charlie’s consequent rhythmic experiments in his bedroom neither disturbed the rest of the household nor interfered with school, Mr Watts didn’t object to his son’s hobby. Indeed, that Christmas, he gave Charlie a basic second-hand kit – bass drum, snare and cymbal – of indeterminate make¹² – though he and Lilian realised swiftly that it was ‘the worst thing you can get a kid. They’re an awful lot of fun, but the worst instrument to actually learn to play, noise-wise. They’ve got all these practice pad-type things, but there’s no point in playing them because half the fun when you first start is the sound of the drums – and the noise is unbelievable. That’s part of the horror of playing them – controlling the volume.’¹¹

Surprisingly, the neighbours were tolerant – ‘a boys-will-be-boys kind of thing,’ reckoned Charlie⁴ – when, initially, he attacked his present with gusto, showing no signs of ever stopping. Fortunately for them, Charlie absorbed quickly the signals from Art Blakey: ‘One of the great things with drums is to be able to play quietly.’² As the New Year got under way, his strivings brought forth hand-and-foot co-ordination, accurate time-keeping, a clean roll faster than moderato, and the beginnings of an impactive personal style.

There were instructional manuals available, but he couldn’t read standard music script, and drum tutors were few and far between then, even in Greater London – so Charlie gathered what he could by trial and error when playing along to records – ‘which I hated. It seemed so synthetic’¹¹ – and through watching other drummers either on television or at the local palais where, in stiff evening dress, the bands helped shut out the staider verities of rationing; newlywed couples having to start married life in one set of in-laws’ homes, and front doors slammed on the pervading smell of soiled nappies and overcooked cabbage.

During the night’s veletas, cha-cha-chas and concessions to short-lived fads like the Jitterbug and the Creep, there was always some young dingbat requesting ‘Rock Around The Clock’, but otherwise ‘There wasn’t any British rock ’n’ roll for Charlie to copy,’ notes Alan Barwise, ‘so he was forced to be more creative. His backbeat came from using a traditional military marching band grip with, for example, the fulcrum on his left hand between the thumb and forefinger, but right inside the grip. He also had his snare drum in an unusually high position. If it hadn’t been like that, he might have lost that loose jazz feel of his.’

While drumming overshadowed the rest of Charlie’s adolescence, there were other interests such as the Wild West, which he researched beneath its Roy Rogers-and-Trigger veneer, and maintained an abiding interest into adulthood – particularly in the US Civil War. He was an avid listener to radio comedy – where his tastes ran to Hancock’s Half Hour rather than the more off-beat Goon Show. He was also given to drawing cartoons supplemented with fragments of verse and prose.

This was reflective of his flair for art – as was the embossing of his initials on his bass drum skin and, crucially, the fluttering of a General Certificate of Education ‘O’ level pass in the subject on to the Watts doormat in August 1957. This, plus a favourable testimonial from Tyler’s Croft, was enough to gain him a place on a three-year course at Harrow School of Art, beginning the following month. Thus the world of work could be kept at arm’s length for a while longer, enabling the fancy that he’d like to make a living as a musician to enter Charlie’s index of possibilities.

‘Musician’, see, no longer meant sitting in the fourth row of violins and cranking out Beethoven all your life or, indeed, conforming to any school dictates about what was and wasn’t ‘decent’ music. You didn’t even have to be born into showbusiness any more. Admittedly, jazz didn’t coin much, but, like Shelly Manne did, you could finance such a combo if you got to know the right people and were sufficiently versatile and coldly professional to take on studio session work in the employ of whoever called the shots, with no extra time or favours done. You could also get a foot in the door via servitude under the batons of middle-aged band leaders on luxury liners and at debutante balls.

Charlie was well placed to pursue such paths as the British music business was centred, then as now, in London – as was the British take on skiffle. Specifically, it was traceable to a metropolitan jazz band led by trombonist Chris Barber. Most of its repertoire consisted of ‘Bill Bailey’, ‘High Society’ – both issued as singles – and further set-works from the ragtime portfolios of Louis Armstrong, Kid Ory, Sophie Tucker et al – though clarinettist Monty Sunshine’s style, for example, was derived as much from the European klezmer form of lower-register improvisation as any toot-tooting from New Orleans, and it was significant that The Dutch Swing College Band, Germany’s Old Merrytale Jazz Band and other pre-eminent traditional jazz outfits sur le continent absorbed their music from British ‘dads’ like Sunshine and Barber rather than its US originators.

On his band’s 1954 LP, New Orleans Joys, Barber allowed singing banjo player Lonnie Donegan a crack at ‘Rock Island Line’, one of two ‘skiffle’ novelties amid the interweaving intensity of the front line that dominated the remaining tracks. There were sufficient Light Programme airings of ‘Rock Island Line’ to warrant its issue as a spin-off 78 in autumn 1955. Its climb into the Top 20 in both Britain and the United States made it expedient for 24-year-old Donegan to go solo – though an understanding Barber promised him his old job back when it was all over. This gratifying turn of events was milked with two high-profile US tours, but though Lonnie’s skiffle was derived from the rent parties, speakeasies and Dust Bowl jug bands of the US Depression, ‘rockabilly’, its closest relation in primeval rowdiness, gripped the American teen infinitely tighter.

Nevertheless, on figuring out the same three bedrock guitar chords, his Limey cousin could (and generally did) form a skiffle ensemble with friends. Aspirant skifflers would be everywhere, stretching out limited repertoires at wedding receptions, youth clubs, church fêtes, birthday parties and every talent contest advertised.

As well as an embarrassment of slashed acoustic guitars, at the core of its contagious backbeat were tea-chest-and-broomstick bass, a washboard tapped with thimbles, dustbin-lid cymbals, biscuit-tin snare drum and further vehicles of musical effect fashioned from everyday implements. Like punk after it, anyone could try skiffle – and the more ingenuous the sound, the better. The highest ideal was to forge an individual style by making even ‘Rock Island Line’ not sound like any other outfit’s version.

Soon, those skifflers who meant business were running up hire purchase debts for the amplified guitars and orthodox dance band drum kits that were to supersede the finger-lacerating acoustic six-strings and pots-and-pans percussion that were becoming old hat during interval slots for jazz bands at Ken Colyer’s Studio 51, London’s oldest jazz club, not to mention fuller sessions down in the Heaven And Hell, Le Macabre, the Safari and, deepest in the heart of Soho, the 2 I’s, all-skiffle basements within the square mile bordered by the consumer’s paradises of Park Lane, Piccadilly, Shaftesbury Avenue, Charing Cross Road and Oxford Street.

Yet, though it was known that Lonnie Donegan had drummed with a jazz band when on National Service – and that mere ownership of a kit attracted offers for your services all over a given area – Charlie Watts’ ventures into skiffle were irresolute. David Green, a next-door neighbour – and lifelong friend – had manufactured a tea-chest bass, but the two never progressed much further than talking about starting up a group. They spent more hours spinning discs in one or other’s bedroom before skiffle lost its flavour on the bedpost overnight, and Charlie started at art school.

2 Art

Within Harrow School of Art’s imposing white-stone edifice, Charlie completed an all-purpose foundation course before specialising in graphics and lettering. He also absorbed a hidden curriculum via a restless and omnivorous debauch of reading during which his understanding of which books were worthwhile and which were not became more acute. His brow might have furrowed over Soren Kirkegaard, the Danish mystic, and certain of his existentialist descendants, chiefly Jean-Paul Sartre, but he was less enraptured with the US connection, epitomised by Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, foremost prose writers of the ‘Beat Generation’, and associated bards such as Corso, Ginsberg and Ferglinghetti.

Initially, he was disinclined to air his learning, extra-curricular and otherwise, during college tutorials. Indeed, for much of his first terms there, Watts said as little as possible, and tended to walk alone. Yet he began to fix on details that most others in a given lesson might be too lackadaisical to consider or even notice. He seemed also to be more au fait with the historical traditions and conventions of art and its interrelated philosophies than they.

Perceived as slightly eccentric, he distanced himself further by not conforming to the unofficial art student – and Guenille, si l’on veut: ma guenille m’est chère –