How 'Hackney Diamonds' Came Together After Charlie Watts' Death — and the Track That Still Carries His Beat

When Charlie Watts died in August 2021, most fans assumed the Rolling Stones were finished. Instead, they went back to work—but they didn’t start from scratch. While jamming with Steve Jordan (Watts’ handpicked replacement), the band dug into old sessions and discovered two tracks where Watts had already laid down drum parts. One of those, “Mess It Up”, made the final cut of 2023’s Hackney Diamonds with Watts’ original performance left untouched. It’s a ghostly, beautiful thing: Charlie playing along to a song he never saw released.

The other Watts track, “Live by the Sword”, goes further back—drums recorded in 2019 alongside bassist Bill Wyman, who hadn’t played with the Stones in decades. So the album isn’t just a tribute; it’s a time capsule. Jagger and Richards built the rest of the record around these bones, then added Jordan for everything else. That mix of old and new gives the album a weird, emotional glue. You hear Charlie in one ear, Steve in the other, and the band somehow moving forward without pretending he’s still there.