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The Rolling Stones too old to party

Mar 21, 2013, 6:01 GMT

The Rolling Stones

The Rolling Stones are too old to party all night.

The 'Brown Sugar' band were known for their hard living throughout the 60s, 70s and 80s, but drummer Charlie Watts claims they were all in bed at a reasonable hour their 50th anniversary shows in the UK and the US last year.

He told British station BBC Radio 2: 'There's no sort of going to bed at five in the morning. It's quite normal to wander down the corridor and go to bed at five in the morning when you're young. None of us do that. We try to do it, but by 2am we're [gone].'

He added that his bandmates Sir Mick Jagger, Ronnie Wood and Keith Richards have all become 'mellower' with age, but admits he never personally lived the rock 'n' roll lifestyle.

He added: 'We are exactly the same really, as people, except we're mellower. We don't really hang out a lot together, we never have done, except in the very early days when we kind of lived together, we used to work so much there's no need to, we just wanted to get away.

'I was never into the rock 'n' roll sort of thing, I never had been. I was never into that whole thing I don't look like it and I never behaved like it really.'

The band's subdued living is a far cry from when they toured in the 80s and Keith would stay up for days on end.

Photographer Denis O'Regan, who photographed the band on their European tour of 1982, said: 'Keith would usually stay up until the night before the show, so if we arrived on a Monday and the show was a Wednesday night, he would stay up until Tuesday morning then sleep until just before the show.'