Spider from Mars Read online

  MY LIFE WITH BOWIE

  SPIDER FROM MARS

  WOODY WOODMANSEY

  with Joel McIver

  SIDGWICK & JACKSON

  This book is dedicated to my wife, June;

  to my sons, Nick, Joe and Dan;

  to my sister, Pamela;

  to my brothers in the Spiders From Mars,

  Mick Ronson and Trevor Bolder;

  and to my friend David Bowie,

  who changed my life.

  Contents

  Foreword by Tony Visconti

  Prologue

  1 Rocker in Waiting

  2 Ratted Out

  3 All the Madmen

  4 Oh! You Pretty Things

  5 Hang On To Yourself

  6 Starman

  7 Let Yourself Go

  8 It Ain’t Easy

  9 Watch That Man

  10 So Where Were the Spiders?

  11 Holy Days

  Afterword by Joe Elliott

  Select Discography

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  PICTURE CREDITS

  List of Illustrations

  Foreword

  by Tony Visconti

  As an American new to England I thought the name Woody Woodmansey might have been a Tolkien invention, like Tom Bombadil. I had never heard of such a name. Mick Ronson was singing his praises, though: Woody was Mick’s favourite drummer and we had to import him from Hull immediately.

  The ‘we’ was David Bowie and me. Months earlier David and I had been completely taken with Ronson’s guitar playing and formed a backing group called the Hype with drummer John Cambridge, who’d suggested Ronson to us in the first place. Ironically, back in Hull, Woody replaced Cambridge in the Rats, Ronson’s earlier group, and now at Ronson’s behest he was replacing Cambridge yet again, this time in the Hype. Rock is a cruel mistress.

  David and I occupied a huge Victorian flat in Beckenham, Kent, and Woody and Ronson moved in, sleeping on mattresses on the floor. Sometimes their girlfriends from Hull came down for a visit, and that would make nine of us all together, including our girlfriends and Roger the roadie. But most of the time we were downstairs in a disused wine cellar, banging out arrangements for the first songs of the new David Bowie album, later to be called The Man Who Sold the World.

  Mick Ronson was right about Woody – he was an amazing drummer. His speedy hands were a blur, adapting quickly to the strange juxtaposition between sophisticated chord changes, sudden time signature changes and songs structured like operettas. From the USA I brought in concepts like the jazz bolero – the instrumental section of ‘All the Madmen’ – that Woody learned in five minutes. I got him to play instruments he hadn’t heard of, such as the guiro and timpani. He mastered everything thrown at him. He had my respect, and I know as a bass player and producer that I certainly had to earn his.

  We were a happy bunch of musicians when we entered Trident and Advision Studios in 1970. We blew their roofs off and we completed the album feeling triumphant. What happened afterwards will be told later . . . but in 2014 I received an email from Woody asking me if I would like to play The Man Who Sold the World live in concert, as we had never actually done that back in the day. I was iffy about it, because I was uncertain whether I still had it in me to play the Herculean bass parts which I’d busked so many decades before.

  I didn’t fully commit until I got this email from Woody:

  Hi Tony,

  Was It something I said? Mac stuck on SLEEP?

  Hiatus?

  Woody

  That was the slap in the face I needed. I accepted the challenge.

  At the time of writing this we have performed The Man Who Sold the World at least forty times to wildly enthusiastic audiences in the UK, Japan, Canada and the USA. We are still on tour with our core group of Glenn Gregory, James Stevenson and Paul Cuddeford and will play it at least twenty times more.

  This is my story with Woody Woodmansey. Now let Woody tell his, how a young man from a blues band in the north of England ended up as the drummer in the Spiders From Mars.

  Tony Visconti, 2016

  PROLOGUE

  ‘A rediscovered TV performance by David Bowie singing his classic song “The Jean Genie” live on Top of the Pops is being shown tonight for the first time in almost forty years,’ newsreader Fiona Bruce announced. ‘It was thought the performance had been lost for good . . .’

  It’s a funny thing to see a video of yourself from forty years ago pop up on the BBC’s six o’clock news.

  It was a few days before Christmas in 2011, and in amongst all the stories of scandal and conflict, there it was – a recording of Bowie and the Spiders, which had been broadcast on 4 January 1973 and not seen by anyone since. Although the BBC’s tape had been lost or recorded over, one of the cameramen from the day, John Henshall, had made a copy for himself that had been kept in a drawer somewhere – until now.

  Later that evening, they played the full video on the Top of the Pops’ Christmas special and I sat down with my family and watched. Although I was sixty-one years old, as I watched my twenty-two-year-old self I was caught up in the excitement all over again.

  At that moment in time, we’d had a hit single in the UK and US with ‘Starman’, and the album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars had been released in June 1972, so far having spent twenty-five weeks in the charts. ‘The Jean Genie’ had been released the previous November and was number sixteen in the charts (and about to climb a lot higher). We’d just come back from our first US tour and were in the middle of a small English one before heading back to the US again. It felt like things were really beginning to happen.

  As I listened to Mick Ronson play that familiar guitar line harder and more aggressively than the recorded version, I remembered that when the BBC asked us to do Top of the Pops Bowie had been absolutely adamant we’d only appear if we could play live. Over the course of the tour the live version of the song had become more energetic and raw, and we all felt strongly that it would have more impact on the show than simply miming to a pre-recorded backing track, which was normal at the time. Luckily the BBC agreed, and we had time to fit in our appearance between our gigs in Manchester on 29 December and Glasgow on 5 January. Although we’d only had about three days off over Christmas, which hadn’t really been enough time to unwind, none of us felt tired as we arrived at Studio 8 for the recording.

  Our stage look was always evolving and our designer, Freddie Burretti, who was on a roll now, had made us new clothes for the show. Bowie was bare-chested, wearing a turquoise patterned jacket with blue trousers. He’d added a necklace and one single pendant earing. Mick wore his new black and gold suit, Trevor his black and silver suit.

  It made me smile to see my get-up – a white- and black-striped jacket, with padded shoulders and very wide lapels, red Oxford-bags-style trousers, a black shirt and metallic-silver tie. It looked brilliant but Freddie tended to forget that I needed to be able to move my arms. The sleeves of the jacket were so tight that I wasn’t looking forward to playing in it.

  I was positioned at the front of the stage, which was not my usual spot for live performances but the producers had used the same set-up when we’d done ‘Starman’ the year before and that had obviously been successful. What was different this time was that we were playing a live version of the song with an extended guitar solo, which would last as long as Mick felt it should last, so eye contact was important – I knew Mick would give me a nod as he finished his solo. In the recording you can see me turning my head around to be able to see his cue.

  By the time the show was broadcast we had been on our way to the Glasgow gig and never actually saw it. None of us probably thought about it much again
.

  Watching it now, though, it felt odd that this moment had been sitting in a drawer somewhere, one song from so many that we played together over those years. We didn’t know then what those songs would come to mean to people all over the world. I had no idea that more than four decades later, people would still come up to me and tell me that watching us changed their life, made them think differently. We were just up there, playing the best we could.

  If you’d have told me when I was starting out that all those years later a video of me playing the drums would be on the news, I’d have laughed in your face and told you not to be daft.

  But that’s the story I want to tell you now; how a boy from a small town in East Yorkshire became a Spider from Mars.

  Woody Woodmansey, 2016

  1

  ROCKER IN WAITING

  I remember, with absolute clarity, the moment when I knew I was going to be a rock musician.

  It was a warm summer day in 1964 and I was fourteen years old. The Beatles’ ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ and the Rolling Stones’ ‘It’s All Over Now’ were riding high at the top of the charts. I was more of a Stones fan – the Beatles were a bit too smooth for me. Everybody liked them, including my parents, which was a real turn-off. I also liked the Animals, the Kinks and Johnny Kidd and the Pirates. Top of the Pops had started airing in January that year and like millions of teenagers I sat glued to the TV on a Thursday evening. But my epiphany didn’t come as a result of hearing any of my favourite bands. I was standing on the edge of a farm machinery repair depot in the Yorkshire town of Driffield when everything changed.

  My friend Frank’s dad owned the place, and we’d often go down there to mess about on the machines and play football. That afternoon four of us were kicking a ball around in an open area of concrete between the huge combine harvesters and tractors. It was basically a bit of wasteland surrounded by tall banks of nettles. I kicked the ball at one of the other kids, but it shot over the nettles and vanished.

  I went in search of it, finding it lying next to the door of a brick building that looked a bit like an air-raid shelter, maybe twenty foot long, with no windows. I’d never noticed it before. The ball had rolled up to a silver-painted door; the words ‘The Cave’ were painted on it, graffiti-style.

  As I bent down to pick up the ball I heard music coming out of this building. At first I thought someone had a transistor radio in there, and then I realized that it was more dynamic than that. I could feel the vibration in my body, even standing outside the door. I shouted to Frank, ‘What’s that music?’

  ‘It’s my brother,’ he replied. ‘He’s playing in there with his band.’

  ‘What kind of band?’

  ‘Rhythm and blues, or pop, or something,’ Frank shrugged.

  ‘Can we go in and listen?’ I asked.

  ‘No, you only get in there if you’re wearing a dress,’ he told me.

  The music had really grabbed my attention, though, and I pestered Frank to ask his brother if I could go in and watch, even just for one song. A few days later Frank said, ‘They’re practising tonight, come down. My brother says you can go in and watch if you want.’

  The first thing I noticed as I went inside the Cave was that it smelled strongly of damp. The second was how dark it was, lit only by a single red lightbulb. The band, who were called the Roadrunners, had hung what looked like fishing nets from the ceiling in an attempt at cool decor, which added to the atmosphere – to my eyes it looked very rock ’n’ roll.

  At the far end of the main room was a stage, about a foot high, that was carpeted. There were five musicians on it, so it looked pretty cramped. In the middle was a drummer sitting at his kit, on the left stood a guitarist and a bass player, on the right another guitarist, and the singer was out front. They were already playing when I arrived, a Bo Diddley song I recognized. I’d never seen a band play live before and, only 10 feet away from them, every sense I had was being assaulted. I was mesmerized. It was the most exciting thing I’d ever experienced. They all had long hair, but the singer stood out as his hair was ginger. He was wearing bell-bottom jeans and shaking a pair of maracas in time to the drummer’s Bo Diddley beat. They all looked so cool and confident.

  I was a shy kid, so even going in and watching the Roadrunners was pretty nerve-wracking for me. But I had to do it: something was compelling me. I even tapped my feet and nodded my head to the music, by my standards a major display of exhibitionism. Watching the Roadrunners, I was so happy; the impact of the music hit me so hard. I thought, ‘This is it. This is what I’m going to do, I’m going to be in a band like this and play music.’

  Up to that point, if I’d thought about it at all, I’d have assumed my life would be spent in Driffield. It was a busy little town in a picturesque part of Yorkshire, surrounded by farmland, with turkeys, sheep and cows in every direction, as well as cornfields. There was a little bit of industry, but not too much: we had Bradshaw’s flour mill on the outskirts of the town. There were a couple of factories, including Dewhirst, which made shirts for Marks & Spencer, and Vertex, a spectacles company.

  That description makes the town sound pretty boring, I’m sure, but it could be exciting at times: there were a few local rock bands, and occasionally a big London band would come up and play. We had a couple of good coffee bars with jukeboxes, where we hung out.

  Driffield was only twelve miles from the coast, where there were resorts like Bridlington and Scarborough, and then Hull was the nearest big city, about thirty miles away. Perhaps that’s not such a long way to travel if you’re driving or taking a train, but, believe me, the cultural distance between Driffield and Hull was huge in lots of ways. Driffield had one main street of shops and one main venue, the Town Hall, whereas Hull was a bustling city which at that time had the third busiest port in the country, although this would change drastically in the seventies after the Cod Wars with Iceland saw the local fishing industry decline. It had a university and an art college as well as clubs and theatres. In Hull all the big names of the time – the Beatles, the Stones, Roy Orbison and Jimi Hendrix to name a few – would come play at the ABC Theatre.

  My father, Douglas Woodmansey, was originally from the village of Langtoft, which is about six miles north of Driffield. He joined the army with a friend of his when he was in his teens, because they wanted to see the world. I don’t recall which regiment he was in, but I know he served in the Far East, including a spell in Hong Kong.

  My mother, Annie, was born in Driffield, and was part of a large family. She became a nurse at East Riding General Hospital in the town, and met my father when he was home on leave. They never really talked much about that time, perhaps because they weren’t keen to admit that she got pregnant. Mum and Dad didn’t get married at that point because they weren’t sure if they would be together in the long term. He wanted her to be an army wife following him around the country, but she loved nursing and wanted to continue in the profession. They were both on their own career paths and hadn’t got around to making big decisions yet. It took a bit of thinking through, especially with the stigma of having a baby out of wedlock. It was a hell of a big deal in a small, very traditional community like Driffield at that time.

  Mum kept working right up until I was born, hiding her pregnancy with a sort of corset worn around her abdomen. It was so tight that she passed out on the ward one day, and I appeared shortly afterwards, on 4 February 1950.

  My mother’s father wanted to kick her out of the house, I later found out, because she’d got pregnant. He’d been in the army himself, and was a real disciplinarian. But her mother – who was a very no-nonsense woman – stepped in and said, ‘Annie’s staying in this house, and she’s having her child here.’ My grandfather was tough, but she was tougher.

  So I spent my early years living in my grandparents’ house at 18 Eastfield Road, which was also home to my mother, her uncle Edward, her sister Deanie and their two brothers, Harold and Ernest. It was on a new council estate, and I’d
cycle around on my little three-wheel bike and chase fire engines, and go so far from home that my long-suffering relatives would be scouring the streets trying to find me and bring me back. My mother worked nights a lot and my dad was away most of the time, so essentially my grandmother raised me until I was five, when my dad left the army. Although I was christened Michael Woodmansey, I went by the name Mick Bradley then, using my mother’s surname.

  My grandfather was an engineer at the local gasworks in the centre of the town. I went to the works with him a couple of times when I was little; I remember burning my hand on a pipe. My grandmother was a housewife, looking after their four children and me. It was a really good period of my childhood. I was a happy kid.

  The old cliché of neighbours being in and out of each other’s houses was completely true for the families where we lived. People would leave their front doors open and you’d go round and have tea. The whole street was like that, except for one particular set of neighbours whose house you’d never go to. I remember very clearly that there was some animosity between our family and theirs. One day in 1954 those annoying neighbours complained to my family that I was keeping them awake with my drum kit – even though I didn’t have one. I don’t know what they’d actually heard, if anything, but this gave my uncles an idea . . . so they went out and bought a snare drum, sticks and a stand and took me upstairs to the bedroom next to the neighbours’ bedroom.

  ‘We’re going to shut the door,’ they told me cheerfully. ‘Make as much noise as you can!’

  Apparently I really went for it and beat the hell out of those drums – and that, looking back, was the very start of my career as a drummer. I like to think I’ve developed a bit of subtlety in my technique since then, but you never know.

  When I was five years old my parents got married. I guess they must have slipped away and done it as they never mentioned it. They had finally come to the decision that my dad, rather than my mother, would give up his career so we could live as a family in Driffield. The outcome was that he left the army and the three of us settled down together at 49 Westgate, a terraced house divided into two flats: we had the ground floor and the garden, plus an outside toilet which was about thirty yards away from the house, and an outside bathroom which was about twenty yards away. This was an outhouse with a concrete floor and three tin baths of different sizes hanging on the wall. There was a boiler in there so you could heat water up for the baths, and it got very steamy: you couldn’t even see your feet to wash them.