Spider from Mars Read online

  When we recorded the basic track for ‘Life on Mars?’, Ken didn’t want to end up with a lot of takes that he’d have to sift through, so he would just record over old takes. We’d done one take, which was OK, and a second which was really good – but right at the end, as it was fading out, a phone rang while we were recording.

  The phone was in a bathroom next to the studio. It was intended for session musicians, who used it to call out to find out if they had work lined up, but nobody ever called in on this phone. It was really weird that it rang during the fade-out of the song. Mick said, ‘For fuck’s sake!’ We then did another take – and it was excellent.

  When we listened back, the song faded out, and then the phone rang, and then the end of the earlier take could be heard after that, because the new take had started earlier on the tape. Bowie liked it, so we kept it. That was smart of him; I thought it was a really classy touch.

  I remember Ken finishing the mix of ‘Life on Mars?’ and calling the four of us to come and listen to it in the mixing suite. The sound quality is really good in these places, and when he played it I remember saying, ‘Holy shit!’ It was the first time that I almost forgot that it was us playing. It was that good. We were the ones who the music was affecting; we were feeling the impact of what we’d caused. I almost forgot what was coming next, as we listened.

  Bowie had told us earlier that the ‘Life on Mars?’ concept had originated with a 1968 song called ‘Comme D’Habitude’ by Claude François and Jacques Revaux. Bowie had been asked by his then manager Ken Pitt to write English lyrics for it. However, his version – called ‘Even a Fool Learns to Love’ – was rejected. Paul Anka’s English-language version was released a year later by Frank Sinatra. It was called ‘My Way’.

  This had pissed David off, so he had decided to write his own version, not ripping it off but using similar chord sequences. He said it was about a young girl’s view of the modern world and how confusing it was. In the song she’s watching a film and unable to relate to either reality or the film. The film tells her there’s a better life somewhere – but she doesn’t have access to it.

  The fans loved ‘Life on Mars?’ when it was released as a single in July 1973, when it charted at Number 3 in the UK and stayed there for thirteen weeks. By that time Bowie had become a huge star. Back in December 1971 hardly anyone seemed to give a damn about us or Hunky Dory. Funny how things ch-ch-change . . .

  ‘Kooks’ is obviously about Bowie’s son, Zowie. I thought it was a really modern way of a couple singing about their kid, just as John Lennon had sung about his son. There was a cuteness about it that didn’t need embellishing; it just required a simple beat.

  Conversely, ‘Quicksand’ was a pretty dark song. Lines like ‘I’m sinking in the quicksand of my thoughts’ took it to places that I hadn’t heard many other artists go to, at least in a personal message from themselves. It was a bit unnerving, actually. The drums come in and out all the way; it’s a pretty tricky arrangement, because we don’t bring the parts in where you’d expect. We deliberately made the flow as oblique as possible, because that was what the song needed.

  The more introspective sound of this song was inspired, at least as I see it, by artists such as Jacques Brel. Bowie had started listening to these singers, along with Scott Walker and other experimental songwriters, after his foray into American subcultural music such as the Velvet Underground. He’d play those records to us and we’d listen intently to what those guys were trying to say.

  Hunky Dory then goes to ‘Fill Your Heart’, with an arrangement that is similar to Biff Rose and Paul Williams’ original; there were brushes on the original. I don’t usually use brushes, but I did on this occasion. ‘Andy Warhol’ is acoustic, and there are no drums on this track. Then there’s ‘Song For Bob Dylan’.

  Dylan had obviously influenced David a bit as a folk singer. To me, that song was David saying, ‘You’ve dropped everybody in the shit, Dylan; you’re not doing what you’re supposed to be doing. You’ve stirred everything up. You’ve said, this is wrong and that is wrong, but you’ve got no solutions.’ I think that helped him to become the solution himself; to say, ‘I’ll tell everyone where to go, then.’ It was a bit cheeky of Bowie, mind, because Dylan had been a massive influence on our generation.

  Bowie wrote ‘Queen Bitch’ after being influenced by the Lou Reed and Andy Warhol crowd. The version we’d done in Ronno had a different guitar part, but of course it was familiar because we’d played it a lot. To me he was saying in this song that he could sum up their attitude in a single song that was better than fifty of theirs. We wanted to capture that American feel without losing our Englishness.

  And at the end of the album there’s ‘The Bewlay Brothers’, which I think is amazing. David recorded it while the rest of us went out for a meal; he stayed behind and had finished it by the time we came back, and I thought it was mind-blowing.

  ‘What’s that song about?’ Ken asked him.

  ‘I have no idea,’ David said, ‘but you wait – when the Americans get hold of it, they’ll go apeshit. They’ll call me the Messiah. They’ll read so much into it about what I am’.

  And that’s what happened. The pictures in our minds that those lyrics summon up are amazing, and the song seems full of knowledge. Bowie later referred to the song as a ‘palimpsest’, in other words a manuscript of writing beneath which older writing can just be faintly seen. That sums it up very well.

  Hunky Dory is a classic album; it has been included in many best albums lists over the decades. It’s just what it is: beautifully played and recorded, and absolutely full of ideas. While Bowie was writing it, he’d come up with new ideas and say, ‘We’re going to add strings to “Life on Mars?”’, or ‘Let’s end “Changes” with a slow, saxophone outro’, and we’d be like ‘Fucking hell, this is amazing!’ He was changing all the time, and although he didn’t know it that was to be his modus operandi for the rest of his life. He survived that way.

  So Hunky Dory was in the can by August, but we didn’t know when it would be released. Defries had used some of the tracks to help secure a deal from the big American label RCA but we weren’t involved with that. We, the band, still hadn’t signed any form of contract. Recording good songs, playing good gigs and not having to worry about the rent was enough for us; we were still young and naive.

  The month was memorable for another reason, as it introduced Bowie to an outrageous cast of characters who would become part of all our lives. In August 1971 Andy Warhol’s infamous show Pork arrived in London. Apparently the show was based on conversations and activities recorded at Warhol’s place in New York, the Factory, and although I didn’t get to see it myself, it was later described to me by one of the cast as an ‘orgy with arty dialogue’. From pictures I saw of it, that seemed like a good description to me. Bowie, Angie and Defries did go and see the show and met the Warhol actors/superstars, discovering that they had connections to the New York underground art/music scene. Tony Zanetta, who played the Warhol character in the show, introduced Bowie to Warhol himself in September, while Bowie was in New York to sign his RCA contract. On the same trip Bowie also finally met Lou Reed and Iggy Pop.

  Once the contract was signed and Bowie was back in London, we discovered RCA wanted three albums out of him. I can’t imagine they had any idea how quickly those albums would arrive.

  5

  HANG ON TO YOURSELF

  There’s a list of attributes that any good album has to have; you can tick them off, one by one. Did Hunky Dory have good songs? Yes. Did the songs have a message? Yes. Did the vocalist communicate with the listener? Yes. Could the musicians play? Yes. Did they play with feeling rather than just accuracy? Yes. Was the album mixed and balanced correctly? Yes. And so on.

  But we couldn’t play those songs live, or not all of them anyway. Apart from ‘Queen Bitch’ and ‘Life on Mars?’ they just didn’t translate to the rock band format. Mick, Trevor and I looked at the songs on Hunky Dory and rea
lized that you couldn’t really tour the album, which was where we were supposed to be going next. We needed new songs if we were going to head out on tour, and build our audience that way. As it happened, Bowie had written so much material throughout 1971 that he’d stockpiled another album’s worth of songs, and with RCA behind him and Defries demanding another album to comply with RCA’s contract we would soon be back in the studio to record the follow-up to Hunky Dory.

  One day Bowie said to us, ‘I’ve got a title for the new album. It’s called The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars.’

  I thought, ‘Fuck me – that’s a long name.’

  But before we started rehearsing for the new album, we had two weeks off and Bowie said, ‘Do you want to come to Cyprus on holiday?’ We were all knackered, and Bowie especially needed a break, so he, Angie, Trevor and I jumped on a plane. Zowie stayed back at Haddon Hall with his nanny, and Mick had a production job to do in Canada with a band called Pure Prairie League, so it was just the four of us.

  A friend of Angie’s lent us a house which was sparsely furnished but comfortable and someone Angie knew came in and cooked for us. We had a bedroom each, and it took us a while to get used to having lizards crawling on the ceilings in the rooms. The house also had a private beach – or at least I hope it was private, because I walked around naked some of the time. I got up earlier than everybody else, so I could take my clothes off without feeling embarrassed, and go for a swim. Being in Bowie’s band must have been making an impact on me: I never would have done that a couple of years before.

  Cyprus was a beautiful place. The island was completely unspoiled, and it was a couple of years before it was split into Turkish and Greek territories, so you could go anywhere. There weren’t many other tourists there.

  I hired a car, although I’d never passed my driving test. I’d previously had lessons from my dad and so had a provisional licence, but, guess what, the lessons didn’t go very well. The car hire place was next to the police station and the two policemen knew I didn’t have a proper licence and they were fine with that. There wasn’t much in the way of traffic in the area where we were staying, though some of the roads had a steep 200-foot drop to the sea below. After one look over the edge, Trevor said, ‘Fuck off, Woods, let me drive this bit.’

  We visited the markets and bought fabrics for clothes, as well as going snorkelling and taking out high-powered speedboats, which belonged to some of Angie’s friends. We drank the local ouzo and retsina and went out to eat in the evenings, smashing the plates afterwards in typical Greek style. It was a great holiday.

  The whole time we were there Bowie was writing new songs; he didn’t rest that much. I never heard some of those songs again, ever, which is a shame because I thought they were really good. He was a pretty normal guy in a relaxed environment like this, although he wouldn’t talk about football, or cars, or politics, or any of that casual stuff that most people chat about; he liked to talk with a purpose. He was a good listener, too.

  On the flight back from Cyprus to England, about halfway through the trip, lightning hit the tips of the wings of the plane, bouncing from one to the other, and Bowie was terrified. In fact, the plane was shaking so badly, we all thought it might be all over. It was a real kiss-your-arse-goodbye moment.

  I looked at him and I could see all the blood vessels in his face, because he had gone so pale. He wasn’t a fit, healthy person back then, because he hardly ever ate, and he almost passed out on that plane. That was too close for comfort for him, and he didn’t fly again until the late seventies because it was too traumatic.

  Where Bowie was most normal was when we’d go out clubbing to the Sombrero or the Speakeasy, which we frequented back in London. He loved dancing to Tamla Motown and to the soul and R&B music that clubs played before disco. He was a great dancer – unique, perhaps, but still good. He definitely stood out on the dance floor.

  It was a weird relationship between Bowie and me, I suppose, because he was my boss but also a friend. He introduced me to a view on art that I hadn’t considered before. Bowie would say to Mick and me, ‘Shall we go and see such-and-such an exhibition?’ and Mick’s usual reply was, ‘No, what do I want to go and see that for?’ whereas I’d say yes, generally, because I was interested in some of these things.

  We spent some of October rehearsing the new tracks for Ziggy in our basement studio, then in November we went back to Trident and recorded most of the tracks. It’s funny now to think that most of the album was in the can before Hunky Dory even came out, especially because we’d come a long way in a short time – Bowie as a songwriter and the rest of us as musicians.

  Ken Scott was producing again; he was one of the best at getting the right sounds and making a particular part sound like it belonged. Once again all the arrangements were done by Mick and Bowie.

  As ever, if things were going well in the studio, Bowie was very easy to work with. If they weren’t, it would get a bit dark, because he couldn’t explain in musical terms if something wasn’t working for him. He lacked the vocabulary. He knew when I hit the right beat, or if Mick played something that was correct, but he didn’t know how to explain it to us if those things weren’t right. In that situation, he’d either sulk or just leave.

  That would create tension for all of us, so each of us would think, ‘Fuck! Is it me who’s doing something wrong?’ When that happened, the three of us would keep playing, and work on different things, until we came up with something that he liked.

  On those occasions Bowie really was like a child. He rarely raised his voice, though, apart from one occasion at the beginning of the Ziggy sessions when we were playing something in a way that he didn’t like.

  ‘You haven’t fucking learned this!’ he shouted.

  There was a horrible silence. No one knew what to say, and none of us – even Ken Scott – were any good at diffusing tension, so we just scrapped what we’d done and started again. Maybe he was just having a bad day, or maybe we were. None of that is important, really. We were all prone to the usual frustrations that creative people have. Bowie may have known nothing about what you could do in the studio, or what the controls did, but he was always right in his judgement.

  ‘Let’s play this chorus twice here,’ he’d say to Ken.

  ‘You’re sure?’ Ken would ask.

  ‘Yes, just try it.’

  Bowie would always be proved right. Not sometimes; always. It was uncanny. After several takes of a guitar solo he’d say, ‘That take is the right one’, and he’d be spot on.

  Trident was on two levels, so if you were recording your part you’d have to go out of the control room, down some stairs and across the floor in the lower studio to where your gear was set up. Ken and I would watch Mick recording his solo, knowing there was always a chance that he would go into uncharted territory and we were willing to give him a chance as we knew what he was capable of. Mick himself never really knew when he’d got it. He just took it as a matter of fact that he could play the guitar. He was very modest.

  So Mick would go down there and get his sound right while Bowie was reading Melody Maker. He would record a few takes, and Bowie would say, ‘Ken, use the first one’ without even looking up. Mick would do another six takes, trying to outdo that first one, and technically they’d be better but they wouldn’t be as good, because they wouldn’t have the right feel. He wouldn’t even remember recording the first one by then, but Bowie knew the first one was the best. That happened many times. He had incredible instincts that way, which impressed all of us.

  It’s funny: Ken Scott said that it took him about a year to realize that Ziggy wasn’t a concept album, but it was the right thing to spin it that way, so that people could contribute to the concept themselves. We never talked about it having a concept. Bowie never mentioned one, and perhaps he didn’t know if it needed one or not, because when we’d finished recording the album he hadn’t written or recorded ‘Starman’ yet. That song was the cataly
st for the whole concept of the album, which became the story of Ziggy, the alien who came to save the earth only to be destroyed by rock ’n’ roll excess.

  Ziggy Stardust begins with my solo drum intro on ‘Five Years’, a song about the world ending. Ken got a fantastic drum sound for me; he was Bowie’s George Martin. There were little nuances here and there that you thought probably wouldn’t add much to the songs, but they did. They helped to build the dynamic and kept the listener glued to it.

  When we first started recording I wasn’t happy with my drum sound. I told Ken that my tom-toms sounded like me hitting cornflake packets and my snare sounded like a big packet of crisps. When I came into the studio the next day, Ken glanced up at me casually.

  ‘Can you check your drums, before we get started,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah, OK.’

  As I got to the drum room I glanced through the window but couldn’t see any equipment. Puzzled, I opened the door and there on the floor, in place of my drums, were two Kellogg’s corn flakes packets, a bag of crisps and plastic coffee cups in place of my cymbals. They were all mic’d up just as my kit had been. As I gaped at them I heard roars of laughter behind me. Everyone had crept down the stairs to see my reaction! They were pissing themselves. This stuff kept us sane, or relatively sane anyway.

  After this episode we brought the drums back into the room and Ken and I worked on getting the rockier sound needed for the Ziggy songs. On Hunky Dory I’d used low tuning on all the drums and lots of gaffer tape, pieces of sponge and so on taped to the skins to create the fairly dead drum sound that was needed. On Ziggy we needed a more open, live drum sound, so I tuned them higher and hardly any damping was used.

  Ken was also an excellent mixer. Perfection in a mix makes it soulless, although it’s achievable if you persevere, but perfection is not the right target. It never is, when you’re making art. The aim is to convey the right emotions at the right time and in the right way. If we spend another hour on it, will it improve the communication and the emotional impact? If so, go for it. If not, leave it as it is. That was how everything was done.