Spider from Mars Read online

  Later again on the tour, Trevor would have his long brown hair dyed jet black and Angie worked on those incredible sideburns by spraying them silver. Mick’s blond hair was styled and highlighted.

  The transformation was complete.

  On 11 January we unveiled Ziggy on a pre-recorded session for BBC Radio’s Sounds of the Seventies with John Peel. It wasn’t broadcast until 28 January, though. We went back on 18 January to record another session for the same programme, this time with Bob Harris, to be aired on 7 February. Both were recorded at the BBC Maida Vale studios.

  The set list was ‘Hang On To Yourself’, ‘Ziggy Stardust’ ‘Queen Bitch’ and ‘I’m Waiting For the Man’, for both shows. On the Bob Harris show we did ‘Five Years’ as an extra number. This was just the four of us with Nicky Graham on piano.

  After that, on 19 January, we began a week of rehearsals for the British dates at the Royal Ballroom on Tottenham High Road, driving up there from Beckenham at lunchtime and going through the whole set, twice each day, non-stop. As I sat at the back of the stage I could see the three other guys interacting up front so I’d suggest things to them, like standing back to back for the beginning of ‘Queen Bitch’, and then kicking away from each other when the heavy chords began, because it looked exciting that way. We’d adjust the lighting as we went along, too.

  Everybody threw in ideas, although you had to be pretty sure it was a good idea before you suggested it, or Bowie would ignore it. The show wasn’t choreographed to within an inch of its life, but most of the major movements on stage were planned, along with the lights, to complement the music. I enjoyed being part of the creativity.

  In the midst of rehearsals, we had our second shock to the system when we read an interview Bowie had done with the Melody Maker saying that he was gay and always had been.

  This was completely new to us, despite the environment we’d lived in at Haddon Hall. He had his camp moments and effeminate poses but we assumed if he was gay he’d have mentioned it to us at some point. We’d got used to him doing things to get attention so we thought this was just another example. I must admit we never asked him outright as we’d never witnessed anything that made us think he was.

  After the interview even Angie said, ‘You could have thought of your wife and at least said you were bisexual!’

  Attitudes towards homosexuality were different in those days as it had only been decriminalized five years before in Britain. So, true or false, it was a courageous statement to make. It definitely sent shock waves through the music world and focused a lot of attention on Bowie and the Spiders. Still, all this – the clothes, Bowie’s statement – felt like a massive risk. When something outrageous hasn’t been done before, you worry that you’ll be a laughing stock and you’ll never get another gig in your life – which was a consideration, believe me.

  Mick did an interview with a magazine right after that. His first statement to the journalist was: ‘Before you start, I’m not gay.’ More comments like that would have blown everybody’s cool, so Bowie stopped us doing interviews. Of course, with the way we dressed now, most people assumed we were gay anyway. This was tough for three northern boys like me, Mick and Trevor, but we had a down-to-earth sense of humour about it.

  We saw that people were genuinely unnerved by us. We would go into studios dressed the same way as Bowie, and the engineers would look at us with unease. You could tell from their faces that they thought we were gay because Bowie had said that he was. There was a certain attitude towards you.

  We thought it was funny, though. I remember Mick and me sitting on the sofa in one studio, while engineers were tweaking the mixing desk six feet away – and you could feel the atmosphere. They were uncomfortable, as if they didn’t know what they were letting themselves in for. What were we, they wondered?

  Mick nodded towards one of them and said to me, ‘He’s got really nice legs, hasn’t he?’

  ‘No, the other one’s legs are better,’ I said.

  As the engineers cringed we cracked up laughing. They just looked at us, faces bright red.

  ‘You think we’re gay, don’t you?’ I said.

  ‘Well, we weren’t sure . . .’ they answered.

  We had that a lot, but we just played around with it.

  At the beginning of February we recorded a session for The Old Grey Whistle Test, presented by Bob Harris, which was British TV’s major music programme at the time. We performed ‘Oh! You Pretty Things’, ‘Queen Bitch’ and ‘Five Years’. I’ve never forgotten what happened with ‘Five Years’.

  We’d done a run-through so we knew where the cameras were going to be and I felt fine. But on the final run-through someone had decided that, as ‘Five Years’ ends with just drums, it would be better to finish on a close-up of me. I wasn’t aware of this until we were actually recording and at the end of the song the main camera started coming closer and closer to me . . . It was unexpected and I was absolutely terrified. All I could think was that millions of people were going to be watching me. I hope I managed to disguise my feelings but I’m not sure if I did. When June saw it on TV she spotted my suppressed terror.

  And then, almost two years after I first came down to London and met David Bowie, we were finally taking the music out on the road. After all the recording we’d done, I was really looking forward to playing the songs live although I still felt some reticence about how the look of the show would be received.

  The first gig of the Ziggy tour was at the Toby Jug, a large, red-brick pub in Tolworth near Kingston, on 10 February. About sixty people were there and we came on around 9 p.m. Before the show we got changed into our stage gear in a tiny dressing room and we could hear the punters outside drinking and chatting. When we went on stage, we played that little pub as if it was a stadium. I watched Bowie, Mick and Trevor up front; they were full of energy, and made sure the crowd gave them their full attention. It was a great start to the tour.

  We were optimistic, and we knew we’d build up momentum as time passed – but some of the early gigs were only half full. The girls usually liked it, but most of the guys didn’t: the show was so over the top and outrageous, especially in small spaces like those.

  I’ve no idea why we played such small gigs to start with, although I appreciate that we weren’t really in a position to play bigger ones because it hadn’t all taken off yet. The audience were right on top of us – in hindsight far too close.

  We mixed up songs from Hunky Dory and Ziggy Stardust, with numbers like ‘Space Oddity’ and ‘My Death’ by Jacques Brel, which Bowie performed halfway through in an acoustic part of the show. Although a lot of the show had been worked out in rehearsals, playing every night is really the only opportunity a band has to fine-tune things and develop as a live act, and that’s exactly what happened.

  Ziggy was the cosmic yob . . . posing, pouting, high-kicking like Rudolph Nureyev one minute and a futuristic Elvis the next.

  Bowie was finding his character night after night. From my view at the back of the stage he was trying things out and discarding them left, right and centre. At the same time the rapport between Bowie and Mick was taking on new dimensions. Mick was a natural hard-rocking macho man, stomping and posing around the stage, often making grotesque faces as he pulled off the ultimate guitar performance. He was the perfect counterpoint to Bowie’s effeminate, androgynous alien alter ego, and soon to become rock god, Ziggy.

  Trevor and I held down the rhythm section and never let up for a moment, driving it hard and heavy where needed and playing with as much feeling as we could muster between us.

  The chemistry between the band was really working and it felt fantastic and so right. This was what rock ’n’ roll was all about and what we’d all talked about creating months earlier. Exciting and ass-kicking.

  Now, on those early shows on this tour we’d hang around with the crowd after the show, wearing all this finery, because we hadn’t yet got into the mindset of leaving the stage and locking ourselves awa
y in the dressing room after we played. We would chat to the fans, mainly girls, who tried to get very friendly with us, not realizing that the male members of the audience were becoming antagonistic.

  ‘Queers!’ shouted some bloke from across the room one night.

  We ignored him, but there was a silence around us and we knew that trouble was brewing, so we took off.

  After another show when the atmosphere got threatening again Bowie said to Mick, ‘You said you had a roadie with the Rats who was pretty tough, right?’

  ‘Yeah, Stuey George,’ Mick replied. ‘He lined up an entire audience against a wall once and made them shut up!’

  This was true. Our mate Stuey was as hard as nails. The Rats played a gig at Cottingham Hall near Hull back in 1969, and there was some aggression from the audience. Stuey went out there and made every single one of them stand against the side wall of the venue until they’d calmed down.

  ‘Why don’t you ask him if he wants to come and work for us?’ asked Bowie.

  Stuey was a black ex-boxer and, that old chestnut, a lovable rogue. If I ever questioned him about his past, he would grin cheekily and say, ‘It’s all just rumours, Woody, just rumours!’ He could always take a joke which, being around the Rats, was fortunate. I remember his girlfriend once banned him from coming with us to a gig in Leeds – a situation he took seriously. After ten minutes of our jibes – things like ‘It’s all right, Stuey, we understand’, ‘What’s it like being under the thumb?’ and, ‘So now we know who wears the trousers’ – he got in the back of the van with the equipment.

  ‘My girlfriend could be waiting somewhere down the road,’ he said. ‘She’ll probably flag you down but don’t say fuck all, or I’ll get killed.’

  Half a mile down the road there she was. We pulled up alongside her and wound down the window.

  ‘Have you seen Stuey?’ she asked.

  ‘Yeah, he’s hiding in the back of the van,’ we chorused.

  She started to scream abuse at him from outside while Stuey banged on the partition. ‘Just go, just drive’.

  He later got in the front of the van with us and said, ‘You lot are a bunch of bastards, you’ve got me in so much trouble.’ But he could always take a joke.

  So Stuey joined us from Hull, moving into a flat in Beckenham. He came to every gig we did on the Ziggy tour after that. Tony Frost joined him not long afterwards, because he’d done martial arts and was another tough guy. We were relieved, because in the end somebody would definitely have got hurt if we’d continued with no security. The mere presence of those two mean-looking dudes was enough to stop any potential trouble from then on.

  Bowie seriously impressed me as this tour began. He had this opinion about shaking up the music business, and how the Ziggy album and tours were going to do just that. He kept hinting in the press that everything was about to go off the scale when it came to the live show. The whole idea of being subversive through rock music started with him, and he was the first musician with the guts to actually go out and do it.

  The British tour rolled on. As Bowie said himself later on, Ziggy was all about small beginnings. He was right, too, but it didn’t take long for us to move up to bigger venues. We went from London, to the Midlands, to Glasgow, and to Sunderland, among other places, in February alone, and then we went back down again to the West Country and the south coast in March.

  Bowie was loving it. He gave his all every night, and from our perspective on stage with him we could see that the crowd were as excited as he was. Early on in the tour it would take a while for them to warm up, and I’d be worried that our look was too much for them to take on board. In fact, there were several gigs where there was hardly any applause until about the fifth song, which was a bit unnerving. After one such show Bowie seemed very anxious.

  ‘What the fuck is wrong with them?’ he asked. ‘Don’t they know they’re supposed to clap? They just sit there open-mouthed, staring at us.’

  One of the crew interjected: ‘David, they’re in awe. It’s like they don’t want to miss anything and they’re not quite sure how to respond.’

  But as time passed the audiences became consistently enthusiastic, even at the start of the show. We knew we were on to something.

  As we were touring the UK, Tony Defries was delivering the finished album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars to RCA Records in the USA.

  Then ‘Starman’, backed with ‘Suffragette City’, was released as a single on 28 April in the UK. Suddenly we were on the radio again, and when the Ziggy Stardust album itself came out on 6 June it went straight in at Number 7, peaking at Number 5. Finally we were headline news.

  The promotion continued with us performing ‘Starman’ on a show for Granada TV called Lift Off With Ayshea on 16 June. We were all getting changed in the dressing room before the show started when Bowie did something we hadn’t seen him do before. He took out a bag containing make-up!

  We watched in disbelief as he applied various strange substances to his face . . .

  ‘Aren’t you putting make-up on?’ he asked.

  The answers from us varied from ‘Fuck no’ to ‘No fucking way’.

  ‘It’s a shame,’ he said. ‘You’re going to be seen by hundreds of thousands of people and your faces are going to be green under these TV lights.’

  He played us brilliantly: we looked at each other and we didn’t even have to speak or discuss it. None of us wanted to look green!

  He then asked us to get made up for the live shows, too, and we didn’t like that at first – but as Bowie himself later put it, once we found out the effect the make-up had on the girls, we had no problem with it.

  After all, Elvis had worn a bit of make-up on stage, so it wasn’t like it had never been done before, and I remember seeing Paul Jones of Manfred Mann buying make-up from the chemist’s in Bridlington once. But it quickly reached ridiculous levels.

  ‘Who’s nicked my fucking mascara?’ Mick demanded as we got ready for a show one night.

  ‘Don’t look at me,’ Bowie yawned in response.

  ‘I haven’t got it,’ I said.

  Mick stomped off to accuse Trevor. It was hilarious, and yet again I’d reflect on how far things had come since we were playing small clubs in Yorkshire.

  A funny thing happened early on in the tour. Mick used to bend the strings on his guitar so much when he played that he’d go out of tune, and sometimes he would walk across the stage mid-song and try to tune Trevor’s bass to his out-of-tune guitar.

  Trevor hated this because to the audience it looked like he was the one out of tune. This occurred on a few nights until one night Trevor lost his cool and swung his guitar at Mick’s head. Mick responded by doing the same.

  In terms of pure theatre I thought this looked amazing, and I remembered the Artwoods doing a similar thing years before, so I suggested to Trevor and Mick that they have a fight with their guitar headstocks during the solo in ‘Width of a Circle’. Mick arranged to give Trevor a nod when he was about to swing at him, and Trevor would back up. The idea was that they would just miss each other.

  Then I told them that it would look even wilder if we put a strobe light on as well, although unfortunately they couldn’t see each other as clearly, so they’d come off stage all scratched from being hit with each other’s strings and occasionally they did hit each other on the head. Bowie loved all this, and it had the added benefit of giving him time to do a costume change.

  We kept touring through June, playing shows in Sheffield, Middlesbrough, Leicester and elsewhere. These were middle-sized venues and universities, so we were making some progress.

  Bowie fucked off to New York for a weekend in June to see Elvis Presley perform at Madison Square Garden. He later explained, ‘I arrived late and our seats were right down the front and I’d made the mistake of wearing one of my Ziggy outfits. I was the only one there wearing glam clothes.’ He added, ‘I felt embarrassed.’

  As an aside, the U
K glam rock scene was fully established at this time. Bolan had appeared on Top of the Pops performing ‘Hot Love’ with glitter under his eyes in March 1971 and kick-started the movement, in the eyes of many. Bands like Sweet and Slade followed suit. Bowie took it to another level, though . . . Bowie’s own views on glam came out in an interview in the Telegraph about five months later: ‘I like Marc Bolan’s and Alice [Cooper’s] work but I think we’re in very different fields. One does tend to get lumped in. But I think glam rock is a lovely way to categorize me and it’s even nicer to be one of the leaders in it. I had been very much on my own. There’s security in being part of a trend. With a little bit of luck, if I keep working hard, I can probably withstand it.’

  Piano players came and went. Nicky Graham did the most piano playing with us; he worked at GEM and later went on to be a very successful producer and record company executive. He also worked as a gofer for us, but one night he failed to get tickets to one of our shows for one of Angie’s friends, after which he suddenly wasn’t in the band any more.

  Around that time, Mick bought a car for his family up in Hull, and it got vandalized. Some wanker wrote, ‘Ronson is a poof’ on it. It didn’t get any easier when we got to the famous blow job moment at Oxford Town Hall on 17 June, a couple of weeks after the Ziggy album came out.

  Mick had been looking for some new tricks to do with his guitar; he’d already incorporated playing his guitar with his teeth during one of his solos. We’d been talking in the dressing room that afternoon about how Chuck Berry did his famous duck walk while playing, and Hendrix played guitar with his teeth and also set fire to it. Dave Edmonds had played his behind his back. Pete Townsend had ‘windmilled’ his and smashed his guitar to bits.

  ‘We need something like that on stage,’ said Bowie. ‘All of those old ideas have been done. I’ve got an idea of what to do, but don’t freak out and look surprised when it happens, Mick.’