Spider from Mars Page 13

  None of us, Mick included, had any idea what he had in mind.

  When Bowie got down on his knees in front of Mick that night and pretended to play his guitar with his teeth, Mick’s back was to the crowd, so they assumed Bowie was pretending to give him a blow job. This was understandable, because he’d grabbed Mick’s arse with both hands.

  Some of the crowd laughed, some of them were speechless: none of them knew how to react.

  I asked Mick what he felt about it after the show.

  ‘I dunno, Woods,’ he said. ‘It’s not really what I was expecting. People are going to give me lots of stick about it, aren’t they?’

  There wasn’t much I could say to that, because he was right.

  It became a regular part of the show and was definitely a press moment for us, one of a few that took place that year. We didn’t even know that photographer Mick Rock had taken pictures of it happening, but it went on to be hailed as one of rock’s classic moments, especially when it appeared on a full page in Melody Maker immediately afterwards. The journalists loved it, but I’m not sure the public were too keen; it was controversial stuff for 1972 but it made us infamous on both sides of the Atlantic.

  As a result the band’s profile was even further enhanced. A few shows later, we were playing at the Croydon Greyhound, with Roxy Music supporting us, and they had to turn away a thousand people who wanted to get in. A thousand! That’s how popular we were getting. Along with this popularity came the girls. I’d like to sum this up by saying we worked hard, we played hard and we partied hard. After a show we would be pumped on the adrenalin and it was hard to come down. The groupies helped relieve us of the extra adrenalin! Bowie and Angie had an open relationship so I guess we all followed David’s lead. Later on when I popped the question to my girlfriend June this was something I had to address. I did ‘recover’ from this conversation . . . more about that later.

  On 6 July it got even crazier. We’d completed around fifty concerts and we had about another ten or so to do on the UK tour. To actually be able to perform night after night to packed audiences was amazing. All our fears about how we’d be received had been allayed; the audiences were amazing and wilder than we’d ever imagined. As we’d progressed through the tour we were continually tweaking elements of the performance to improve it. For instance, it seemed distracting during the show if, as very often happened, a couple of roadies had to walk on stage to fix something wearing their normal t-shirts and scruffy jeans. This definitely spoilt the illusion for the audience so it became policy for them to dress all in black. This was all part of the professionalism. We were all in high spirits, our confidence through the roof.

  The single ‘Starman’ had been getting lots of airplay and was actually climbing the charts and we were asked to do Top of the Pops, which was recorded on 5 July, to broadcast the next day. You may remember how massive that programme was in the seventies: if you were on it, everyone saw you. It had a huge viewing audience of between ten and fifteen million. This was a real milestone moment for us.

  Since deciding to be a musician at fourteen, this was the show I dreamed of appearing on – and now it was actually happening.

  There were about six stages in the TOTP’s studio and there was an invited audience who were moved about between the various stages so as to be in camera shot for each particular artist.

  We’d done a run-through, as had every other band that was on that day. The drums for some reason were out in front of Mick, Trev and Bowie, an unusual set-up, but nobody seemed to mind or even mention it.

  I remember there was a corridor from our dressing room to the main stages. Status Quo were appearing that day, too, and we found ourselves standing opposite them waiting to go on. We were dressed in all our finery, including full make-up, and they were dressed in their trademark denim. We couldn’t have looked more different. We gave each other nods and laughed when Francis Rossi said, ‘Fuck me, you make us feel really old.’

  Bowie played his part to the max, camping it up on stage, and at one point he threw an arm around Mick’s shoulder. It was a bold move and quite a shocking gesture to make at this time, especially considering all the press concerning Bowie’s sexuality.

  During the line ‘I had to phone someone so I picked on you’ Bowie pointed directly into the camera and from reports at the time and ever since then this became a pivotal moment in his career. The impact of that performance was felt in millions of living rooms across the UK. It also landed the single in the top ten of the UK charts two weeks later.

  Although we knew we’d done a good job, I have to admit at the time we didn’t feel there was anything outstanding about that particular TV appearance. But it seems that a generation of future rock stars, too numerous to mention, were inspired and since then I’ve had the opportunity to speak to countless fans who told me of the buzz it created in the playgrounds and streets across the country the next day.

  What we did realise was that we were now famous. From then on there were always fans camped outside the flat on the front doorstep, male and female, and we’d have to step over them to get to the shops. If there were too many, we sneaked out the back door and climbed over a wall.

  Kids would bunk off school, arriving at some ungodly hour in the morning. By the time we got up and saw them they were obviously freezing. We’d tell them, ‘You’re supposed to be at school!’ and they’d say, ‘Yeah, but we had to come!’ and so sometimes we’d invite them in. Mick would make them breakfast and we’d talk about music and school and so on.

  Sometimes Bowie would come along and they’d gasp and then fawn over him. One group of kids told him that they were doing a project at school about him and his music, and wanted to ask him questions. He agreed, and he slipped into ‘artist-being-interviewed’ mode. Occasionally he’d say things to shock them, but, again, that was him attempting to create an effect.

  In fact, even shopping took on a different perspective after this. Mick and I would be in a greengrocer’s shop having selected our fruit and vegetables, and would take out money to pay for them only to be told, ‘No we don’t want paying. We saw you on Top of the Pops.’

  Two days after Top of the Pops we played the Royal Festival Hall in London. It was a concert to raise funds for ‘Save the Whale’, one of the many causes espoused by Friends of the Earth. The poster for the event showed Bowie astride a whaling harpoon. Also appearing on the bill as support that night were Marmalade and the JSD Band.

  Kenny Everett, the famously anarchic DJ, was the compere for the evening and introduced Bowie as ‘the next biggest thing to God’. The reviews afterwards were amazing, Record Mirror, for instance, announcing that Bowie ‘looks certain to become the most important person in pop music on both sides of the Atlantic’. But for us it was a special night as we had a surprise guest appearing with us. This was to be Lou Reed’s first solo live appearance in this country. We had a short rehearsal with him during soundcheck; it didn’t take too long as we had already been playing the tracks in our set at various times.

  I thought Lou was cool. He definitely rose to the occasion and had been out and bought a black velvet suit decorated with diamond patterns of diamanté, like a glam Mexican. Towards the end of the seventy-minute set Bowie introduced Lou and we played ‘I’m Waiting For the Man’, ‘Sweet Jane’ and ‘White Light/White Heat’. The two of them singing those songs together was amazing and, needless to say, it went down a storm.

  Talking to Lou that night, he told me he’d had a great time. ‘The British audience is very different to what I’m used to – they’re more attentive. Playing places like Max’s Kansas City, where everybody just freaks out and there are lots of drugs, is completely different.’

  He asked me if I knew any of his music. I said, ‘Yeah, all of it’, which surprised and delighted him.

  He also said he’d enjoyed performing with us because we’d played his stuff really solidly. I told him he reminded me of the early beat poets in NYC and I really liked the sense
of decadence he managed to capture on his early albums. The conversation wasn’t long; they never were with Lou as he seemed to have an ability to down a bottle of whisky in no time at all. I thought he was a sweet guy, though.

  Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground were not that well known in UK at the time, and probably had a small following of a few thousand in the States. It was Bowie’s intention to raise Lou’s profile in the UK and to help him with a new album. In fact, Bowie and Mick would co-produce the recording, which would become Transformer. The original plan was for the Spiders to be Lou’s band on the album, but this was later changed as it was considered a bit too confusing to have Lou Reed and the Spiders From Mars.

  We had a reel-to-reel tape machine back at our Beckenham flat, so every night after the sessions, which started in August, Mick would play me rough mixes of what they’d done that day. I thought it was great, especially as day by day I’d hear the songs building up. ‘Perfect Day’ was beautiful and I loved ‘Walk On the Wild Side’. Mick and Bowie’s production was amazing. Transformer would go on to become a classic album.

  Our next outing was to the Friars Club in Aylesbury. What made this unique, apart from a brilliant audience, was the fact that RCA had spent $25,000 to fly over a select group of American journalists to review the show. Defries had seen this as a perfect opportunity to create a media frenzy prior to our scheduled arrival in the US in September.

  That night we did an impromptu version of the Beatles’ ‘This Boy’. We’d only ever done this once before, in Liverpool as a nod to the Fab Four. From reports at the time the reviews were very favourable.

  Bowie had announced our next gig to the NME who were at Aylesbury: ‘Hello, handsome, my name’s David and I’m going to be at the Rainbow in lovely north London with the Spiders From Mars, some very pretty people called Roxy Music and a gorgeous butch blues singer called Lloyd Watson this Saturday and Sunday. It would be just too, too divine if you could make it there – and if you can’t make it there, just be there, hmmm? It’s going to be the most exquisite concert of the year.’

  It was David’s idea to put on a whole theatrical production for the show at the Rainbow Theatre on 19 August; a second show was added on 20 August when the first one sold out. We appeared on the poster as Ziggy Stardust and his band the Spiders – the first time, as far as I’m aware, that we were billed this way.

  As I’ve mentioned, a major influence on Bowie as a performer was the mime artist Lindsay Kemp. Earlier in his career Bowie had joined Kemp’s mime classes and had actually toured with him as part of his show on several occasions. Now Bowie wanted to include Kemp and his troupe at the Rainbow and the pair of them would choreograph a show that embellished the music we were playing.

  The stage itself was designed with six ladders leading up to various scaffold platforms. On three of the platforms were screens and at different parts of the show shots of such rock icons as Elvis, Little Richard and Mark Bolan were projected onto these screens, giving the idea that Ziggy had already joined that august band. Other shots included Warhol’s soup cans, Kellogg’s corn flakes packets and Marilyn Monroe – it was all very pop art.

  The stage was covered in sawdust so any dragging of the feet by band or dancers left a visible trail of movement.

  Freddie Burretti made outfits for Lindsay and the troupe. There were about six dancers if I remember correctly; the outfits made them look like they were covered in spiders’ webs. They all wore very ghoulish make-up. At one point Lindsay dropped down a rope from the ceiling dressed as a very freaky angel, smoking a three-foot-long joint.

  One of the actors/dancers was a guy called Jack Birkett, who was almost blind – we watched him marking out the stage before the show so he would know where he was and didn’t miss any lighting cues. During the show he would run to the front of the stage really fast and then stop near the edge. It was quite nerve-wracking watching him.

  Throughout the whole set they performed choreographed scenes that from my vantage point, sitting beneath a scaffold section, helped create probably the most bizarre, theatrical performance ever – I doubt it has ever been equalled.

  It was also the first time Bowie wore an outfit by renowned Japanese designer Kansai Yamamoto, whose model had influenced Suzi Fussey for David’s hair. Bowie called it ‘his bunny costume’; it was later known as his Woodland Creature outfit. It was a red leather playsuit or romper suit, and it didn’t have legs! Mick, Trev and I wore the outfits from the second half of our normal show which were like our others but had collars, and were black/silver, giving a metallic appearance.

  Aside from a couple of days at the Rainbow, once the full stage set was in place our rehearsals took place at the Stratford Royal Theatre, which is not really a rock ’n’ roll rehearsal venue; it’s for actors and theatrical performances. It was very ‘proper’ that we did it there.

  There was a bar in the theatre that was frequented by actors, lighting technicians, etc., and during a break in rehearsals the four of us went there for a drink in our ‘onstage’ outfits. A guy who obviously had no idea who we were came up to us.

  ‘Are you from the cast of Star Trek?’ he said.

  Without batting an eyelid, and in unison, the four of us answered, ‘Yes.’

  ‘Which episode? he asked.

  ‘It’s a new one, hasn’t been shot yet,’ Bowie told him.

  ‘I’m not aware of that one,’ he said.

  What was funny was that later on that day we actually saw William Shatner, better known as Captain Kirk, in the bar.

  The Rainbow shows were a resounding success. Once again Bowie had surprised us, demonstrating that he had more strings to his bow than we’d previously imagined.

  The tour’s official photographer, Mick Rock, was at the show and videoed parts of it which were later included on the video for ‘John, I’m Only Dancing’, our next single.

  The press got it. ‘The whole evening could be judged a wondrous success,’ wrote Chris Welch of Melody Maker, although he added, ‘Eventually the faint suspicion grew that certain sections of the audience were slightly stunned and bemused by the jive David was laying on us.’ He concluded, ‘By God it has brought a little glamour into all our lives, and amen to that.’

  ‘This was perhaps the most consciously theatrical rock show ever staged,’ said Charles Shaar Murray at the NME. ‘With perhaps the finest body of work of any contemporary songwriter, and the resources to perform this work to its utmost advantage, there really isn’t anything going that tops the current Ziggy show,’ he added. Murray also quoted Lou Reed as saying that the show was ‘amazing, incredible, stupendous – the greatest thing I’ve ever seen’. Thanks, Lou, that was nice.

  It turned out that to stage these two shows had been incredibly expensive so these were the only ones we did on that scale.

  I met Mick Jagger at the Rainbow; he came to a rehearsal and was cool. He was mainly interested in my drum kit, for some reason. So was Paul McCartney; they both commented on my drum sound. McCartney came to several rehearsals and sat and watched us with his wife, Linda. We had a whole piss-taking thing going on, where our roadie would continually wind us up about how he was well in with all the big stars. He wasn’t, but he’d do this whole routine about ‘Me, Paul and Linda are best mates’. He would stand behind Paul and Linda without them knowing, point at them and himself and give us a thumbs up.

  I met Ringo, too, and we talked about drums. Elton John was also there. He is quoted as saying, ‘What will I see tonight? I think I’ll see an amazing show. I’ve followed him since he was doing gigs at the Marquee years ago. I remember him from The Lower Third and all that rubbish. I just think he’s great.’ I didn’t speak to Elton that night but ran into him at the Beverly Hills Hotel during the US tour. More about that later. The interest we were getting was all a bit of an ego boost; after all, these were the rock hierarchy, and they’d come to see us play.

  Incidentally, I found out several years later when attending Joe Elliott’s (of De
f Leppard) wedding, where I met Brian May, that Queen had come to see us play on many occasions and had based a lot of their image on Bowie and the Spiders.

  And while I’m name-dropping, around this time I’d started to meet other musicians I liked, for instance Iggy Pop, who was around quite a bit as he and David had plans to work together. He was a bit alien to me, which I realize is a bit rich given that I was in a band with David Bowie. We had very little in common, but he knew what he was, and what he liked and didn’t like – his opinions were very strong. His stage show at the time was intense: he thought nothing of ripping his chest open with a mic stand. Bowie and Iggy seemed to come from opposite ends of the spectrum both musically and as performers. But I did like The Stooges, we’d watch films of him with them and I was blown away by his performances. He had that unpredictable edge, a bit like Jim Morrison, where you never quite knew what he was going to do next. Maybe that’s what they had in common.

  I was fortunate to meet one of my heroes, Led Zeppelin’s drummer John Bonham – one of the world’s most famous musicians at that point; we went for a drink in the Ship on Wardour Street one night while we were recording at Trident. He was a big bloke, and he liked a pint. I thought he was a great guy, despite the fearsome reputation he had when he was drunk. Obviously we talked drums and we had a good time putting the world to rights.

  I later met Jimmy Page and Robert Plant at the Crown in Tottenham. I was introduced to Robert Plant in the dressing room and he said, ‘Woody Woodmansey, I know that name’, and I said, ‘Robert Plant, I know that name’ . . . I’d just watched him perform from six feet away and was still blown away by his performance, so most of the conversation was me telling him why he was so good.

  By now I was recognized in the street a lot, which I liked, unless I was trying to get some shopping done on Oxford Street or somewhere. I’d turn around and there’d be maybe fifty people behind me. I couldn’t very well say, ‘I’ve got shopping to do!’ I’d chat with them and sign autographs until my arm was dropping off, and would often run out of time to get any shopping done. But I met some genuinely nice people who told me what the music meant to them. I had no problem with that.