Spider from Mars Read online

  We then went around asking various crew members if they had any more concrete information. Some said they’d been told that was it, he’d finished with Ziggy, others said they thought it was just a big stunt and many were just as confused as we were. Bowie had already left the venue by this time.

  So I decided that, as there was an after-show party, I would catch up with him there and hopefully get an answer. The party was held at the Café Royal on Regent Street and I’d already seen the guest list which included Ringo, Lulu, Jagger, Lou Reed, Jeff Beck, Cat Stevens, Peter Cook, Britt Ekland, Elliott Gould and Keith Moon, one of my heroes.

  Mick had already left for the party so Trevor and I went together in a cab. As well as getting the truth about that statement I had another important mission in mind. I was leaving the following morning to go home to Yorkshire to get married . . . June and I had planned to get married at the end of the tour and had finally settled on a date. We would have a register office wedding on 5 July with close family and friends from Yorkshire. We had also planned a short service down in Sussex for our friends on 7 July, at a Scientology church. I had asked Mick to be my best man for that and had also invited David, who’d said he’d be there. As we’d done all this at real short notice, due to not knowing when the tour would actually finish, we hadn’t got together any official invitations, it was all verbal. So I wanted to remind David and Mick about the wedding that night.

  Arriving at the Café Royal, we were confronted by a red carpet and a bunch of photographers madly flashing away as we exited the cab. The place was jam-packed with guests. I’d hoped to see Keith Moon but there were so many people I never did, and we tried to get to Bowie but he was surrounded by the likes of Jagger, Lou Reed, Jeff Beck and Ringo. It soon became clear to us that this wasn’t the time or place for any serious band discussions, or wedding reminders for that matter.

  June and I were married as planned in Bridlington Register Office with both sets of our parents and our families and a few old friends present. June had made me a suit as well as her wedding dress over the previous two days. She added the porcelain buttons to her dress that I’d brought from Japan.

  Then we came back down to Sussex for the second ceremony. However, Mick and David didn’t show up. We didn’t know what had happened to them, but we couldn’t wait any longer so Trevor stepped in as best man and Geoff MacCormack gave June away. Some of the road crew and entourage were guests, too. Trevor’s daughter, Sarah, was a flower girl, along with Mike Garson’s daughter, Jenny.

  I got a call about an hour and a half after the wedding ceremony, while I was getting changed at the house of a friend of myself and Mick. I assumed it was someone phoning to say congratulations. But, no, it was Tony Defries, who said, ‘I’m calling to tell you that you won’t be going to France to record the Pin Ups album.’

  ‘Why not?’ I said. I was a little shocked. It was not a statement I was expecting to hear, especially on my wedding day.

  ‘Well, you said you didn’t want to be in the band any more.’

  He was referring to the moment six months earlier when I’d refused to do the remaining dates during the second US tour unless we got a pay rise.

  ‘Yes, but we got through all that, and sorted out the money, didn’t we?’ I said. ‘And we’ve done two tours since then.’

  ‘But you said you didn’t want to do it,’ he repeated.

  I could tell by his tone that this wasn’t something I could argue my way out of. Standing there, it struck me suddenly that I’d had enough of this insanity. Not as a musician or a rock star, just as a person. I’d had enough. I really didn’t feel like fighting it. I asked if David and Mick were there with him as I honestly just wanted to say something like, ‘No hard feelings, all the best.’ After all, we had been close friends for some time.

  ‘Yes, they are both here,’ he said.

  ‘OK, can I speak to David?’ I asked.

  After a few seconds of silence he answered, ‘He doesn’t want to speak to you.’

  ‘All right,’ I said, ‘put Mick on.’

  ‘He doesn’t want to speak to you either,’ he said.

  I just said, ‘OK’, and put the phone down. I was speechless.

  Trevor came in and I said to him, ‘Do you know who’s just called me?’

  He could see by my face that something terrible had happened. ‘Defries? I knew you were going to get that call, but I didn’t want to spoil your wedding, so I didn’t tell you about it.’

  ‘Why the fuck would they call me right now?’

  He just looked at me unhappily. My mind was reeling. It was hard to believe they would sack me on what should be such a happy day.

  10

  SO WHERE WERE THE SPIDERS?

  I spent the rest of our wedding day trying to keep it together, mostly for June’s sake but also for the rest of our friends and guests who were not aware of the latest news. The last three and a half years had taken me on an extraordinary adventure, reaching beyond my wildest dreams. Our wedding was meant to be the cherry on the cake. I needed time for my severe reality adjustment to sink in.

  I’d worked hard with a group of close friends who had more or less become my only family due to the nature of our schedule. Together we’d produced four studio albums that were all now successful. In fact, towards the end of July all those albums plus the first David Bowie one were in the top forty, three of them were in the top fifteen and Aladdin Sane was at Number 1, an unheard-of achievement by an individual British recording artist. We’d played somewhere in the region of two hundred concerts, we’d appeared on prestigious radio and TV shows, including Top of the Pops. The ride to the top had taken years; the trip down took a few minutes. It knocked the shit out of me. I was lower than I’d ever felt in my life.

  A honeymoon, which should obviously have been on the agenda, didn’t even once cross my mind. June and I were back at the flat in Beckenham and it was just the two of us. I’d spoken to Trev at the wedding and he’d said he found out from the crew that the ‘mysterious’ coke dealer on the tours had in fact been Bowie’s supplier, which had added more shock to an already confusing scene.

  Trevor was staying with Mick at his friend’s flat in London prior to leaving to go to France, to a studio at Château d’Hérouville, to start recording Pin Ups. He phoned me at the flat and told me he hadn’t really thought the ‘wedding phone call’ scenario through properly, and now, on seeing the effect it had had on me, it really made him angry. He had stormed into MainMan’s office where Mick, Bowie and several others were having a meeting.

  ‘That was fucking disgusting what you did to Woody at his wedding. How could you do that?’ he said to Bowie.

  ‘If you don’t like it,’ Bowie replied, ‘you can fuck off as well. I’ll easily get another bass player.’

  At that point Mick dragged Trev into one of the other rooms and told him not to say anything more or he would be out of a job too.

  Over the next couple of weeks, and with June’s help, I was able to start picking myself up from the floor. I decided to do my own post-mortem on the situation; even though I might still be missing vital pieces of the jigsaw, getting it straight in my own mind had to be better than feeling mystified by my sacking. After all, the only explanation I’d been given for my dismissal was Defries’ statement, quoting me six months earlier: ‘You said you didn’t want to be in the band.’

  The shock news that Bowie had been on cocaine throughout the last US tour did explain his strange and often antisocial mood and behavioural changes, his distancing himself from the band. And it helped me to begin to understand his refusal to defend the Spiders when Defries had been so dismissive in the meeting over financial matters.

  I had also noticed his inability to be in control of ‘Ziggy’ and that he appeared more and more in character 24/7. I had thought at the time that ‘Ziggy in America’, as he described the Aladdin Sane album, was a bit of a compromise for him and he’d wanted to move on. I looked back now and realized ev
en at that point that he was looking for a way out of Ziggy Stardust and back to David Bowie, but ‘Ziggy’ was so huge I don’t think he could see how to do it without potentially disastrous consequences for his career.

  When he learned of RCA’s refusal to continue funding the tours, I think that pushed him into making the decision to end ‘Ziggy’ as neither he nor Defries liked being dictated to by the record company. So if Ziggy’s death was on the cards, he would have to make a clean break, which meant he wouldn’t really be able to continue with a band that had, by this time, created its own profile as ‘the Spiders From Mars’. Therefore we had to go, along with Ziggy.

  I also thought that my reactive outbursts during the wages discussions had not done me any favours. I was probably seen as an unpredictable element, something I’m sure led to the secrecy about that last Hammersmith gig and put me first in line for the firing squad. Yet, in retrospect, it’s now obvious that events had been set in motion even before that. But I had been unaware of a lot of things at that time.

  The other thing I looked at was the fact that Defries had wanted to fire the band after The Man Who Sold the World, and I don’t think he put any value whatsoever on the Spiders and what we actually contributed, which I would put down to lack of awareness, plain and simple. I was never convinced he had always acted in Bowie’s interests.

  It was a shame that it was considered necessary to bring about my exit from the band in such a hurtful way. But in the end my personal take on all this was that I was extremely proud of what Mick, Trev and I had contributed to Bowie’s music and in helping him realize his vision. Mick, with his incredible guitar playing, string arrangements and his talents as a performer, along with Trevor and myself as the rhythm section and backbone on all those amazing songs and shows. I never dreamed back then that, four decades later, the songs from this period would still be a part of weekly radio play.

  June and I moved out of the flat we’d shared with Trevor and Mick in Beckenham and got our own place in Sussex, while I tried to decide what I was going to do next musically. I got to know a few local musicians around the area and started playing gigs in pubs and sports clubs, performing a mix of original material and covers. It felt good to play purely for pleasure, with no extra pressures. I’d been learning to play the acoustic guitar on my last few tours with Bowie, sitting in my hotel room while Mick shouted at me to shut the fuck up. He eventually stopped shouting at me so I figured I’d got to a good point . . . I could do it reasonably well and started writing some songs. After a few months I decided to try the songs in front of an audience and put a little four-piece together, taking on the job of lead vocals. Often the people who came to see us would shout, ‘Get on the drums, Woody!’ which I tried not to take as a reflection on my singing. All this, I think, was a sign that I still wasn’t ready to get too serious about my career.

  Meanwhile, Trev and Mick had come back from recording Pin Ups in France, which proved to be the last Bowie album the two of them would play on. In October 1973 they joined Bowie in a new production he was doing for NBC TV, a Midnight Special called ‘The 1980 Floor Show’, which was filmed at the Marquee on Wardour Street, London. RCA wanted it to promote Pin Ups as there was no upcoming tour. I’d stayed in touch with Trev quite regularly since the last Hammersmith gig; he was keeping me updated on what they were doing and I knew he was working with Mick on Mick’s solo material.

  The next time I saw Mick was when he invited June and me to his new flat In Hyde Park. He’d got together with Suzi Fussey by now, although she wasn’t there that evening. He’d also left Bowie and was into his solo career. His first solo album, Slaughter On 10th Avenue, had come out in March 1974 and had sold reasonably well, but the critics didn’t like his vocals much. I think Mick was reeling a bit from the fact that his solo career wasn’t going quite as well as he’d planned. When I raised the issue of his involvement in me being sacked he shrugged and said, ‘Well, it couldn’t have lasted forever’, which was very Yorkshire of him. I dropped the subject because he had enough problems of his own. We were still close friends, after all, and the past was the past.

  I’d gone to see one of his gigs earlier at the Rainbow in London with June, who had made all the costumes for everyone in the show, including Mick. I found it uncomfortable watching him in the role of lead vocalist/frontman because, having known him for so many years, I could see he was incredibly nervous. It was good to see him attacking the guitar solos with his usual flair, though. I’ve often wished that he’d been advised to follow a more Jeff Beck approach to his solo career and concentrated on guitar instrumentals.

  Not long after this Trevor phoned me and said he’d just spent a few minutes with Mick in the MainMan office in Fulham where he’d told him he wasn’t continuing with his solo career and had joined Mott the Hoople, leaving Trev out of work. Trev said he now knew what I’d felt like on my wedding day. It was so abrupt.

  Trevor came down with his family that autumn to live near June and me, because he and I were discussing putting a band together, although we didn’t yet have a name for it. We needed a singer and a guitarist and asked Mick to join. He wasn’t interested in that, but offered to come down and play a bit of guitar on the album and help to produce it. Instead, Trevor and I found two musicians on Cube Records. Dave Black was the guitarist – he was a bit like Mick, but jazzier. Pete MacDonald was the singer, and Mike Garson came in on keyboards. So Trevor and Pete started writing songs, and I wrote a couple, too. We went up to Hull and demoed the tracks in a few days at Keith Herd’s studio.

  We also took on a manager who’d been recommended to us. After a while I realized he was answering ‘It’s all going nicely’ to whatever question I asked him, so I knew something a bit weird was going on, although he had a London office and could talk the talk. After a while I said, ‘What do you mean, it’s going nicely? I’m skint!’ Believe it or not, he told me that he had a meeting with an Indian aristocrat who he was going to ask to invest in the band.

  ‘Do you know this guy?’ I demanded.

  ‘No, I’m just going to go up to his hotel and get into his room somehow and ask him.’

  ‘Fucking hell. That’s your plan?’

  The wealthy Indian declined to fund us but the demos were good, so our manager booked time at Trident Studios for us, even though we didn’t have a record deal. We started to record the album and quickly racked up about £10,000 of costs, including hotel bills. At that point Trident wanted to know when our manager was going to start paying them, but when I asked him I didn’t get a meaningful answer. I’d had enough – the situation needed handling by someone. I went to the hotel manager and explained that neither we, the band, nor our manager had any money. The hotel manager was really nice. She was a friend, or perhaps a mistress, of Spike Milligan – we had dinner with him one evening and he was hilarious. She liked me, so she arranged a deal whereby we all shared a single room, and as long as we didn’t order the most expensive things on the menu we could eat in the hotel restaurant and pay the bill when we got our record deal. It was very generous of her.

  That sorted, I took on the role of band manager and started booking appointments at record companies. I had a few finished songs, and the backing tracks had been completed. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing, but I was good at bluffing. Some of the people I met were really annoying: they’d listen to the first eight seconds of a song and then skip to the next one. Typically the meeting would then go like this:

  ‘Didn’t you want to hear the full song?’ I’d ask.

  ‘That song isn’t a single,’ they’d reply.

  ‘You can tell if a song is a single from the first eight seconds?’ I’d say incredulously.

  ‘Yes, we can.’

  I’d take the tape back off them. ‘You’re a wanker’, I’d say and walk out.

  There was a lot of that. I was slogging around record companies and getting zero results. Then one day a friend from the Bowie days phoned out of the blue to say hello. She
told me she was working at Pye Records for the head of A&R and happened to mention in conversation that they were looking for a rock band. I immediately said, ‘Book me an appointment for tomorrow!’ and she did.

  I took the songs over, walked into the Pye executive’s office and said, ‘You need a rock band.’

  ‘We do,’ he said. ‘Talk to me!’

  And I was in. Just in time, too. Norman Sheffield, one of the owners of Trident, was a tough man with a reputation for ruthlessness. He called me in about this huge debt we’d incurred and said, ‘It’s very hard to play the drums without feet, isn’t it?’

  Dennis McKay, our tape operator from the Bowie days, was producing the album and he went as white as a sheet when he heard this.

  ‘Woody, we’re both going to end up wearing concrete boots!’ he said.

  Fortunately, Pye gave us £80,000 for the album. I had no idea about royalty points and so on, and just pretended that I knew what they were talking about. I’d told them how much I needed for the studio, the hotel, the gear and living expenses and Pye agreed to it. I calmly said, ‘That’s great, thanks’, but inside I was going mad, thinking, ‘Thank fuck – I can keep my feet and I can still play the drums!’

  I did the same thing with the publishing companies: eventually I got us a 75/25 deal, which is unheard-of. I had managers phoning me up saying, ‘How the fucking hell did you get a 75/25 deal?’ I had no idea.

  We decided to call the new band the Spiders From Mars; Trevor registered the name. Our self-titled album was recorded in 1975. Mick did come in and play some guitar and helped with some production ideas but unfortunately those tracks never made it to the finished album. We did a short tour of the UK and the album was released in 1976. ‘White Man, Black Man’ was the single, but it didn’t get much airplay. It soon became clear that the record company didn’t really have a clue how to market a rock band. The album didn’t do well outside Japan and stayed underground.