Spider from Mars Read online

  I argued with Trevor a little about the situation, the first and only time he and I fell out. He wanted to stick with the band after the album came out, but I didn’t think it was going anywhere, and I was also doing all the work – drumming, writing and managing – while the rest of them sat around playing cards. I said that if I was going to manage the band I wanted an extra 5 per cent; they hit the roof and that was that. I left the band and they continued gigging with a drummer they knew from Newcastle.

  Around this time I received a phone call from one of Paul McCartney’s secretaries. She said Paul was auditioning drummers for his band Wings and wanted to know if I was interested. I told her I was and she said I had to be at the studio at eleven o’clock on the Monday morning. To this day I don’t know what I was thinking, but I didn’t go. On the Monday afternoon the girl phoned me up and said, ‘Where were you? Paul was expecting you.’ I apologized and said that I thought the Wings gig wasn’t for me. I asked her what deal the new drummer was getting; when she told me I realized I had made a mistake!

  Then in 1976 I met a guy called Brian Leahy, who had been an agent in Australia and suggested that I put my own band together. As I had now written quite a few songs, it seemed like a good idea. I started looking for musicians for my new band, which I called U-Boat, and began demoing songs. Leahy took them into Bronze Records, who announced that the first song I’d written was a hit and signed us up.

  The owner of Bronze Records was Gerry Bron; he was also the manager of Uriah Heep and Manfred Mann. He produced the U-Boat album, called U1, and unfortunately made the mix really compressed, whereas I’d wanted a raw sound with no frills, almost like punk rock, which was then all over the charts. We ended up falling out over it. The album came out and we did quite a few sold-out gigs in this country, although most of the people at the shows were obviously there because of the Bowie connection.

  While we were making the album Gerry told me he was having trouble finding a suitable bass player for Uriah Heep. I’d recently spoken to Trevor, who had moved back to Hull after the Spiders had finished. He told me he was on the dole, and that every time he went into the dole office to pick up his cheque the whole place would break out into ‘Starman’, which really upset him. This pissed me off, too, so on my mental list of things to do I’d added: find a gig for Trev . . . He didn’t deserve that shit.

  I immediately recommended Trevor for Uriah Heep. I knew he’d fit, and he got the gig, staying with the band for the rest of his life apart from a brief stint with Wishbone Ash. He was grateful and after that, for a good few years, he and I would chat regularly on the phone, no matter where we both were. We’d talk about everything: family, band members, music, whatever else was happening in our lives, generally putting the world to rights.

  I didn’t actually see or hear from Bowie until autumn 1976. I was in France doing some session work when one of the studio engineers mentioned that Bowie was at Château d’Hérouville again, recording his next album with Tony Visconti. This would be Low, which came out in January 1977.

  I decided to give Tony a ring as I hadn’t seen him since 1971, when I’d visited him at his flat in Penge a couple of times, and the château wasn’t too far away from where I was working. He was excited to hear from me but said, ‘Give me your number and I’ll call you back as we’re under pressure to get the album completed.’

  He rang just ten minutes later.

  ‘David says why don’t you come down to the studio, it’ll be nice to see you.’

  I booked a cab and headed for the château, an eighteenth-century mansion that was quite imposing from the outside but had a more relaxed and bohemian feel inside. They called through from reception and Tony came out to meet me. He looked the same as ever. We hugged and then he took me through to a kind of banqueting area with a lounge section alongside it. There were about eight other people sitting on the sofa and chairs, chatting.

  A voice said, ‘Hello’, and I recognized it as Bowie’s, so quickly checked all the faces in the room to find him. He saw my confusion and cracked up. He was sitting in an armchair next to the wall.

  ‘Fucking hell, I didn’t recognize you,’ I said.

  He had very short brown hair, quite a scruffy-looking beard and he was wearing a checked shirt, baggy denim jeans and what looked like hiking boots. Definitely not what I was expecting. He stood up and we gave each other a friendly hug. He seemed very pleased to see me, too.

  ‘Have you eaten?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘We’ve just stopped for our evening meal so you can eat with us.’

  After dinner he said, ‘Woody, let’s go and talk.’

  I followed him through a door into one of the editing suites. We just chatted generally, about who he had been working with, how it was good to be working with Tony again. He said he’d been in a ‘bit of a state’ with the drugs, obviously assuming I knew all about it, and he was doing everything he could to get clean.

  ‘I had no idea you were doing coke on the Ziggy tours,’ I said.

  ‘No, I was very discreet,’ he replied.

  He said he’d realized recently that those were the best times. There was something special about the first time you go for success and you make it, and he didn’t think he could ever capture that feeling again.

  He asked what Trev and Mick were doing. When I told him Trev was with Uriah Heep, he said, ‘I can see him doing that.’ I told him I didn’t know what Mick was up to at that moment. Mott the Hoople had broken up shortly after he’d joined, but he did collaborate with Ian Hunter on his first solo album which came out in 1975, the same year they formed the Hunter Ronson Band. He’d recently released his own second album, Play Don’t Worry, which hadn’t really worked; by now I’d not heard from him for months.

  Bowie asked how my band was doing, how was June?

  Tony popped his head around the door after about half an hour and said, ‘We need to get back to work, David, otherwise we’re not going to get these tracks finished.’

  ‘It’s been really good to see you,’ Bowie said. ‘I’m glad you’re all right, and if you ever need to get hold of me for anything, whatever, ring the office. Depending on what I’m doing it might take a couple of weeks, but I will get back to you.’

  I hadn’t felt there was any need to bring up what had happened three years earlier. He had acknowledged it in his own way. I said goodbye to Tony and him, and called a cab. As I headed back to my studio, I felt that the old wounds had been healed.

  U-Boat were the first band to get a residency at the Marquee; we sold it out every night for two weeks, which was gratifying. I was told Gary Numan had come to see us and was a fan, and also the Sex Pistols had sent us a telegram saying they’d like to support us.

  We toured Europe supporting Uriah Heep, and did pretty well; we were selling more albums in Europe than they were at one point. I also got to see a lot of Trevor on that tour, but it was pretty weird, us both being in different bands. We used to play tricks on each other during each other’s set. One night, during one of our serious ballads, a near-naked woman came onto the stage. She then proceeded to walk around to each band member caressing them while they tried to concentrate and not fuck up the song. It turned out the Heep guys had hired her. They also filled my snare drum with marbles one night, so when I hit it there was a horrendous noise. I quickly had to switch to my spare snare drum while they all stood in the wings killing themselves.

  In retaliation we grabbed two fire extinguishers and set them both off under the drummer’s stool; he disappeared from view for quite some time. We also grabbed Trevor one night while he was doing a bass solo. He was standing near the back-drop, so we pulled his leg through, wrapped gaffer tape around it and attached him to a scaffolding pole. He had to get one of his roadies to come and cut him loose.

  One of U-Boat’s last appearances was at the Reading Festival in 1977. We were planning a second album when everything went belly up. There were serious musical difference
s between us – I wanted to go in more of a rock direction, others wanted to be more pop – which ended up causing a rift with the management and U-Boat sank without a trace.

  It had been good fun, though. Would I change anything about it, looking back? No, I have no regrets. I did turn down a gig with Meat Loaf around this time, which was probably another mistake, but you accept your mistakes and move on.

  The rest of the seventies went by in a bit of a blur. I did sessions here and there, and June set up an interior design business. I’d made money from U-Boat, so we were doing OK. My first son, Nick, was born in 1975, and his brother Joe arrived two years later, and my youngest, Dan, came along in 1985. I loved being a father, and tried to spend as much time with them as I could.

  I didn’t know this until after the fact, but Bowie apparently wanted to put the Spiders From Mars back together around 1978. Mick told Trevor that Bowie had phoned him up and asked him. But Mick had said he didn’t want to do it. He was still collaborating with Ian Hunter, and was in demand as a guitarist and a producer, working with artists like Sparks, Roger Daltrey, John Cougar Mellencamp and the Rich Kids. He told Trevor he’d said to Bowie that he didn’t want to go backwards and he was too busy anyway and happy with what he was doing. A reformed Spiders would have been an interesting scenario! At least it proved that there were no bad feelings between Bowie and us.

  The ad said ‘Twelve-piece professional band seeks drummer with feel and good attitude’. It was 1984 and I was now an established freelance drummer for hire who was in-between jobs, so I gave them a call out of professional curiosity. The band turned out to be Dexy’s Midnight Runners, who’d had a couple of big hits. The manager recognized my name and told me that they’d auditioned 250 drummers, but had just found one the day before that the singer, Kevin Rowland, was happy with. He passed my number on to Kevin anyway, and the next day the manager phoned again, asking me if I would come up to Birmingham and audition if they paid my expenses.

  I hadn’t played the drums for three months, so I was a bit rusty, but I went up there and met Kevin Rowland, who seemed a bit eccentric. He took me into a room where his entire band was waiting, and showed me their drum kit. It was the worst I’d ever seen.

  ‘I can’t play that,’ I told him.

  ‘Well, two hundred and fifty other drummers have had no problem with it,’ he replied.

  I told him I’d need fifteen minutes to set it up, tune it and make it playable. He reluctantly said yes and I fixed the kit.

  The atmosphere in the audition room was as you’d expect after eleven people have just spent two weeks playing with 250 drummers – good ones, bad ones and indifferent ones. They were fed up with drummers, and now some other fucker had come in to audition, just when they thought they’d found the right guy. That was the vibe: it was really uncomfortable. Then I noticed a tray with eleven cups on it and a big teapot and I was parched, so I poured myself a cup. A roadie came in, did a double take and said, ‘Who’s poured a fucking cup of tea?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘You’ve fucked it,’ he said. ‘Kevin pours the tea, and it hasn’t brewed properly yet!’

  Then we started playing a song, but it had so many changes that I stopped the band.

  ‘Look, I will get this song right,’ I said, ‘but I need a few minutes to go through it with someone who knows it.’

  The guitarist showed me the song, and we went through it again. I got it all right, and Kevin seemed moderately impressed, enough at least to ask me to try another one. We did that correctly, too, but the organist, who was pretty cocky, said, ‘You’re speeding up!’, which I wasn’t.

  ‘I may be playing it wrong,’ I said to him, ‘but I don’t fucking speed up.’ Probably not the best thing to say at an audition! By this time I assumed I’d failed but we carried on and did a few more songs. At the end Kevin said, ‘Thanks for coming, I’ll give you a ring tomorrow.’

  All the way home I thought I’d wasted my time, so when he called me the next day I said, ‘You’re calling to tell me I didn’t get the gig, right?’

  He went silent then asked, ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘I could tell I’d fucked it up.’

  ‘Well, I just wanted to let you know that I’ve gone with another drummer,’ he said.

  ‘Thanks for telling me. It was nice to meet you,’ I said, and thought no more of it until he called again three weeks later, out of the blue.

  ‘I’m just calling to apologize to you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I picked the wrong drummer: it should have been you. Will you come up and do the album?’

  ‘I will but since I screwed up the audition, why have you changed your mind?’

  ‘Out of those two hundred and fifty drummers that we auditioned, you were the only one who was prepared to put up with shit and get it right.’

  So I worked on the album, which was called Don’t Stand Me Down, for a few months. We demoed some fucking great songs, which never got released. The album took two years to complete and in the end I think I was only on one song, ‘The Waltz’, which got some radio play. I rocked the song up to the level I thought it should be, and I thought it was brilliant. It was interesting to play with a brass section, which I hadn’t done before. There was no drum booth so they built me one, made of sheet plastic, in the middle of the studio floor. It had a door and a large plastic window so I could see the rest of the band and it was like my own little house. I found a couple of milk bottles and wrote ‘2 pints please’ on a piece of paper, stuck it in one of the bottles and put them outside my door. This didn’t go down well at all.

  It was a bit odd at times in the studio. It soon became clear that when a song was recorded, no one was supposed to tap a foot, or even move a muscle, until Kevin said it was a good take. I didn’t know this, and was enthusiastically moving around, and saying ‘Yes!’ because it was good shit. Initially Kevin looked at me suspiciously but then he gave me a big smile. I got on fine with him.

  The number of tempo changes during a song was equally strange. During rehearsals I would be given a chart showing all the arrangements to the songs we were going to be recording. Alongside each section of the song was written the bpm (beats per minute), in other words the tempo, that it had to be played in. Each of the sections, like verse, chorus and bridge, had different tempos. A song would start in 120bpm for so many bars, then go to 122bpm for the verse, 118bpm for the bridge and 124bpm for the chorus . . . playing to a click track hadn’t yet become a part of the recording process at this stage. Now it is a standard way of recording bass and drums, as many programmed keyboard parts are used and they have to be set to a specific bpm.

  The first time this happened it really threw me. I’m a good timekeeper but changing the tempo four or five times during a song seemed like an impossibility. I actually went home that night and played countless records, from Phil Collins to Billy Cobham, to see if anyone had actually done this. After three hours I hadn’t found a song that had.

  The next day I told Kevin what I’d done but he insisted that he wanted the tempo changes so I told him I’d have to rehearse for a few days with a metronome on my own. When we rehearsed the songs he recorded them on a little portable recorder and after each song he would play it back and check the tempo changes with a metronome. I found it pretty stressful having my playing scrutinized to this degree, but by the end of the week I had actually got there. But I have to say, from my point of view it did knock out a lot of the potential feel that would have been achieved by not using this method.

  Kevin had a unique voice but even more importantly he had an amazing ability to communicate with it. I thought the Dexys sound was unlike any other, and if he’d continued in the same direction, they would still be successful today. I also hit it off with Helen O’Hara, who was the violinist in the band. I thought she was very sweet and an amazing player. I later programmed all the drums for her solo album.

  Then, in 1984, I got a call from a friend in LA who tol
d me that Nicky Hopkins, who had played piano with just about everybody including the Beatles, the Stones, the Kinks, the Who and the Jeff Beck Group, had asked about me. The Who and the Jeff Beck Group are two of my favourite groups ever so I was impressed. It turned out that the songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Edgar Winter needed a drummer for some open-air events and Nicky wanted to know if I’d be up for doing it. I thought, ‘Cool’, and said, ‘Yes, I’ll be there.’

  However, after flying to LA and arriving at the studio, I found twenty-five drummers in a corridor practising on their drum pads. I was annoyed; I hadn’t known I was coming to an audition. I thought I had the gig. Nicky told me apologetically that Edgar’s management had just continued contacting as many drummers as they could. They were panicking because Edgar was going to pull out of the shows unless he found the right drummer.

  All these drummers were American, and the name of the game seemed to be who could shout the loudest to the guy who was in charge of scheduling about the famous people they’d played with. I thought, ‘This isn’t me. I’m British and we don’t do that. If that’s what they want, I’ve wasted my time.’ As I sat waiting my turn I was listening to a cassette on the studio tape player of two songs I was to play on. Just as I’d got to a complex part at the end of one of the songs, there was a power cut in the studio and the tape stopped rolling. I started panicking as I knew it was almost my turn to audition.

  At that moment, a guy called me into the audition room and he told me which song I was to play, which was neither of the ones I’d been learning. ‘I’ve never heard this song!’ I protested.

  He just shrugged so I walked into the studio where Edgar and the band were waiting. The drummer who was in there put some headphones on me and I heard about eight seconds of the song before they said, ‘You’re on!’