Spider from Mars Read online

  Edgar turned to me and said, ‘You start this song.’

  I hadn’t noticed that the whole intro was just drums. I hadn’t even grabbed hold of the actual beat. In order not to look like an idiot, I said, ‘Yeah, I know.’ The other musicians were all staring at me in anticipation.

  I started the song and the whole band played a few bars of it until Edgar put his hand up and signalled for everyone to stop. I assumed I’d fucked up and wasted my time and everyone else’s. Then Edgar came over to me and said, ‘You played that beat, man! No one plays that beat unless they’re from Memphis. Where you from?’

  ‘England!’ I said. And that was it. I had no idea what I’d done that was so great, but I got the gig.

  The next major gig that came along was thanks to Nicky, too. We’d become great friends by this time. Nicky was Art Garfunkel’s pianist and MD and when he was asked to put a band together for a tour of Europe he suggested me. I hadn’t been a folk fan, as I’ve said previously, but I had fond memories of listening to Simon and Garfunkel on the jukebox back in the infamous coffee bar in Driffield.

  Nicky gave me a tape of the set list for the show and at first listen they didn’t seem too complex. But once I got into them I realized that, although some of the parts sounded simple, they required quite a bit of technique to get right. A particularly well-known session drummer called Steve Gadd was the drummer on the majority of Art’s songs. Steve’s one of the most incredibly skilled players around, and he plays with a very laid-back and behind-the-beat feel that I initially had real problems duplicating. It was only after lots of practice that I was able finally to master it.

  When we practised for a couple of days before Art’s arrival, Nicky kept telling me to play more quietly or I wouldn’t get the gig. That was tough: I was already playing as quietly as I could. When he got to the studio Art walked right up to the kit and said, ‘Playing drums for me is like walking on eggshells. If you understand that, we’re going to get on.’

  ‘No problem,’ I said. I didn’t know what he meant, but it didn’t sound good. It did focus my mind on not playing too loudly, as Nicky had advised. Most other musicians that I’ve played with would probably say, ‘Woody doesn’t have a volume control, he’s stuck at eleven’ . . .

  Art was not unlike Bowie in that he didn’t seem to have the musical vocabulary to explain what he wanted, so he’d say to me something like, ‘In the chorus, I want you to think of the words “blue” and “icebergs” . . .’ Or he’d say, ‘Think “butterflies” on the bridge.’ You can’t say to Art Garfunkel, ‘What the fuck?’ so I’d just nod thoughtfully and carry on. It was hard not to crack a smile sometimes, though.

  All the band, including myself, passed the audition with flying colours. When we were in Spain we had a Midnight Special show to do on 16 October. I honestly can’t remember if this was for TV or radio. We recorded the songs in a really nice studio and we got an incredible sound. Art was very pleased with it.

  Back in my hotel room I was watching the BBC news when I saw there had been a major hurricane across Britain which had hit the South of England especially badly. I called home to see if everyone was all right and June told me that the big beech tree that used to stand in the garden was now parked on the roof! They were all OK but a little shaken up; two of the boys had joined her in the middle of the night because they were scared, but Nick, our eldest, had slept through it all.

  The power was out and lots of other trees in the vicinity were down, too, so you couldn’t drive down the street. I travelled home the next day, a beautiful sunny one, but the landscape had changed. The local authorities had obviously been out in the morning and cleared a lot of the roads of fallen trees, so it was no problem getting home – except that I couldn’t get in through the front door because it was blocked by a massive tree.

  Our next performance with Art was a Royal Command Performance for the Prince’s Trust at the London Palladium. This was on 4 December 1987. We played ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ with Prince Charles and Lady Diana in the royal box. Elton John was appearing that night, as was Ray Cooper, Robin Williams, Chris De Burgh, Sarah Brightman, Rowan Atkinson, James Taylor, Belinda Carlisle, Amy Grant, Mel Smith and Griff Rhys: the host was David Frost.

  I lent Elton John’s drummer my kit because his drums had got held up somewhere. Elton came over and said, ‘Woody Woodmansey! The last time I saw you was outside the Beverly Hills Hotel in 1972.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s right – too many lobsters!’ I said and he laughed.

  During the performance I looked up towards the royal box and noticed Princess Diana was smiling. I thought to myself, ‘I’m probably never going to play in front of her again’ so I gave her a wink and a nod of the head. I’m fairly sure her smile got bigger.

  We followed this up with a tour of the UK and then Japan where we appeared at the Tokyo Dome with Billy Joel, Boz Scaggs, the Hooters and Impellitteri for the twentieth anniversary of CBS/Sony Records. It was in front of an audience of 42,000 which was my biggest yet . . . so I was really excited. We were doing an hour-long set, opening with ‘The Sound of Silence’ by Simon and Garfunkel.

  While we were sound-checking I was taking in the enormity of the venue when I suddenly had an idea for the opening song. Normally we just went on as a band and started playing, then Art would walk in with a spotlight on him, so I wasn’t really sure if he would be receptive, but I said to him, ‘What if we turn all the lights off in the Dome with no lights on stage and then you just start singing “Hello darkness, my old friend”, and then the following line which is “I’ve come to talk to you again”. Then a spotlight hits you, then the band comes in.’

  He said, ‘I love it, let’s do it!’ So we opened up the show in that way, by the third and fourth line in the song at least 20,000 lighters had appeared, and Art turned round and gave me a nice smile of approval. It was an emotional sight I’ll never forget.

  In September that year Nicky, June and I were invited to Art’s wedding to Kim Cermak, an actress and singer, held at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens in New York. It was all a mad rush as our scheduled flight was cancelled, so we raced around to get another flight, which we did, but that meant we arrived late in New York and therefore had to get changed into our wedding outfits at JFK as we had no time to go to the hotel first. Luckily we arrived just as the service started. Art was really happy that we’d made it. It was beautiful and in a fabulous venue.

  Just over a year later, in October 1989, we headed over to Antwerp where we were doing a ‘Night of the Proms’ at the Sports Palace, an enormous stadium that held 23,000 people. The one-hundred-piece Royal Philharmonic Orchestra of Flanders were accompanying us.

  To polish up the music on our side we had rehearsed for five days in London and were sounding pretty damn good. When we got to the soundcheck at the stadium the orchestra was already in place behind us. All our equipment, including my drums, was in place ready and the famous Dutch conductor Roland Kieft was on his podium. It was the first time I had ever played with a full orchestra. I’d done sessions with string quartets before but nothing like this. It was a little daunting.

  As I fiddled about with my drums and did a bit of tuning, I noticed the conductor handing out piles of sheet music to the orchestra and some of our band. He then proceeded to walk in my direction and I thought, ‘Shit, I hope they’re not for me.’ He stopped in front of the drums and said, ‘Your music’, handing me the pages.

  I started to panic a bit as I didn’t read music, although I could tell from looking at some of the songs that the drums had been written to come in at different places from what we had rehearsed. I could also tell that some of the beats had been simplified. I thought, ‘Hell, I’m really in the shit if these arrangements are how it has to be played’, so I went to Art and said, ‘I’ve just got the drum parts for tonight.’

  ‘Are they any good?’ he asked.

  ‘They’re quite a bit different from what we rehearsed,’ I said.

  �
�Just play whichever you think is the best’, he told me. I walked back to my drums thinking, ‘Thank fuck for that’, wiping my brow.

  When we started the show I noticed the conductor cueing the orchestra and members of our band to bring them in. He then turned to me and did the same, but according to our rehearsals I wasn’t due to start playing till several bars later so I just stared at him and kept my arms folded. I’m not sure what he was thinking – he was pretty poker-faced – but after a couple of songs he didn’t bother to cue me in any more.

  Luckily the original drum parts all fitted perfectly with the arrangements, although I did fuck up during ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’. Sitting in the middle of a one-hundred-piece orchestra, with Nicky Hopkins’ incredible piano playing and Art’s amazing voice, I got completely lost in the moment and didn’t realize I’d become a spectator. When it came to my turn to bring my drums in I completely missed my cue. If I hadn’t noticed Nicky glaring at me from behind his piano, I would probably not have played at all. I would have stood up at the end and applauded along with the audience. I was able to ride over the cock-up and I don’t think many people noticed.

  I was with Art for a few years. I got on with him really well and found him to be a real gentleman and quite an intellectual, yet also eccentric. It was a real pleasure, musically: and every night I would be blown away by the absolute quality of his voice. No other singer has that same purity. June came to many of the shows and was a big fan of Art’s voice, especially when he came to dinner one night and started singing ‘Mrs Robinson’ to her in the kitchen while helping with the food.

  Nicky Hopkins was a real character and I loved him. He moved to England and lived with us for about a year. We soon found we had the same sense of humour, which was due to the fact we’d both grown up enjoying the Goons, Monty Python, Tony Hancock, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, to name a few. He was a very modest guy even though he was one of the world’s best piano players. I think he played on more than five hundred albums in his career. We were walking around Tunbridge Wells one day when a guy came up to him and said, ‘Excuse me, I hope you don’t mind me saying this but you really do look like Nicky Hopkins.’

  Nicky didn’t even crack a smile, and just said earnestly, ‘You know, sometimes I feel like Nicky Hopkins.’

  The guy looked confused and sloped off.

  I worked on some of Nicky’s solo stuff and several gigs, mainly in LA. In 1988 Nicky had written a song with a friend of his for Children in Need. He was doing some work with Paul McCartney at the time and mentioned the song to him. Paul suggested Nicky recorded it in his studio and offered to play bass on it.

  ‘Who have you got to play drums on it?’ he asked.

  ‘Woody,’ Nicky said.

  ‘Woody? Why don’t you get a real drummer?’ Paul said.

  Taken aback, Nicky replied, ‘He is a drummer, a great drummer! You know Woody Woodmansey, don’t you?’

  ‘Course I do, I thought you were talking about Ronnie Wood. We call him Woody, too.’

  When I got to his studio, McCartney said, ‘The last time I saw you was when you were rehearsing for the Ziggy Stardust tour. Have you still got the same kit?’

  ‘No, that one got lost somewhere in the ether. I’m playing Premier now.’

  ‘Well, hurry up and set up and we can do some jamming.’

  I did this as quickly as I could and we jammed for about half an hour, everything from reggae to old-school rock ’n’ roll with Nicky accompanying on piano. Paul really loved Nicky’s piano playing. I kept feeling the urge to play drum fills like Ringo would have done.

  A local girls’ choir came along to record vocals for the session, and Paul and Linda had laid on a load of crisps and buns and sausage rolls and whatever for them. It turned out there were twenty-five kids but only twenty-four bags of crisps, and we were a long way from any shops. They both panicked because some child was going to have to go without crisps. That was touching: it showed me what they were really like. I said, ‘Paul – look how many cakes and things are on the table. I’m sure one of them will manage without crisps!’

  Mick Ronson and I hadn’t been in touch for probably ten years, partly because he had moved to America, where he was living with his wife Suzi and daughter Lisa. Then I heard on the grapevine that he had moved to Sweden with his new girlfriend.

  I think it was sometime in February 1993 when I got a call from Suzi Ronson. She told me that Mick had been diagnosed with liver cancer a couple of years earlier and the two of them had got back together and they were living in London. He had been trying alternative remedies and was now undergoing chemotherapy.

  This was a big shock. Although she hadn’t given me many details, her tone had seemed more desperate than optimistic. She said he wanted to speak to me when he felt a bit better.

  He phoned me a couple of days later and told me about it. He said he’d been having back pains a couple of years before and there were times when he was so exhausted that his sister Maggi arranged for him to see a doctor. That’s when he’d found out it was cancer and since then he’d been trying everything to beat it. He sounded really confident that he was going to win the battle and I backed up his confidence by saying that was the right attitude to have and not to give in.

  He did say one thing that made me think he hadn’t actually faced up to the situation. He told me he’d been down Portobello market and bought a healing crystal that he was wearing around his neck. I didn’t have any experience or knowledge of this kind of treatment, so all I could do was say, ‘Try everything.’ I could tell he didn’t really want to talk any more about his situation so we started reminiscing happily about the old days, from the Rats to the Spiders. He also said he’d had a great time in the Hunter Ronson band, and Ian Hunter had become a really good mate. He told me he was working on another solo album and mentioned the musicians he’d been working with although he hadn’t got all the tracks done yet.

  ‘I’d like it if you and Trev would do something on the album, Woods,’ he said. ‘I’d really like that.’

  ‘That would be brilliant and I’m sure Trev would be up for it as well.’

  ‘I’ll get back to you with some dates.’

  ‘It would be good to see you anyway. When can we meet up?’ I said.

  ‘I’ll get Suzi to let you know because sometimes I’m too knackered to do anything.’

  Later I had a chat with Trev and we were both waiting for a call to tell us the studio dates. Unfortunately the next time I heard from Suzi it was to tell me that it didn’t look like it was going to happen. They didn’t honestly know how long Mick had to live.

  Suzi called me shortly afterwards to say Mick had passed away in his sleep. He died on 29 April 1993. He was only forty-seven. Even though I was half prepared for it by Suzi’s earlier phone call it was still devastating news. I tried to look at it positively, in that he’d passed away in his sleep surrounded by people who loved him and we’d had a chance to talk and remember the good times. Still, it hit me pretty hard.

  On 6 May Trevor, June and I attended Mick’s memorial service at the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints in London. He was buried in Hull the following day. Bowie was in America doing promotion for his new album, Black Tie White Noise, but he did give Mick a tribute on Arsenio Hall’s TV chat show in America, praising him as the early 1970s most influential guitar hero, which was pretty accurate.

  There was a memorial concert for Mick at the Hammersmith Apollo exactly a year after he died, organized by his sister Maggi and writer Kevin Cann, who had initially suggested the idea to her. Trev and I became Spiders again for the night and were joined by Joe Elliott and Phil Collen from Def Leppard, and Phil Lanzon, the keyboard player with Uriah Heep. We played seven tracks, four Bowie numbers from our Spider days, one by Lou Reed and two of Mick’s songs, ‘Angel No. 9’ and ‘Don’t Look Down’. We were also joined, for two songs, by Bill Nelson from Be Bop Deluxe and Billy Rankin from Nazareth.

  Among those
appearing that night were Tony Visconti, who played with the remaining members of the Rats, Dana Gillespie, Glen Matlock, Steve Harley, Roger Taylor from Queen, Roger Daltrey, Bill Wyman, Ian Hunter, Bob Harris, Johnnie Walker, Mick Jones and Big Audio Dynamite. Bowie didn’t appear, and rumour has it that he thought his presence would have turned the event into a circus. If that’s true, then I think he was right, and it would have been disrespectful to Mick. As it was, the whole evening had a great vibe to it, and it was obvious all the musicians were there because they wanted to celebrate Mick as an artist and an individual in the best way they could.

  It was very surreal for me to be playing songs which Mick had been such an integral part of. To be on stage at the Apollo, which used to be called Hammersmith Odeon and was the scene of Bowie and the Spiders’ last gig, made it even more poignant. Several times during the set I looked up expecting to see Mick standing there with his Les Paul, pulling one of his faces. Afterwards Trevor said he’d felt the same thing.

  We all went over to Bill Wyman’s restaurant, Sticky Fingers, in High Street Kensington afterwards and shared our memories of Mick.

  Nicky Hopkins also died prematurely, in September 1994. He was only fifty and died needlessly of complications from surgery for Crohn’s disease, from which he’d suffered for most of his life. I was incredibly sad to see him go. The range of work that Nicky did during his career was remarkable. He was a true legend. I’m privileged to have known him and to have had him as a friend.

  11

  HOLY DAYS

  Playing at Mick’s memorial concert at Hammersmith, and getting to know Joe Elliott and Phil Collen during rehearsals, was a bittersweet experience for Trev and me. We’d lost an old friend with whom we’d shared some of the most exciting times of our lives and we were focused on making sure that we did justice to Mick on the big night. Any worries we’d had were immediately dispelled as we started running through the songs with Joe and Phil. It was obvious they were big fans of both Mick and Bowie. In fact, they knew the songs as well as Trevor and me, so it all came together quickly and without any hassles and they sounded shit hot. On top of that we all hit it off as individuals and the banter was as if we’d been together for years.