Spider from Mars Page 3

  Perhaps unwisely I began to practise my comedy routines at school, repeating sketches I’d seen, because I was more interested in having a laugh than working. I was also fond of making what I thought were amusing comments in class. For example, one of the teachers had a mahogany stick, about an inch and a half square, and he would belt kids with it. He’d get it out and as a joke I’d say, ‘Me next, sir!’ That sometimes backfired and I’d get the ‘mahogany’ treatment myself. The idea was to lighten the atmosphere while some kid was getting beaten up. After a while the only reason for me to go to school was to get laughs.

  When I wasn’t performing, if I was ever in a small group of three or four people, I would spend most of my time wondering what to say. I really was shy at heart, and it was painful.

  While the teachers were gritting their teeth over my sarcastic remarks at school, I was also getting into trouble at home. The length of my hair had now become a serious problem for my dad. He used to say, ‘I’ll make a man of you if it kills me!’

  I woke up one night to find that he was actually trying to cut my fringe while I was sleeping. The scissors were dangerously close to my eyes. I pushed him away, but I can understand what he was thinking, because all this was happening at a time when a boy with long hair was regarded as a sissy, less than a man, especially in a northern town. People would shout, ‘All right, Mary, how are you doing?’ in the street. It was more than annoying.

  My mum was caught in the middle of all this. She understood my dad’s point of view, because she wanted me to do well at school, but as my mother she also wanted to protect me. My grandparents were on my side to an extent, because of the fact that they’d raised me.

  I get it, of course. My father didn’t want any son of his to go down the route that I was obviously taking. Before I started rebelling against everything I’d been a genuinely good student and my school reports had always confirmed that I was bright. My parents seemed to regard me as some kind of kid genius who was going to go places, although to them that meant being a bank manager, or having my own firm of accountants, or some other respectable middle-class profession. In their minds I was definitely going to do something along those lines, anyway, although I myself had no idea what I was going to do. What teenager does? None of the possible jobs the career officer gave me held any appeal and when I tried to come up with my own list – anything from detective to train driver – I didn’t want to do them either.

  I have to give my parents points for perseverance: they really kept the pressure on me in the face of massive indifference from yours truly. I remember once I came home from school, delighted with a test result I’d got, and expecting them to be really pleased.

  ‘I came second in English!’ I said, bursting into the kitchen.

  My dad looked up from his tea and replied, ‘Why weren’t you first?’

  I was speechless, but he just looked at me.

  Summoning up some words, I managed to say, ‘Well, some other kid did better than me, but second is pretty good, I reckon.’

  He just ignored me, and I began to feel a bit annoyed. This wasn’t fair.

  ‘Oh, piss off then!’ I snarled, and turned to walk away.

  That was the first and only time I ever swore at my dad. As I left the room, I heard him stand up and come after me. He grabbed my shoulders, spun me round and lifted me up by the lapels of my jacket so my feet were off the ground. There was nothing I could do except struggle: he was much stronger than me.

  He carried me over to the coat pegs on the wall, hung me up by the back of my jacket and started thumping me. He completely lost it. Honestly, I’m not making this stuff up. It made me want to get away from there as soon as I could.

  At Christmas 1964 the Mutations played the Christmas dance at the girls’ school. There were five hundred girls there, with us four guys, which was an eye-opener because we felt like rock stars for the first time. I realized at that moment that being in a band – a good band, anyway – could be pretty cool if you were interested in girls, as we all were.

  My performance was hardly stellar, though: my drum kit was so rickety that the tom-tom fell off, and the cymbal stands weren’t stable so the cymbals kept sinking closer to the floor. I fell backwards off the stool too. Everybody had to wait until my kit was put back together before we could play on. It was dreadfully embarrassing. I didn’t know it at the time but a girl called June was there watching us on our first ill-fated performance. She later asked me if it had been me doing my Keith Moon impersonation.

  Not long after that, the local authority merged the Driffield boys’ and girls’ secondary schools. One Monday morning, half of my class were moved to another room, and then a load of girls came in carrying their satchels. One of them was a pretty brunette with a Sixties Helen Shapiro-type hairstyle. She was wearing a mini skirt (just within the school regulations) with white knee-length socks! Needless to say, she got my attention all through that first morning. In fact, as she walked in, I saw her and I thought, ‘I’m going to marry her’, even though I wasn’t even looking for a girlfriend at the time. It was very strange, because I’d never seen her before in my life. I found out her name, and that she was from Middleton on the Wolds, a village not far away, but it took me a while to pluck up the courage to make a move.

  In fact, I got John Flintoff to ask June out for me, although I later found out that before he approached her she’d put a Valentine’s card in my school desk. She lost her nerve, though, and took it out before I saw it. Our first date was sweet: I took her to the cinema but, a bit unromantically, I don’t remember the film.

  I still went and watched the Roadrunners every time they rehearsed at the Cave or played a gig – I think I was the only one there who wasn’t connected to the band. They were about five years older than me, which is a lot at that age. I was still at school and they were working men. I used to sit there and watch Johnny intently; for me, he was just as good as Bobby Elliott of the Hollies, who I really admired. Johnny had great style, he never messed a beat up and he was also a nice guy on top of that. He and I are still in touch to this day.

  I watched every move Johnny made when he played the drums at the Cave, and I remembered it, and then I went home and practised those exact things on my own kit. I listened to a lot of LPs all the way through, too. If I wanted to analyse a particular drum beat, I’d play the record and rest my finger on the vinyl: that slowed it down enough so that I could hear what tom-tom was being played, and so on.

  I had fallen utterly in love with the drums, and, with them, the dream of being a star. It was all downhill from there . . .

  2

  RATTED OUT

  A turning point came in early 1965 when I got a really bad report, which with hindsight I deserved. The teachers wrote that I was disrupting the class with my wise-guy comments, and they also noted that I’d never once made it to school on time that year. This didn’t go down well with my parents, and I felt pretty bad about it, so for the next six months I knuckled down and worked really hard.

  I did my mock O levels that summer, which I thought went well, but when I got the results the teachers had marked me down for my previous bad behaviour – even though all that had been six months earlier – and given me E grades in some of the subjects. An E grade was a pretty bad fail at O level. I assumed there had been a mistake, so I went to a teacher and explained that I was top of the class in those subjects and therefore the E grades couldn’t be correct.

  The teacher told me to go and see the headmaster, John Harrison.

  ‘We know how well you did in the exams – but six months ago you were messing about every single day,’ he told me.

  ‘That’s true,’ I admitted, ‘but surely I’ve behaved better since then? You can’t give me an E if I’m at the top of the class.’

  ‘We can write anything we want about you, Woodmansey,’ he said, looking squarely at me.

  I told him that wasn’t fair, but he wasn’t about to back down. He told me that all the t
eachers had talked about me in the staff room, saying what a troublemaker I was. The fact that I’d behaved myself for the previous six months meant nothing, because I’d been so bad before that point.

  This conversation all came as a bit of a shock. I thought about my situation and realized that if I stayed on to do the actual O levels in the summer of 1966, it would be a pointless exercise if the teachers weren’t willing to teach me. What the headmaster said next made all that irrelevant.

  ‘Either you leave,’ he said, ‘or we’ll kick you out. It’s up to you.’

  I told him I was leaving. What else could I do?

  ‘And what are you going to do when you leave school, Woodmansey?’

  ‘I’m going to be a pop star, sir, and be on Top of the Pops.’

  ‘You’re a moron, Woodmansey – and you always will be. Get out.’

  Some years later, in 1972, after The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust had been released and I had indeed played Top of the Pops, I considered driving up to the school in a limo and sticking two fingers up at his office, but I never did it. Perhaps I should have. John Harrison retired in 1991 and died in 2013, but I bear him no ill will all these years later. After all, being kicked out of school helped me focus on my drumming.

  As I walked out of the school gates that July, the thought of never having to go back and do lessons that I wasn’t interested in filled me with excitement. The elation didn’t last: a moment later, that feeling was replaced by terror. I clearly remember thinking to myself, ‘Oh shit. What am I going to do with the rest of my life?’ I’d been unable to answer that question when the careers officers had asked it of me, and I was no nearer to answering it now.

  I didn’t have a clue what being a working person was all about. Although kids could legally leave school at my age back then, I’d planned to stay on; I thought that I’d get smarter and wiser if I did that, and things would fall into place. I hadn’t planned on walking out of the school gates, aged fifteen, straight into real life.

  So now I had to face my parents. I knew my mum would be disappointed and my dad would be angry, and I had to find a way to sell it to them.

  ‘Look, I’ve decided to leave school,’ I told them at the dinner table, trying to hide how scared I felt. ‘I really want to get a job. You know, learn a trade and make a decent living for myself.’

  This was a lie, of course – I still wanted to be a drummer in a band – but I couldn’t think of another way out of my predicament.

  Fortunately, my dad nodded. ‘All right then, son. It’s about time you did something with your life.’

  My mother was less easy to convince; she obviously thought that I’d thrown away my education – and with it my potential. But she had to accept it. I didn’t want to go back to school, my father wanted me to learn a trade and that was that.

  In essence, I’d been let down by the education system, but on the other hand it was entirely my own doing. I suppose I was different from most of the other students who understood why they were studying logarithms or technical drawing, or whatever the subject might be. I didn’t; I only wanted to do something that I enjoyed so much I’d happily get out of bed in the morning every day to go and do it. School certainly wasn’t that something. Music might well be but, in the meantime, I had to get a job.

  My father got me an apprenticeship as a plumber and an electrician with a local firm in Driffield. As part of the apprenticeship I was supposed to study at college, but the firm didn’t want to pay for it, so that didn’t happen.

  More importantly for me, the Mutations got their first proper gig (I don’t count that awful June-witnessed Christmas performance the previous year). It was at the Buck Hotel in Driffield, which is still there. We were talking music with the landlord one night and he asked us if we’d play there for a fiver between us. Our band – Frank and Paul on guitar, John on bass, Michael on vocals and me on drums – got a pound each to play six songs, including ‘Green Onions’ by Booker T & the MGs and ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’ by the Stones, which had been a hit that summer.

  There’s a repeated part in ‘Satisfaction’ which is just a drum beat with no other instruments going on, and I was absolutely petrified when it came along, even though it’s only two bars long. Those two bars felt like an hour to me; every time we played that song I thought to myself, ‘Will I get through this without cocking it up?’ I managed it each time, though, and, believe me, that was the high point of my career up to then.

  We also did an original song called ‘Swan Lake’, which was embarrassingly bad. I can’t remember how it went, but put it this way: I’m glad YouTube didn’t exist back then. We didn’t have stage clothes and just wore regular gear like polo-neck sweaters and camel-coloured trousers because we hadn’t got as far as thinking about an image; we didn’t even know if we could get through a single song in front of an audience, who were mainly just locals.

  After that, we started playing regularly at the Buck Hotel, earning £5 each for the night. That fiver was a big deal, because it meant that I was a professional musician. Not only that, there’s nothing so good for improving your musical skills as some kind of residency, because you have to get it right, night after night. More gigs came along after that: there were quite a few rich farmers in the area and we’d play for their daughters’ birthday parties.

  My dad used to drive me to gigs in his van, which was good of him, but a bit odd given that he disliked me being in a band more and more as time passed. He probably thought it would be a short-lived hobby for me. Instead, it was my apprenticeship that was short-lived. I didn’t understand the electrician part, and I really hated the plumbing work. I’d be in the middle of Driffield High Street, pulling drain rods through the drains while all the girls from the offices and factories were leaving work. You’d be trying to look cool while wearing rough jeans and an old jacket and pulling shit out of the ground – tricky to say the least.

  The older guys generally ignored me: they’d been doing the job for years and they didn’t want an apprentice hanging around. They only ever talked about football, so I never really got into conversation with them. In the end, after about a year, the company sacked me, and it was deserved, because I was more interested in smoking than working.

  After that Mum took me shopping because my parents wanted me to have some appropriate, hard-wearing clothes when I was looking for work. But by now I was devoted to fashion and was mostly to be found in narrow-legged hipster trousers and double-breasted jackets – all made by June who had left school and was working as a clothes designer. I also wore sand-coloured desert boots and had a long Army & Navy coat in navy blue. You couldn’t wear those clothes in a blue-collar job. Mum was steering me towards a working man’s donkey jacket which Dad wanted me to have, which was the exact opposite of what I was about.

  ‘I’m really sorry,’ I said to Mum, ‘but I can’t wear this. You can buy it if you want, but I’ll never wear it.’

  There was a real stigma attached to being out of work, so I asked my mates if they knew of any jobs going. It turned out that four of them were working in the Vertex spectacle factory. They told me it was cushy and they had a good laugh, and the money was good, so I went for an interview there. Luckily for me, the foreman who interviewed me was a pub singer. He knew I was a drummer and we hit it off; in fact, we talked about music most of the time rather than work-related stuff. I got the job.

  My job consisted of taking a square piece of plastic with two holes in it, shaping it into spectacles, drilling holes in it, putting sides on it . . . and repeat. It sounds dull, but it wasn’t bad, actually. I enjoyed it and the money was really good. We were on bonus schemes, and we had a game going on about who could be the fastest. Then the management bought time and motion people in to make us quicker, and we actually slowed down a bit, because they were useless – but we were still faster than anybody else who’d done it before.

  As talented as I was at making spectacles, music was still my obsession. A bunch
of us would travel twelve miles to Bridlington Spa to see major bands like the Small Faces, the Kinks, the Who – you name it. It was brilliant, like seeing creatures from another world. I’d sit and watch, my eyes glued on the drummers. And I was still with the Mutations. By now we’d played at the Driffield Town Hall and supported the Roadrunners several times on their gigs. That was all about to change.

  It was 1968 and revolution was in the air. In America people were protesting against the Vietnam War. In Driffield we were protesting . . . about a fish and chip shop. One of the coffee bars in Driffield was going to be turned into a chippie, and the teenagers in the town were not happy about losing a popular hangout, so about eighty of us went down in a sort of procession and stopped all the traffic. I don’t know who organized it, but word must have spread pretty fast because the local police were there – all two of them! – watching us chanting and shouting. For Driffield, it was a major event.

  I was standing there holding a banner that read ‘We want a coffee bar’ when the Roadrunners’ old Mother’s Pride bread van pulled up in front of me and they leaned out and shouted, ‘Woody, get in!’ I didn’t need to be asked twice, because they were the coolest musicians I knew, so I threw somebody the banner and jumped in the van. Inside I saw the singer Dave ‘Les’ Westaway, the guitarist Dave ‘Feet’ Lawson and Brian Wheeldon (now the bass player), all grinning at me.

  ‘Listen, Woody,’ said Dave. ‘Johnny’s leaving the band because he can’t play any more. We want you to be our drummer.’

  My mind raced. Playing with them would be a challenge, but also the best thing that ever happened to me. Now I’d be in a real band.