Spider from Mars Read online

  Angie was quite something: loud and vivacious, with her American accent, moving her arms and body all the time. She was twenty and I found out later she had been born in Cyprus to American parents, and had been a student at Kingston Poly when she met Bowie. As Bowie and I chatted that evening she flew in and out of the room like a mosquito on speed, interrupting whatever we were talking about. If she liked what she heard, she’d throw in a loud, unsolicited opinion.

  Bowie would gaze at her with affection at those times. They’d got married just before I came down to live with them, and they seemed very much in love. They cuddled and kissed, frequently and passionately.

  My first evening with Bowie was amazing. Although he was only twenty-three – which seems very young now – he appeared self-assured and sophisticated. Occasionally he would be open and warm, like one of my mates from Yorkshire: you could crack jokes with him and talk about Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which had appeared on TV a few months before. He loved the Pythons’ surreal sense of humour, and so did I.

  ‘And what is the name of your ravishing wife?’ he’d say, quoting from the ‘Marriage Guidance Counsellor’ sketch.

  ‘It’s Deirdre!’ I’d reply, in a high, simpering voice.

  ‘Deirdre . . .’ he continued, lasciviously. ‘What a beautiful, beautiful name!’

  And so on.

  At the same time, even while we were throwing jokes around, I noticed that there was a certain detachment about him. Bowie seemed like an artist in preparation: he looked as though he was planning things in his head, even while he was talking to you and looking directly at you. You couldn’t help but feel a distance from him when that happened.

  As we talked, it became obvious that when Bowie’s career had failed to take off after ‘Space Oddity’, he’d taken a bit of a knock and was struggling to find a new way to express himself. Although he’d done a certain amount of recording by then, he was going through a period of significant change. I noticed something handwritten on the wall at Haddon Hall. It read ‘Not conformity but radical’, with the name ‘Ken Pitt’ – who was soon to be Bowie’s ex-manager – written above the word ‘conformity’ in establishment-type writing, and the word ‘radical’ had the word ‘rebel’ written after it in different, more aggressive lettering. That summed up the period of chaos he was in when I joined him, to an extent at least.

  Tony Visconti arrived later that evening, accompanied by his then girlfriend Liz Hartley, and I liked him immediately. He was twenty-six, so a few years older than the rest of us. He was an American musician and producer from New York who had moved to London in 1968 and had had some success working with Georgie Fame, Procol Harum, the Moody Blues, the Move and Tyrannosaurus Rex, Marc Bolan’s band. Then, in 1969, he was asked to produce Bowie’s second album and they’d hit it off straight away. I knew he’d worked with a load of successful people, and as the five of us sat down for dinner at the Bowies’ dining table, I asked him what he had in mind for Bowie’s new album.

  ‘We’re going to put together the songs over the next few months,’ said Visconti. ‘Have you seen the rehearsal room yet? No? Let’s go down there after dinner.’

  Visconti was assured, confident and very upbeat in the way that Americans often are, compared to us cautious Brits. His presence made me feel as if I’d taken a real professional leap forward by coming down to be in Bowie’s band. What I also loved about him was that he understood the English sense of humour completely, which was unusual back then for anyone who wasn’t from this country. He could hold his own in a conversation about Monty Python or the Goons as well as any of the rest of us.

  After dinner, Bowie showed me around. Haddon Hall was divided into eight flats. He rented most of the ground floor, and he had the main entrance as part of his flat, so the entire building looked like it was his, when he did photo shoots and so on there. You walked through the front door and there was a little kitchen on the left, a bathroom on the right and then the main living room in front of you. At the other end of the room a huge staircase led up to a stained-glass window on the landing, where the doors to the other flats had originally been. It looked exactly like the massive staircase at Tara in Gone with the Wind.

  At the top there was an area on the other side of the banisters where Mick and I shared a mattress. Tony and Liz had a room downstairs; Bowie and Angie also had their room downstairs; and there was a lounge. The other person living there was Roger Fry, an Australian who was Bowie’s driver and roadie. He had a mattress under the stairs.

  The flat was sparsely furnished, perhaps because the Bowies, Visconti and Liz had only moved into it the previous December. There was nothing but a chest in the hall, and a bed and some drawers in Bowie’s room, the ceiling of which he’d sprayed silver. He had also bought a really nice antique dining table and chairs, which he’d painted red, adding gold to the carved details. The first time we sat down to dinner at the table, I noticed how artistic it looked. This was to be my home for the next year and a half.

  The domestic arrangements were simple. Mick and I were paid seven pounds a week each. Angie would be the one to hand me, Mick and Tony our cash. Bowie paid the rent for the place, and we all chipped in to a household kitty for food. It was a bit like a hippie commune, which was fine by me: the progressive aesthetic of it suited how I was feeling at the time.

  Bowie didn’t seem like a wealthy man by any means. He was getting royalties from ‘Space Oddity’, so he had a bit of money, although not a lot by the look of it. I didn’t sign a contract with him at that stage; it was all done by verbal agreement. Money didn’t cross my mind as long as we were housed, clothed and fed – that was all that mattered. I was just happy to be a professional musician, in London, with a chance of making it.

  Bowie and Angie were obviously used to a slightly more luxurious level of living than Mick and I were, especially when it came to food. This became slightly irritating within a few weeks of my arrival. We’d put our money into the kitty, and they’d spend it all on a single meal, so we’d have fuck all to eat for the rest of the week. For instance, they’d buy luxury food items, sometimes just enough for one meal, and then we’d ask where the potatoes were, and there weren’t any – because they hadn’t bought any.

  In retrospect, they weren’t really cut out for running the house. When the food ran out Angie would complain, ‘You get nothing for your money these days.’

  I’d say, ‘I know. There’s not even any potatoes!’

  We’d eat toast and whatever else we could scrape together, and no one starved, but when you’ve got five hungry people in a household, arguments are inevitable.

  One day Tony, Mick and I had a massive row with Bowie and Angie, and we ended up saying, ‘We’ll buy the fucking food!’ But then Angie would try to cook what we’d bought, and she’d burn it. She was a shit cook; perhaps that’s why Bowie was so thin. He never cooked, and rarely ate. After a while Mick and I decided to make meals for ourselves and leave them to it.

  But none of this really mattered, because we had music to make. Bowie’s plans to record an album and tour it afterwards were basic, but they sounded achievable. He had a deal with the progressive rock label Vertigo for his new album, and Tony was going to play bass and produce it. Vertigo was a great choice for the album: the label, a subsidiary of Phonogram, had been set up the previous year and had released albums by Rod Stewart and Manfred Mann. They were all about pushing boundaries, and we had high hopes for the new LP.

  As Bowie came up with his new songs we rehearsed them, in Haddon Hall’s old wine cellar. Tony, Mick and I turned the cellar into a soundproofed rehearsal room. We constructed a wooden frame within the ceiling and walls, and covered this with a soundproof board made of compressed straw. We then filled the gaps between the wall and the board with sand. It was solid, which was good, because it was deafeningly loud inside.

  It was a really small room, the width of my drum kit, and perhaps three drum kits long. It was dark and smelled of damp, as all cel
lars do, but we didn’t care because we loved playing down there. We spent a lot of time playing various bits of music, just trying things out. It was good. I really enjoyed the vibe that Bowie, Mick, Tony and I created. We were feeling each other out, musically, and on the occasions when Bowie wasn’t there the three of us would embark on long, improvised jams that flowed on endlessly.

  We three backing musicians were all equally good at what we did, and there were no instructions from Bowie, apart from things like, ‘There’s three bars of this here, and then this other part comes in; drums come in here’, and so on. We’d learn the arrangement and get on with it.

  Occasionally Bowie would say he liked the beat I was playing, or the groove, but he obviously just expected me to be good, so he usually said nothing at all. He was clearly the band leader, but he never really called the shots, if that makes sense. He basically left things up to us: we were expected to figure out what was needed to make the songs as good as they could possibly be. If we hadn’t been able to do that, we wouldn’t have been in the band in the first place.

  Bowie and Tony were good at what they did, but as we rehearsed I was reminded once again that Mick could play literally anything on the guitar. The man was a genius. When he played a Jeff Beck song, for example, he didn’t just get close to Jeff’s playing; he played it exactly as Jeff did. It was the same with Jimi Hendrix or Paul Kossoff of Free, or anyone else whose guitar parts he chose to play; there wasn’t really a Mick Ronson sound as such back then, because he could do anything. Whoever he was copying, he nailed it, and he had a reputation for being able to do that.

  Without meaning to sound boastful, I was the same: I could play every fill that Ginger Baker did on certain Cream tracks, because he was one of my idols and I’d studied what he did down to the last detail. People would come up to me and say, ‘Man, if I closed my eyes, I could swear I was at a Cream gig, you sound so much like Ginger.’ That was a compliment, of course, but after a while I began to want my own sound rather than someone else’s, as did Mick, and we both worked hard to achieve that goal.

  Sometimes during rehearsals Bowie would tell us, ‘Come on, let’s have a break and go to a club’, and of course we said yes. He’d take us to a place called El Sombrero, at 142 Kensington High Street. The first time Mick, Bowie, Angie and I went in there I was blown away. It had a star-shaped dance floor lit from beneath, and the music was fantastic: soul, old R&B and rock. The place was full of beautiful people, dressed to the nines, and the women were gorgeous. Mick and I had no idea such places existed.

  We were standing having a drink when a guy walked up and slipped a note in my hand.

  ‘What’s that?’ Mick asked.

  ‘It’s probably a note from a girl that he’s been asked to pass me,’ I said, a bit smugly. I’d had a lot of attention from girls by this point, being in a band. Then someone gave a note to Mick, and another guy came and put one in my top pocket.

  This kept happening until we had about ten notes each. It looked a bit crass to just open them up while we were standing there, so we went into a dark corner and read them. They all said things like, ‘I’m at the bar next to the blonde, come on over. My name’s John and I think you’re really cool.’

  ‘They’re all blokes!’ Mick said. We were stunned, because we’d assumed these guys had been running errands for all the gorgeous chicks around.

  Angie came up to us. ‘What’s happening?’ she asked. We told her and she started laughing.

  ‘Don’t you know this is a gay club?’ she asked.

  ‘No!’ we replied. What a disappointment. But there was style and creativity there, in the music and the clothes. That club attracted a very talented crowd.

  We had a pretty civilized existence at Haddon Hall. There wasn’t much debauchery until we went to America in 1972. I never saw Bowie do any drugs, or even drink much. He might have had the odd lager, but that was it. The rest of us were the same. As I mentioned before, Mick was raised as a Mormon so when I first met him in Hull he didn’t drink or smoke, or even touch tea and coffee. In London, though, that gradually changed: one weekend I saw him rolling a cigarette and then he actually had some coffee. Next thing I knew, he was trying a lager. Eventually we smoked a bit of grass, but that was it. We knew that drugs like cocaine existed, and that a lot of rock bands took them, but they seemed very distant from where we were and we had no plans to make them part of our lives.

  We all smoked cigarettes with enthusiasm, though. Mick often used to wake me up in the middle of the night and say ‘Woods! Are you awake? Do you want a rollie?’ I obviously didn’t want a rollie, so I’d pretend to be asleep, but he wouldn’t stop until I got up, smoked a cigarette, drank a cup of tea and had a chat with him about our plans for the future.

  Gigs came along slowly, more slowly than I would have liked, having played a lot live with the Rats and the Roadrunners before that. We didn’t do an actual, scheduled tour at all in 1970, but initially Bowie and I did a bunch of odd pub gigs, just for fun really. I wasn’t paid for those; I was living on my retainer of seven quid a week, but I didn’t care. Sometimes Bowie would call upstairs and say, ‘Woody, we’re doing a set at the Three Tuns tonight.’

  The Three Tuns was a pub on Beckenham High Street. Bowie had set up a short-lived Sunday night folk club there with his then girlfriend Mary Finnigan in 1969, which they’d turned into a local Arts Lab. He’d been inspired by the influential Arts Lab in Drury Lane – where you could watch all sorts of avant-garde performances, including mime. We did very little preparation for our gigs there. I didn’t even know what we were going to play, because we didn’t have songs finished yet, but I took a goatskin mat with me and we’d jump in the car. Once in the pub I’d sit on the mat and play bongos, totally improvised, while Bowie played acoustic guitar and sang. Sometimes Mick would come along and play a bass that he’d borrowed from Tony. Often it would be just Bowie and me. Sometimes we’d do two or three of these pub gigs a night.

  Bowie said a particular line every night: ‘We’ve ripped off the goatskin idea from Marc Bolan!’ because Bolan’s percussionist Mickey Finn would also sit on a goatskin next to his boss. But I left it at a gig one time, so when Bowie next made the joke, there I was, with no goatskin, looking like a twat.

  Bowie was good at playing gigs with an acoustic guitar and reading bits of poetry, but when I joined him there was really no identity in what he was doing. He was just somebody who could sing and write and put it across, and, as I saw it, it wasn’t likely to attract tons of interest. But within a few weeks of playing with him I began to understand his viewpoint on music more clearly. He wasn’t the archetypal rock ’n’ roll musician at all. Most musicians can jam, for example; he either couldn’t or didn’t want to do that. He was a good guitar player, though, and incredible at putting unusual chords together; there are guitar players around today who say, ‘What the fuck is he playing there?’ when they look at his songs.

  Bowie wasn’t just a skilled musician: he could sing, he could act, he could mime, he could paint, he could design . . . there were so many options for him that at first he had difficulty assembling all his ideas and choosing the right path. He would often adopt different accents; sometimes he used to talk to us in a Yorkshire accent, but he wasn’t taking the piss. He would speak in an Australian accent if an Australian was there. Nobody pulled him up on it; that’s just how he was. He couldn’t help it – different characters seemed to flow through him. He was like that with everything: he’d see something he liked and try it on. He seemed to be able to take on a persona – Neil Young or whoever – and then write songs better in that style than that person did, and be totally authentic about it in an unforced way.

  It became obvious after a while, though, that even if Bowie hadn’t settled on the path he was going to take, he believed that he would ultimately make it in the music business. He acted like a star, and he looked like one, and he talked like one, although we could still have a laugh with him. It sounds weird, I know,
but back then I saw him as a kind of Marilyn Monroe or James Dean character. He was much more than a rock star; he wasn’t like Paul Rodgers or Robert Plant or Roger Daltrey or any of the rockers that I’d grown up listening to. He didn’t fit that mould in any way. His songs genuinely were not like anybody else’s, and they were good – really good.

  I quickly found out that Angie was an important catalyst when it came to Bowie making up his mind to do something. She pushed him in directions that she thought he should go, and he obviously valued her opinions.

  You’d hear where Bowie’s influences came from; some songs had an early sixties flavour but when you stepped back and thought about it, you realized that giving people something familiar was the right thing to do. He had the ability to duplicate things and say them in a way that was uniquely his. That’s the correct way for an artist to operate. Later, for the presentation of his songs, he pulled from fashion, he pulled from theatre and he pulled from elements of everything that he’d come across until that point.

  Our chance to take a step up came when we recorded our first album together. The Man Who Sold the World was recorded at Trident and Advision Studios in London in April and May 1970. There’ve been a lot of conflicting reports about how the songs were written, so let me set the record straight.

  Bowie wrote all the songs, but we three musicians – Mick, Tony and I – arranged most of them. Some of the songs were just chord sequences when Bowie brought them to us. He’d say, ‘This is the verse’ and ‘Here’s the chorus’ and ‘Maybe we’ll do this for the middle eight’ and so on, so we would take what Bowie had written on a twelve-string acoustic guitar and adapt it for a rock band, while rehearsing in the cellar at Haddon Hall.