Spider from Mars Read online

  On the later albums it wasn’t done that way: Bowie nearly always brought completed songs to us, with at least a sequence of verse, chorus, middle eight and so on. On The Man Who Sold the World, the basic structures of the individual sections were there, but they didn’t always join up, so Tony and Mick did some work on that.

  During the recording of The Man Who Sold the World, Tony became Mick’s mentor. Mick was really interested in how to record, and how to arrange strings, and he’d help Tony write the arrangements out. After all, Tony was a fully-fledged, successful producer so Mick followed a lot of his instructions. We all benefited hugely from Tony’s experience and willingness to share it with us. Bowie was lucky to have him on board, and I wasn’t surprised that they remained friends and colleagues for the rest of Bowie’s life.

  Tony had some great ideas, and used them to make The Man Who Sold the World sound the way it needed to sound – although he also asked Mick for some advice. He’d say, ‘What kind of bass playing should I do on this album?’ and Mick would tell him, ‘Learn how to play like Jack Bruce and we’ll be all right!’

  I remember the day Tony brought me a guiro, a Latin American percussion instrument that he wanted me to play. He obviously assumed that I knew about percussion, but I looked at this hollow cylinder, with ridges down one side and a hole at the end, and thought, ‘What the fuck do I do with this?’

  ‘Do I blow across the hole?’ I asked.

  He said, ‘No, you prat!’ and gave me a stick to rub across the ridges, producing a ratchet sound. You can hear it on the title track. Then he gave me wood blocks, castanets, timpani and other things I’d never played before and showed me how to use them; he really expanded my vocabulary, and I began to feel like a genuine musician.

  While all this was going on, Bowie spent a lot of time with Angie. When he showed up at the studio, he usually just sat on a sofa in reception with her. The fact that Bowie was out there doing that was frustrating Tony no end, because he didn’t work like that; he wanted the principal artist on board the whole time. I think they had a bit of a bust-up about it. When Bowie came in and completed the songs with his vocals, the argument dissipated, though.

  It wasn’t too difficult for us to play the songs, complex as some of them were. Some of the drum parts on the album were fairly tricky, though. When I was getting ready to record, I tried out the parts in my head, thinking, ‘I’ve got to play this particular drum roll somewhere.’ I listen back to some of the parts now and I think, ‘How the hell did I play that?’

  We jammed a lot of the album; we knew what the songs were about, so we played around until we found something that worked. It was really loose, like all the music that I liked in the seventies, such as Zeppelin and King Crimson. People say Zep were so tight, but if you listen you can hear John Bonham going out of time. It doesn’t matter, though; that’s what rock ’n’ roll always was for me. Nowadays there are more rules, which to me have screwed up what rock is supposed to be about.

  When the three of us were recording those tracks, it was fun working as a team to find the right parts. We set up our equipment in the studio like we would for a live concert: drums in the middle, Mick on my left, Tony on the right and Bowie out front. As we had a lot of parts to create for the songs, it seemed the best position to do this from. We had a collective mission to make all the songs as exciting as we could. This was, after all, my first time recording in a major studio, so it was a big deal for me and there was a lot to learn. It was great having Tony to work with, with all his experience.

  During the recording of the album, we mostly drank tea and coffee. Maybe Mick would have an occasional lager. It was totally disciplined and very work-oriented. After the album was finished, back at Haddon Hall, it was totally different: there were parties every weekend.

  Marc Bolan was there quite a bit. He was the same age as Bowie, and they had been friends since 1964, when they’d been hired to paint the walls at an office owned by their then manager, Les Conn. Like Bowie, he was undergoing a period of transition. Tyrannosaurus Rex had had minor hits with singles ‘Debora’ and ‘One Inch Rock’ and his fourth album, A Beard of Stars, had been released just before I joined Bowie’s band, getting to 21 in the charts. Now Marc was also switching from acoustic hippy folk to a rockier sound and Visconti was going to produce and play bass on their next album that summer.

  Bolan behaved like a pop star in that he loved being the centre of attention, but he didn’t do this in an annoying way, I should add. He was similar to Bowie in that sense, although he was a lot more precious about everything. I remember once he came around wearing a black cape, a floppy hat and ballet shoes.

  I once asked him about his songwriting methods, and he told me, ‘I have a tape recorder in every room, so I don’t forget any ideas. I even have one in the toilet.’

  I thought that was a touch excessive, but I was impressed when he told me he’d had guitar lessons from Eric Clapton.

  Bolan and Bowie were good friends, although they were rivals underneath their friendship, but it wasn’t a hindrance in any way. In their heads, they were both going to be the next big thing.

  I also met Arthur Brown that year, although he seemed a bit lost to me. His band, the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, had had a massive hit two years before with ‘Fire’, but when I asked him what he was up to, he didn’t seem to know.

  ‘My band split up last year,’ he told me.

  ‘So what are you going to do now?’ I asked.

  He just shrugged, and that was it from him.

  I got on better with the singer-songwriter Roy Harper, who played at Haddon Hall once. His fourth album, Flat Baroque and Berserk, had come out a couple of months before I met him and had been his most successful so far, getting to 20 in the charts. The night he played, Mick and I got stoned in the basement flat, where Bowie’s friend Tony Frost lived. I think he worked as a bodyguard and bouncer at a London club but that’s as much as I gleaned from him. He had the same sound system in his basement that you’d have in a club, so we used to go down there and listen to music. Frost also had the best grass in London, so we’d get stoned while listening to reggae.

  So we had a joint with him, and then we came upstairs because a party was on, with the Bowies’ set of friends in attendance, and we knew that Roy Harper was going to get up and play. This wasn’t a particularly easy thing to do. Around the main hall there were flats with pensioners and families living in them, and we had to keep the music fairly quiet as a result, especially late at night. Roy had been told to keep the volume down, so at first he played quietly. The crowd sat silently, listening and passing joints around.

  At one point, though, Roy really let rip and started playing unexpectedly loudly – at full blast. Me and Mick instantly lost it, laughing our heads off, and ended up crawling under the table because we couldn’t handle it. People thought we were laughing at Roy, and told us to shut the fuck up, but we weren’t being disrespectful; it was just that we were stoned and at any second we expected people to burst out of the upstairs flats and kick everybody out.

  On other occasions, Bowie played us reel-to-reel films of Lindsay Kemp, the mime artist and dancer who had taught him to mime. I thought Kemp’s image was a bit strange, although I could see that he was interesting from an artistic point of view, even at this early stage. I just couldn’t see how his art was relevant to anything that we were going to do. Of course, I evolved from that position as time passed and my horizons broadened.

  All I really knew at this time was that I wanted our band to succeed, because I was pretty ambitious. I realized that I wanted to be in the next big band – and not just in any big band, but the biggest band. I hoped Bowie would choose the right way to make this happen, and I wanted to help him succeed.

  I remember when The Man Who Sold the World was finished and the mix completed, Bowie put it on at Haddon Hall and as we sat around and listened to it we were all really excited. As I mentioned before, it had been our first time in the
studio with a proper producer, and now we had the chance to hear what we’d created. I had no idea what my drumming was going to sound like, and Mick didn’t know how his guitar playing would come across.

  As I listened, I thought we’d done a great job. My skills were still coming along at the time, but I had a good feel for when to sit back and when to step up with the drums. A lot of the bands we’d grown up with would often have improvised sections in their songs that gave a feeling of freedom, even though they still followed a structured arrangement, and that was what we did on The Man Who Sold the World. Cream and Zeppelin were particularly good at that. It was a natural way for us to think; we weren’t thinking of the songs as especially structured.

  Bowie had already written most of the first song, ‘Width of a Circle’, before we went into the studio. It was one of the few songs that was almost complete when we went in. Drums-wise, it was just a case of me finding the right beat. The second part of the song, which has a different tempo, didn’t exist until we came up with it through jamming in the studio. Bowie added a melody and vocals to that part later.

  On ‘All the Madmen’, Tony had the idea of having a bolero section, where he encouraged me to play on the bell of the ride cymbal, and make a little tune out of the cymbals. As for ‘Black Country Rock’, I never knew what this song was about. I just knew that once you’d heard that riff it would stick in your head for days. Some good music had come out of the Midlands; maybe that’s what the song was about.

  ‘After All’ was one of the first examples of Bowie’s odd take on life. The idea behind the song was that we all grow old, but that we still remain children at heart. For a gentle song like this one, my drums had to be subtle; it was mainly a hi-hat, just keeping it together, and occasionally a bit of ride cymbal and floor toms.

  On ‘Running Gun Blues’, there are floor toms with echo on at the beginning, and you can hear me playing the tambourine. It was a dark subject: a soldier who has returned from war and he still has his gun, and he wants to kill people. It seems more relevant today than ever. ‘Saviour Machine’ is a sci-fi song about a president who had invented a machine that controlled everything in the world, from the weather to disease. Unfortunately the machine got bored and was begging to be disconnected, thinking of starting wars or creating a plague to relieve the tedium. It had some really cool time changes in it, and musically was quite challenging to play. It is also relevant, because the world’s getting a bit like that, isn’t it? More and more control being handed over to machines.

  There are some big drums in ‘She Shook Me Cold’. In this song we were being out-and-out raw and sexual – well, at least I was! I still think Mick’s guitar intro on this song is probably the rudest, dirtiest guitar ever recorded. ‘The Man Who Sold the World’ is such a cool song and probably the best-known recorded track on the album, later covered by Lulu and Nirvana. I’m also playing the guiro and the maracas in this one. Finally, the theme of ‘The Supermen’ comes from Friedrich Nietzsche; I wanted to feel like a superman when I played it, almost like Thor with his war hammer. I did feel that way, too. I also backed up the drums with tuned timpani, which I loved playing.

  Those subjects – Nietzsche among them – would come up in conversation with Bowie, but we didn’t really dwell on them. He’d say that this song was about the future of man, where machines have developed their own consciousness. These were wild concepts.

  The Man Who Sold the World is an interesting album because it didn’t have a commercial attitude behind it. We played whatever we were inspired to play, as opposed to someone telling us that a song was going to be a single so it needed to be three and a half minutes long. That wasn’t part of the game on this album, so I really expressed myself.

  It was our Sgt. Pepper, if you like, at least in progressive rock terms. I’m making that comparison because on these songs we were able to open up and do whatever we felt was right. The three of us let it all out on our instruments, and then came back together and clicked on certain sections. We had a Moog synth as well, played by the Bowies’ friend Ralph Mace, which was about the size of a room with what looked like a thousand leads!

  This was a big album, and pretty bizarre in some ways, but we all trusted Tony to know what he was doing so we could step up and let rip if we wanted to. That’s a great feeling to have when you’re recording – a sense of security because the producer knows what he’s up to. If it ever got too weird or too far from the point, Tony would say something. He’d occasionally give me some instructions about the drums, but he was going by the feel of it because he was also new to this kind of music. If he heard something he liked, he’d ask us to repeat it.

  So much of The Man Who Sold the World was guided by feel. When I look back at it I can see that Bowie was experimenting with a new sound. For me, this album was Bowie jumping into rock ’n’ roll with both feet.

  It’s incredible that he could still write such great songs among all the confusion. In some ways the whole year of 1970 was a mess. Our band was new, and firing on all cylinders, but none of us – least of all Bowie – knew what direction was right for us. We were having fun, but fun wasn’t enough.

  4

  OH! YOU PRETTY THINGS

  After recording The Man Who Sold the World, all four of us wanted to go out and tour the songs live, but that didn’t work because there was no money to buy a van and equipment. There was no booking agent that I know of, Bowie was in the process of splitting with his manager Ken Pitt, and his champion at Vertigo, Olav Wyper, had left the company. It seemed as if there was nobody on his side.

  We started to miss playing gigs. There’s only so much rehearsing you can do, after all. Maybe Bowie wouldn’t even have got booked to play live at the time, despite the fact that ‘Space Oddity’ had reached Number 5 the previous summer. By now it seemed that hardly anyone knew who he was, proved by the fact that he and I had been playing as a duo in front of small pub crowds.

  So nothing was really happening in the summer of that year, and living on seven pounds a week was becoming difficult, with no gig money coming in. Mick and I were getting a bit disillusioned, and Bowie had pissed us off a bit when he sang ‘Black Country Rock’. That’s a great song, but for some reason he felt he had to sing it like a caricature of Marc Bolan. We weren’t fans of Bolan’s ‘oh-ow-oww’ singing voice, so when he started singing it like that, Mick and I said to each other, ‘Fucking hell. I can’t go out on stage if he’s going to sing like that!’ Even though it was just one song, it really grated with us for some reason.

  We knew Bowie had plans for us, because he told us that he wanted two musical entities to exist – us as the Hype, and himself as a solo artist. Angie went to Phonogram and persuaded them to give the Hype a £4,000 album deal, and so we now began thinking about having not one but two possible careers ahead of us.

  That August, Bowie had a gig at Leeds University. He was going up there in his car, a Riley – we’d demoed a song about it, actually, called ‘Rupert the Riley’ – and Mick and I were in another car with the gear. On the way up there we came to a crossroads with signs pointing to Hull or Leeds, and we just looked at each other.

  ‘What are you thinking, mate?’

  We both started laughing and said to the driver, ‘Take us to Hull!’

  So that was it: we went back to Hull and left Bowie to his own devices. He did the show that night solo, on an acoustic guitar. I suppose he must have been a bit pissed off with us, but he never said anything. The following year, Angie did mention in passing ‘the famous gig that you guys didn’t show up to’, but it was said in good humour and clearly it was all water under the bridge at that point.

  I stayed with June, who was now renting her own house in Hull. I didn’t go back to Driffield; in fact, I barely even spoke with my parents at this point. I knew they’d think my career as a musician had failed, but I had no intention of giving up on the Hype. We got our old singer Benny Marshall back from our previous band the Rats, renamed the Hype R
onno – after Mick’s nickname – and found an agent. He got us gigs, so now we needed a bass player. Geoff Appleby of the Rats helped us out for a few gigs, but we needed someone who could commit to us permanently.

  The obvious choice was a guy called Trevor Bolder who had stepped up once, when the Rats’ then bass player Keith Cheeseman kept getting electrocuted at a gig, which was at a youth club. There had been something wrong with the wiring and it kept giving him shocks, so he wouldn’t play. Trevor was a mate of Keith’s and had come along to watch. We knew he played bass so we asked if he’d take over and he bravely did! We saw then that he had tons of presence and playing ability. Now we asked him if he would come and play bass with us in Ronno, and he agreed to.

  Trevor had a beard when I first met him; it was later that he grew his sideburns long, when we adopted the glamorous image.

  So now, in Ronno, we had two bass players, because Visconti was still playing bass with us. There are photos of us with both him and Trevor, but we never played live with both of them. The record deal enabled us to buy equipment and record with Tony as our producer, but none of us were real songwriters and we didn’t really have enough material for a full album. In January 1971 we did release a single called ‘4th Hour of My Sleep’, which was written by an American called Tucker Zimmerman who was signed to Fly, Bolan’s label. Tony had produced his 1969 album Ten Songs. The B-side was called ‘Powers of Darkness’, which is a pretty heavy, Black Sabbath-type song. We even shot a promotional film at the Marquee, although it was only shown in Scandinavia, and the single didn’t get anywhere.

  Tony had much more success with Marc Bolan, whose single ‘Ride a White Swan’ had come out in October and by late January had reached number 2 in the charts. The album T. Rex was also a hit and it seemed that Bolan was going to find stardom before Bowie. The Man Who Sold the World was released in April 1971 in the UK and, after all the hard work we’d put into it, didn’t sell many copies in the UK, although it was reasonably popular in America (where it came out in November 1970). It didn’t make the charts in either country until it was reissued two years later. Maybe it was too obscure for its time, with its lyrics about soldiers going mad and Nietzschean themes. Perhaps the public wanted to hear blues-rock bands like Led Zeppelin more than this kind of heavy, arty approach. I still love it, though.