Spider from Mars Read online

  A lot of attention was focused on the cover, which featured Bowie in a dress made for him by the fashion designer Michael Fish. I remember him coming downstairs in that dress one day at Haddon Hall, and telling me that he had a photo shoot. I was a little surprised, because I was still fairly new to Bowie’s ideas. A man wearing a dress just wasn’t normal, as I saw it back then, so I asked myself if he was serious. But when I realized that he was, I adjusted my expectations and started to try and appreciate what he was doing. I was definitely changing as time passed . . . It was more like a robe than a dress anyway; long, flowing and rather beautiful. In my mind it was like something from a Renaissance painting.

  Although I thought Bowie looked pretty good in that dress, I also think that with a different cover The Man Who Sold the World might have done better. I can’t imagine many Led Zeppelin fans carrying the album under their arms – it doesn’t quite go, does it? Then again, the American cover was a picture of a cowboy with a gun, pictured outside a mental institution, and it wasn’t as effective, I thought.

  Meanwhile, Ronno carried on gigging, doing covers at universities. Our set included a Bowie track, ‘Queen Bitch’, which he’d written when we were at Haddon Hall, and after we left he said, ‘Take that one, you can have it.’ That was good of him, now I come to think of it. We liked the song, but the problem was that Benny looked like a Hell’s Angel. His image fitted most of our set, but when he sang lines like ‘In her frock coat and bipperty-bopperty hat’ it didn’t quite work, although the song went down well on stage and it was great to play.

  On 14 May 1971 Ronno played the Cavern Club in Liverpool, which was a real high point for me. I remember thinking, ‘I’m setting my kit up where Ringo Starr set his up!’ It was sweaty and packed out. There were shelves all down one side of a curved wall, and I noticed that, as the night went on, pint glasses were stacking up there. Some of them were full, or nearly full, which seemed weird, because people apparently weren’t drinking their beer. But then I realized that you couldn’t get out of the club, so if you needed to piss you had to piss in the pint glasses and then put them on the shelves. The place fucking stank as a result.

  That night we were supporting a band called Tear Gas, who later went on to form the Sensational Alex Harvey Band. I remember the drummer Ted McKenna played a drum fill, and my head spun around. I was like, ‘What the fuck was that?’ because it was truly unbelievable. I met Ted afterwards and asked him about that fill. When he answered, it was as if he was speaking a foreign language.

  ‘I’m just using basic drum rudiments, Woody,’ he told me.

  I had no idea what he was talking about.

  ‘What the hell are rudiments?’

  ‘Techniques, man – the building blocks of drums,’ he went on. ‘Did you never learn them when you were a kid?’

  It was obvious that I hadn’t, so Ted showed me some of them and explained why they’re useful. That was my introduction to drum theory. I’d learned everything by ear before then, from listening to Hendrix and Cream and the Stones and so on. It really opened up the technical side for me, although it took me ages to figure out how to read and play the rudiments, as I didn’t read music. My drumming improved a hell of a lot with Ronno, and my future playing on the Bowie albums was more effective as a result.

  Not long afterwards. Mick got a call from Bowie, saying that he had new management, and asking if Mick would come back and join him again and bring a bassist and drummer with him.

  Mick’s first choices were apparently Rick Kemp and Ritchie Dharma from the Michael Chapman Band, who he’d played with before. I didn’t find out about Mick auditioning them until many years later. He could have picked them because Bowie had started writing some of the Hunky Dory songs and maybe Bowie had explained to Mick that they weren’t as ‘rocky’ as the ones on The Man Who Sold the World, but that’s just my guess. Apparently the audition didn’t work out, though. Also, Bowie wasn’t too keen on the fact that they were ‘lacking in the hair department’, according to Mick.

  Shortly after this Mick asked if I would go back to London with him.

  ‘What do you reckon, Woods? Bowie’s got a new album in the pipeline.’

  I shrugged. ‘Seems like a good idea to me. Ronno’s not doing that great, is it?’

  So the two of us went back to Haddon Hall, nine months or so after we’d left. Ronno’s Phonogram contract expired at some point, although there was a bank account that had some money in it. We couldn’t get hold of it because we three signatories were never in the same place to withdraw it. It’s still there, as far as I know.

  This time we were without Tony Visconti, who had gone off to produce other artists; his career producing T. Rex was taking off, and I think he’d received a lot of other offers. He recently told me that he was fired by Bowie’s new manager Tony Defries, but Mick and I knew nothing about that at the time. Tony and his girlfriend Liz had moved to Penge, in south London, and Mick and I took their room in Haddon Hall. By this time Bowie had written some songs for Hunky Dory and we were going to debut them on John Peel’s radio show, because Peel liked Bowie and had done sessions with him for his earlier albums. We threw ourselves into rehearsals, once again in the old wine cellar.

  Bowie’s whole vibe was different this time: he was more dynamic and more focused. He was full of new ideas and couldn’t stop talking about the plans he’d made for us. A lot of this stemmed from Tony Defries, who had been advising Bowie for a while, and had recently gone into business with Laurence Myers at GEM. Defries was the opposite of Bowie’s old manager, Ken Pitt, who as I understand it had been trying to push Bowie in directions that he didn’t want to go in – towards musicals, for example, or perhaps into light entertainment, which is funny to think of now. Bowie had said, ‘No, I’m more radical than that’, and they’d parted ways.

  Defries wasn’t exactly what you’d call a warm guy. I didn’t really interact with him; he’d come along during the recording sessions, and listen and nod at you and talk socially, but he wasn’t on our wavelength. In fact, I found out later that Defries told Visconti he had wanted to get rid of me and Mick after we’d finished recording The Man Who Sold the World. To Defries it was all about business, and indeed he was a sharp-talking, dynamic kind of guy. Bowie obviously thought that Defries was going to be a useful business partner – and it’s true that Defries ended up doing a lot of good things for him, including arranging the funding of the recording of Hunky Dory and getting Bowie a new record deal.

  Most importantly, though, Bowie had been to America in early 1971 to promote The Man Who Sold the World, while we’d been off playing with Ronno. While there he’d seen Velvet Underground play live and discovered The Stooges. The trip had completely revolutionized his thinking. Magpie that he was, Bowie had taken these influences and was incorporating them into his new songs. The songwriting was different when he came back – some of it darker, some more decadent, but it was all more lyrically expressive. Bowie’s previous approach to songwriting before The Man Who Sold the World and now Hunky Dory seemed quite quaint and English in comparison. Now it started to have shape and form. I think that seeing how Lou Reed and Iggy Pop were writing from their own viewpoint, whether people liked it or not, really helped him. Lou sang about heroin and S&M, for example, which was something of an eye-opener for us.

  Bowie played us a reel-to-reel projection of Iggy Pop and The Stooges playing live in Cincinnati which nobody had yet seen in this country. In the film, Iggy walked bare-chested and feral on the shoulders of his audience, throwing peanut butter at people. It sounds innocent, but it was quite impressive because it showed the power he had over people, and that he was unafraid to use it. Bowie played us music by the Velvet Underground, too, and we got off on the decadence of it. We also listened to Neil Young and Crazy Horse, which became another definite influence on the new album.

  The musicianship in the bands whose songs he was showing us was sometimes a little primitive and often very simple, but the poin
t was that there was definitely a spirit there – and that spirit influenced us profoundly.

  Back at Haddon Hall, Bowie talked to us at length about his new direction. In his opinion the rock ’n’ roll business had become dull; what the kids wanted and needed was excitement. He’d talk about seeing James Brown and other sixties artists who had a real, thought-out production when they played live; even if the production was a bit rubbish and vaudeville, it was still creative and exciting. He’d throw out these ideas and we’d tell him what we thought, based on the experiences we’d had.

  I’d always admired an R&B band called the Artwoods, who had had a three-year career in the mid-sixties, splitting in 1967. They included Jon Lord, who had gone on to form Deep Purple, plus Ronnie Wood’s brother Art, and Keef Hartley on drums. They weren’t really big or well known, but they had a certain something. I mentioned to Bowie that the Artwoods did a fight scene as part of their show, which looked real: the singer pretended to be pissed off at the guitarist and the guitarist would smash into him and knock him off the stage. It was exciting, and fairly punk rock in nature. I talked about this with Bowie; he and I went through lots of conversations along those lines. It turned out he was a fan of the Artwoods, too.

  The other major change when Mick and I returned to Haddon Hall was that Angie was heavily pregnant. Bowie was looking forward to being a father, and perhaps this contributed to his renewed energy at the time. I’m not sure he was what you’d call a particularly considerate husband, though: at times, Angie would be lying on their bed, in serious discomfort because she was so close to giving birth, and I’d be the only one in the place who took care of her. I didn’t do much, I admit, but at least I’d take her a cup of tea and check that she was OK.

  Although she obviously had other things on her mind, Angie was a big supporter of Bowie’s new self-confidence. She was constantly urging him to continue with these ideas, and I don’t think he had many other people of that kind around him. They were intellectuals in the way they discussed these things.

  As we watched him write more songs for Hunky Dory, we noticed the change in him. The songs were more commercial, and definitely better. You heard them once and remembered them, because they were more immediate. In a sense, this period was Bowie saying, ‘Fuck you, I can write songs! Give me a ukulele, give me a trumpet, give me anything – I’ll write you a song.’ He’d grabbed that cult American scene feel and added it to the equation. The result was good music.

  I look back now and I realize that Bowie was breaking away from what was supposed to happen in rock ’n’ roll. Other bands were sticking to the way that rock music had been in the fifties and the sixties, and the dream of the sixties had fallen on its arse because those bands thought the whole world was going to change, and it didn’t. It just went into a slump. All the enthusiasm for life that the sixties bands had had, and all their messages about how good life was going to be for a new, enlightened generation, had vanished by 1971. That’s how we saw it anyway.

  There was a period when it did look possible that my generation – the first kids after the war, who wanted nothing to do with what had come before – would change the world for the better. Drugs clouded that impulse to improve the world, though, among other things.

  In response, our attitude was ‘We’ll do it then: we’ll fucking take it somewhere.’ We weren’t going to take this apathy lying down, but it was risky, because we were going out there with something different, with baggage that had not been in rock ’n’ roll before. You might as well stick your neck out and see what happens. Good music was always behind our attitude, and when you have that you can’t fail, we believed.

  We knew that Hunky Dory was going to be different from the albums that Bowie had recorded before – more accessible and definitely more immediate. He’d sit writing songs in his lounge with his guitar, or in his bedroom, where there was a piano.

  He would shout, ‘Woody, I’ve finished a song!’ and I’d go in and he’d play it for me, and I’d usually say, ‘That’s good, I like that’, if I liked it, which I almost always did at this point because he was writing such good songs. Rarely, he’d play something less good, and I’d say, ‘It might be tricky to turn that into a rock song.’ But most of the time, the songs stunned me, they were so good.

  When Bowie was writing a song on the keyboard, the music would reverberate around the house because it was so loud, so you’d get to know the songs a little that way. You’d be walking around Haddon Hall singing them before you even played them downstairs in the cellar. This time, unlike the previous album, the songs were mostly complete when Bowie brought them to us, although we’d add our own parts, of course.

  On 30 May Zowie Bowie – who now goes by the name Duncan Jones – was born. Bowie wasn’t there at the birth (at that time men were not usually present); he was back at Haddon Hall with us. When Angie brought Zowie back, he was looked after by his nanny Susie Frost, Tony’s wife, in the basement flat, so we didn’t see much of him. Life carried on as normal, at least for Mick and me, but for David the birth of his son was obviously a prominent moment in his life.

  We still needed a bass player, so we asked Trevor Bolder to come down. He arrived the day before a pre-arranged radio session, John Peel’s In Concert on BBC Radio 1, on 3 June 1971. It was a live show and Bowie didn’t want it to only feature him singing – he wanted it quite loose and a little theatrical. He brought in Mark Carr-Pritchard on guitar and three of his friends, Geoffrey MacCormack, George Underwood and Dana Gillespie, who’d been a teenage sweetheart of Bowie’s and was also one of Tony Defries’ clients. Poor Trevor had twelve tracks to learn – overnight. I don’t think he ever recovered from the ordeal. Whenever the red light went on in the studio after that, it reminded him of that time. He admitted that it always put him on edge.

  The songs featured on the show included ‘Queen Bitch’, ‘Bombers’, ‘Supermen’, ‘Looking For a Friend’, ‘Almost Grown’, ‘Oh! You Pretty Things’, ‘Kooks’, ‘Song For Bob Dylan’, ‘Andy Warhol’ and ‘It Ain’t Easy’. The lead vocals were shared on some of these songs with David’s friends. That show was the first broadcast we’d done in front of a live audience, and the first time Trev, Mick and I had played together as Bowie’s band. It was an exciting moment and I rang June and told her we were on and to listen, which she did.

  At Haddon Hall Trev slept on the landing – obviously that was what the new apprentice had to do. His bass playing was excellent, and unusual: he played more melodically than most bassists at the time, and he was really powerful when we played the rockier tracks.

  Trevor really fitted in with the rest of us; he was a nice, quiet guy, although when he’d had a few drinks he’d talk a lot, really loudly. I remember when he visited the Sombrero for the first time. Mick and I were at Haddon Hall that night and Bowie was having a party where a lot of the guests happened to be gay. When Trev arrived back at the flat he came up to Mick and me and in a voice like a foghorn said, ‘I’ve been to this club, and you won’t believe this, but everyone there was fuckin’ gay!’

  ‘Come and have a drink, mate,’ I said, taking him to one side before he embarrassed himself any more in front of Bowie’s crowd. Bowie had overheard, but he thought it was hilarious.

  Bowie was working on a side project around the time we rejoined him, a band called Arnold Corns, whose name was inspired by Pink Floyd’s ‘Arnold Layne’. It was fronted by a clothes designer and gay friend of Bowie’s called Freddie Burretti. In hindsight, Freddie was supposed to be a sort of proto-Ziggy Stardust. The B&C label had released Arnold Corns’ awful single – versions of ‘Moonage Daydream’ and ‘Hang On To Yourself’ – in May 1971, and it disappeared without trace. That track had been recorded in February. Now Bowie wanted us to play on the new single. Mick and I were sceptical, but we’d met Freddie a few times and thought he was OK – if a bit naive – and he was certainly extremely good-looking, like a Greek god in fact! So we agreed and on 17 June, me, Mick and Trevor recorded ‘M
an in the Middle’ and (the B-side) ‘Looking For a Friend’. That was when we realized that although Freddie looked like the ultimate rock frontman, he couldn’t sing a note. The guy had no voice whatsoever. He tried to sing while Bowie sang along with him, but the recordings were terrible.

  Essentially, Bowie was attempting to create a rock star while standing outside the concept, but he decided to do it himself when it didn’t work out. The rock star character he’d created gave him a viewpoint to operate from, as I understand it, although he had no idea how far it would evolve.

  At the same time, Tony Defries had arranged to demo a new Bowie song to attract RCA into a record deal, so we recorded a cover of ‘It Ain’t Easy’ by Ron Davies down at Trident. Dana Gillespie did backing vocals on that song, and we also recorded a rocked-up version of ‘Andy Warhol’ with her. Defries had Bowie on one side of the demo tape and Dana on the other because he was shopping for deals for both.

  But these were distractions from the main issue, recording the new album. It was a lot of fun; Tony Defries did introduce us to good food, I’ll give him that. After the recording sessions we’d go to this little restaurant that was behind a door on Oxford Street. You’d never think there was a restaurant there, but it was a family place, upstairs in someone’s home. You’d go up and there’d be about eight tables with white tablecloths. We’d start with a massive bowl of king prawns on ice, and then we’d have spare ribs to die for. Defries knew his wine, too. We’d be there until three or four in the morning; it used to be a great night out.