Spider from Mars Read online

  Mick and Bowie did most of the arrangements this time, and Bowie and Ken Scott shared the production credits. Mick had worked closely with Tony Visconti on The Man Who Sold the World and it sparked a real desire in him to be a producer and strings arranger. He’d watch his mentor, Tony, like a hawk and say, ‘What’s that you’re doing?’, ‘How do you do that . . . how do you do this?’ During those sessions he’d help Tony write out string parts.

  We were learning fast as musicians. Mick, Trevor and I listened back to the songs on The Man Who Sold the World and discussed them in great detail; from the drummer’s perspective I started to think about less being more. Later, ‘less is more’ became a catchphrase in the business, but back then it really wasn’t common to put it into practice. Compare the drum parts on the two albums, recorded less than a year apart, and the differences are like night and day.

  Any recording drummer’s job is to find a beat that makes sense within a given song. After all, the first thing that people hear when they listen to a piece of music is generally the beat. They’re tapping their foot to it before they even know the song has started. That was the approach that I took.

  My job was to find the drum parts that integrated with the song’s meaning, and that made me concentrate more on what I was doing and what Bowie needed. I noticed that some drummers would only hit a cymbal once, right at the end of a song – and the effect would be so right, and so spot on, that it twisted my head around about playing drums. It made me put the emphasis back on what a song sounds like on piano or guitar, when it has a clear rhythm running through it but no actual drum beat as yet.

  Bowie never told me what he wanted when we were recording Hunky Dory; the one time I went a bit too hard rock on him he let me know straight away. That was understood. I didn’t need his direction, and he willingly let me do my job and trusted me to do it.

  That sounds funny, maybe even arrogant, although that’s not the intention – but you ask a person what they want and they tell you, and then you decide, based on your knowledge of rhythm, if they’re right or not. If you record what they ask you to record, and it’s not right for the song, you can’t blame anyone else afterwards, can you? That’s exactly how it was with Bowie. I made my own decisions about what was needed and what was right for the songs. The same principles apply to life in general.

  What Bowie’s songs really needed was a groove that didn’t detract from the melodies and the vocals, and which had exactly the right drum sound. If I could figure out some cool drum fills that would end up being hooks for the songs, so much the better – and then my job would be done.

  When I was recording songs with Bowie, I was sometimes tempted to go a bit mental and overplay, but that would have been unnecessary, and perhaps destructive to the tone of the album, even if Bowie had permitted it. I could have fitted in some more extravagant parts here and there, but they wouldn’t have contributed to the song, and that’s what counts. It would have just been me showing what I could do, so I discarded that viewpoint all together for Hunky Dory.

  Mick and Trevor completely understood what I was saying about ensuring that everything was right for the feel of the song. Bowie wasn’t usually part of those conversations: he got bored quickly in the studio, so we didn’t have long to record our parts or to work them out. He was flighty, and he wasn’t into long discussions about the songs, so we had to nail our parts quickly.

  I don’t mean to imply that Bowie wasn’t focused on the music; he certainly was. Angie wasn’t around much for these sessions, and Bowie was very into getting everything right. He and Mick would arrange the songs. They’d say, ‘Let’s do intro, verse, chorus, verse, verse, middle eight, verse, outro’, and that would be it. Putting the songs in order was simple, although someone had to do it, and I’m not diminishing the importance of doing it. When it came to the actual notes we played, that was our job.

  We spent a lot of time getting everything right. Trevor and I spent many hours practising together as a rhythm section, so that the bass and drums would be locked in as one. You can feel the groove lock down when that happens. As musicians, we really loved that feeling. In the studio it might be a few takes before that locking in happened and we were settled into the right groove – but we never had that luxury with Bowie.

  It was close enough most of the time, and in fact we got used to his way of operating later on, and were able to lock in with each other quickly, but in the early days we were required to get it by a certain take, which made the early sessions difficult. We’d play a song together twice, and he’d say, ‘OK, that’s done. Next song!’ and we’d say ‘What?’

  I’d say, ‘We’ve only played it twice, and only once correctly, so if we do it again, we can probably get a better one’ – but he’d say, ‘No, it’s perfect.’ When this first started happening, Mick, Trevor and I would say to each other, ‘He’s mental – maybe he doesn’t realize how good we can get it?’ But then Bowie would record a vocal on a song, and then re-record his twelve-string guitar, and we’d say, ‘Fucking hell, he was right.’

  I started to realize that while Bowie wanted the parts played correctly, more importantly he wanted them to sound fresh. If you record multiple takes of a song, you automatically end up playing from memory of what worked on a previous take and so the recording loses that freshness and spontaneity. You end up copying yourself rather than creating something new.

  Bowie knew his own mind, and tolerated no other opinions apart from ours. I remember during one of the sessions, one of the apprentice tape operators ventured an opinion of a song part we were discussing. The room went deadly quiet; nobody acknowledged his opinion and ten minutes later he was replaced.

  Hunky Dory was a new approach for all of us; we all went through a growing process to a certain extent, not just Bowie. Mick was a master at finding hooks that would stick in your head, and Trevor was an unusual bass player in that he never played obvious lines. His bass parts would give Mick ideas for guitar parts, so we all had a real rapport. My approach, as I’ve said, was to play totally for the song; a lot of musicians say that, but we did it better than most.

  Nearly every Sunday morning through this period Bowie’s mother, Peggy Jones, would come over to Haddon Hall. She was very normal – not what you’d expect David Bowie’s mother to be like at all. She looked like any other woman in her late fifties, with carefully arranged hair and a long coat. Bowie’s father, John, had died of pneumonia in 1969, just two years before; his Riley was the car that Bowie drove.

  I remember once Peggy came up to the landing where Mick and I were sleeping and brought us a cup of tea and a biscuit. Mick woke up suddenly, thinking it was the day of a recording session.

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘It’s ten past nine,’ she said.

  The session the following day was due to start at nine, so Mick leapt out of his sleeping bag, bollock-naked. Peggy screamed, dropped the tray and ran downstairs.

  ‘Mick, it’s Sunday, not fucking Monday!’ I shouted but he was so stressed he didn’t understand what I was saying. We called him ‘Flasher Ronson’ for the next two months.

  Peggy was great; she’d tell Bowie off for this, that and the other.

  ‘Are you eating enough?’ she’d ask him every time she came over. ‘You’re ever so thin.’

  ‘Yes, Mother,’ he said, like an obedient son. ‘Angie looks after me.’

  We all exchanged glances. It was funny to see him feeling uncomfortable for a change.

  We’d all sit at the table for a Sunday roast cooked by Peggy and Angie, band and family mixed together. Bowie’s half-brother, Terry Burns, who was ten years older than him, would sometimes come too. He had suffered from schizophrenia and had no filter on what he said. You’d ask, ‘What have you been up to, Terry?’ and he’d reply, ‘I’ve been wanking.’ His mother would say, ‘I don’t think people want to hear about that at the dinner table’, while we tried not to laugh.

  Poor Terry killed himself in 1985, but in
a way I always thought his influence on Bowie brought him a certain immortality. All the songs about madmen and madness that Bowie wrote in the years when I was with him – they definitely had their roots in Terry’s schizophrenia.

  After our Sunday with the Joneses it was back to work on Hunky Dory. Ken Scott, who had become famous for working as an engineer on the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour and ‘White Album’, and had also engineered Bowie’s previous two albums, was a stickler for detail when it came to getting sounds. He had it all to prove, because Hunky Dory was his first full production gig.

  Years later, Ken told me he had taken on the job with David thinking it wouldn’t matter if his first album production wasn’t very good, as it probably wouldn’t be that successful anyway. When David played him the songs for the album, Ken thought to himself, ‘Oh shit. These are great songs. This guy’s really got something.’

  Ken would often spend half a day getting a drum sound. Sometimes a tom-tom might be ringing or buzzing a bit, so he’d stick ciggie packets on the skins to get them to sound perfect. The result was terrific. Ken wanted the sounds to integrate and belong together, and he put real quality in there. He definitely had the right pedigree. He was a nice guy, and what was most important was that Bowie respected him and listened to his suggestions. He admired Ken’s attitude, which was that producers could bring some personality and charisma of their own to recordings, rather than merely tweaking the faders on the console.

  I think Ken’s contributions played a major part in the success of these albums, not only because of the quality of the sound and his impeccable mixing ability, but because he managed to make the tracks timeless. Ken and I got on well. We’d go round to his house for dinner and the occasional party. They were always great nights. I enjoyed my first fondue at Ken’s house, the new thing for dinner parties at the time.

  We’d worked on some of the songs in our rehearsal room at Haddon Hall. This was mainly to give Bowie and Mick a chance to get ideas for the arrangements. The recording itself didn’t always go perfectly smoothly. Bowie would tell us on a given Friday which songs we were going to record the following Monday and we’d work on those over the weekend. But then he’d often ask us to do completely different ones when Monday came, so all that time was wasted. We’d tell him we didn’t know those tunes, so he’d play them to us twice, and roll the tape. Just before the red light came on, I’d be desperately asking, ‘How does this end?’ You really had to nail it by the third take because Bowie got bored so quickly and the atmosphere would get pretty dark if that happened. We made sure we always got it down by then.

  As a result, we were all on a knife edge in the studio, and it could be stressful. You had to work out how to pull off what was needed, because, as I’ve said, Bowie rarely gave you any direction. He didn’t really know how to discuss specific notes and feels, so you had to find it yourself – and quickly – which made you play with a lot of attention to getting it right.

  We played with feeling on the Hunky Dory songs. For example, we’d heard Bowie playing ‘Oh! You Pretty Things’ at Haddon Hall when he was first writing it, and Mick said then that we needed a lift in the choruses from the drums. I worked out a quirky snare, bass drum and hi-hat pattern that worked and didn’t get in the way.

  There was a lot of that going on. ‘Quicksand’ is a good example of what I’m saying here, because the whole feel of that song was apathy. Everything was hopeless, and we had to go there with the right emotion.

  We’d learned our craft playing blues, and you can’t play blues properly unless you can feel it. You have to concentrate on the emotional side of the music, and when I played with Bowie the music pulled on that side of me. He wasn’t a blues musician, but I had to back up the emotion that was going on lyrically and musically. He revisited those emotions on all the records I played on, from The Man Who Sold the World to Aladdin Sane. He was trying to say similar things each time, but in a more immediate or different way.

  By the time we recorded Hunky Dory I thought Bowie’s voice had improved a huge amount from The Man Who Sold the World. When he did the vocals, he did them quickly because he wanted to keep them fresh and uncomplicated. He was keen to lay down the music and get the song done, so he’d sing a vocal and it would be note-perfect in the first take. He’d ask Ken, ‘Was that OK?’ and Ken would nod.

  ‘I’ll sing another one and you can mix them together,’ Bowie would say.

  After he was done there’d be a stunned silence from Ken, because doing two note-perfect takes like that is practically impossible. But David would do it, and Ken would be fiddling with his moustache, saying, ‘Fucking hell . . . that is spot on.’ He’d play back both takes simultaneously, but you couldn’t hear the two separate vocal tracks, just a thickened version of the first one.

  What impressed me so much was all this musical ability was just the tip of Bowie’s talent. There was so much else going on there, and it all tied together in a way that hadn’t been completely obvious the first time I saw it. For instance, the first time I saw Bowie doing mime, I thought, ‘What the fuck has that got to do with rock ’n’ roll?’ But then I realized that he was coming at it from outside music, so to speak. He was standing on the outside, looking in, and using whatever he needed for his intended effect.

  The opening cut on the album was ‘Changes’. I’ve always thought the line ‘Every time I thought I’d got it made, it seemed the taste was not so sweet’ was about ‘Space Oddity’. He thought he’d made it with that song; then he found out that he hadn’t made it after all. He was almost admitting it had been a false start. The song encapsulated the ups and downs he’d experienced, and made it clear that he was going to keep on changing until he got it right.

  Musically, Hunky Dory is a step forward, too. With ‘Changes’ you can hear that we have more experience as players, thanks to everything that we’d been through. At the same time, Bowie’s songs were more understandable while still putting across his points of view. He seemed more certain of how to express himself now.

  I was particularly pleased with the drums on ‘Changes’, because I managed to pull off a balance of economy and expression on that song. My aim was to find a feel that allowed Bowie’s vocal to breathe. He needed enough space and time to express himself, and my drums had to make that happen. For that reason there’s a lot of space in this song where I don’t play anything.

  With a lot of his songs I would ask myself what the pulse needed to be to drive the song along. One of the keys to a successful piece of music is the beat. I don’t care what kind of music it is; the rhythmic pulse is the carrier wave for the song, while the lyrics carry the message. Whether that song impinges on a person or not, that remains true. You can depress people with drums, too: play a little slower and you’ll have them on the floor. You can do both in the same song; in fact, you can create whatever emotion you want in your groove.

  On ‘Oh! You Pretty Things’ the drums don’t come in until the chorus. That was planned. When it came to the arrangements this time, either David would have done them already, or he and Mick would work on them together. I had to serve the song, stay on the money and not be brash. For example, we tried recording drums for ‘Eight Line Poem’, but they were too much for it. It was all about giving the songs what they needed.

  The highlight of Hunky Dory for me, and indeed of all the songs I recorded with Bowie, is ‘Life on Mars?’, which I think is magnificent. We got Rick Wakeman in to play the piano. Rick, who is an absolute virtuoso, had worked with Bowie on ‘Space Oddity’ as he was the only session player around who had a Mellotron at the time. This time, Bowie said to him, ‘Do your thing as a keyboard player, but treat it as a piano piece.’

  We’d only previously heard ‘Life on Mars?’ with Bowie plinking away on the piano; he could change chords, but he didn’t add any flourishes or embellishments, so when Rick started playing it we were gobsmacked. Incidentally, the piano at Trident that Rick used was the same one as used on the Beatles’ ‘H
ey Jude’ and later by Freddie Mercury on Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’.

  Rick’s playing on ‘Life on Mars?’ is the best piano recording on a rock song ever, in my opinion, and it’s the track I’m most proud of from the whole of my career. The song totally came to life in the studio. Mick and I worked out beforehand how the drums had to be, as Bowie wanted quite a lavish string arrangement. Mick played me the outline of the arrangement on guitar, so I could work out how the drums would fit. At the time I remember approaching it with the concept of ‘John Bonham plays classical music’.

  This was Mick’s first big string arrangement and it was unbelievably stressful for him. He was quite a nervous person; sometimes his hands would shake. He really wasn’t the confident showman that you saw on stage. It was even more difficult because in those days you used the BBC’s string players as session musicians, and they were very conservative. They were good players, but it was impossible to build any kind of rapport with them because we inhabited such different worlds.

  Mick knew that he was going to have to deal with them – and even conduct them. On the day, the string players came to Trident and took their seats, ready for the session. Bowie and I were looking through the large glass window in the control room at the scene below. We watched Mick walk into the studio and introduce himself.

  They didn’t look that impressed; in fact, they seemed almost resentful.

  Mick then stood in front of them and carefully rolled a cigarette. As a way of taking charge of the scene I thought this was a stroke of genius. The musicians then played the arrangement twice, which Bowie and I thought was amazing; we gave Mick the thumbs up. The leader of the string section then said to Mick, ‘We love the arrangement, but we’d like to do another one. I think we can do it better.’ This was unheard of. String musicians usually want to get in and out of the studio as quickly as possible. The next take was the one that ended up on the album. All this was amazing to witness.