The year 1972 was shaping up to be an insane one for us. An English tour was booked from January until September; The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars was set to come out in June on RCA, even though we were still flying high because Hunky Dory had just been released; and, in the autumn, we were going to America for the very first time as a band.
What could possibly go wrong?
It’s hard to imagine now, but ridicule and career suicide were very real concerns. We knew our music was brilliant, but our look . . . Our ‘education’ on showmanship and image had started back in Haddon Hall around the time we were recording Ziggy. We always had weekends off and David used them.
‘There’s a play in London that I’d like us all to go and see,’ he announced one day.
‘What’s it called?’ I asked.
‘I don’t give a shit what it’s called,’ he said. ‘The lighting director there is really good and I want you to get an idea of what can be done with lights.’
Looking back, I suppose that, at the time, bands would use red, green and yellow lights and possibly a strobe light. It was very basic. So he more or less asked us to watch the lighting, not the play. It was quite an eye-opener when we saw how the lights integrated with the music and the scene on the stage, and helped create more impact.
Once we even went to see a ballet – I think it was The Nutcracker – which was funny because we all thought it was just a night out and we bought popcorn, crisps and Cokes before we went in. When the performance started we had to very gently place these things on the floor as they were too noisy to devour! I actually enjoyed the ballet, which surprised me. And once again we saw how the lighting added so much to the performance.
David was tackling us on the clothes front too. We had a bit of a clothes allowance now and so we started to shop on the fashionable King’s Road in Chelsea. We particularly liked Alkasura – which was a favourite of Marc Bolan – and Mr Fish (owned by Michael Fish, who’d designed the dress Bowie wore on the front of The Man Who Sold the World). Freddie Burretti, David’s friend and clothes designer, had also introduced us to Stirling Cooper clothes, which we liked because of the cut of the jackets and the trousers, which were more like jeans and fitted well around the crutch. Very rock ’n’ roll.
I remember the first time we went to these chic clothes shops, Bowie bought a black and green striped satin suit. I bought a brown velvet jacket with a peplum and embroidery down the front, and a mustard-yellow canvas jacket. Mick got a suede jacket that had multicoloured snakeskin lapels. We also bought t-shirts with unique designs.
The femininity and sheer outrageousness of the offstage clothes, let alone the soon to come onstage gear, was a stretch for us at first, I admit. But after a while, we calmed down and got used to the idea. We knew we couldn’t just wear jeans and t-shirts any more, on or offstage. It wouldn’t have worked. Plus we got used to standing out in a crowd, pretty quickly I might add. So it definitely appealed to our rebellious artistic instincts.
For shoes, more prosaically we went to Russell & Bromley. I remember the sales assistant looking at our selection and saying, ‘You do know these are girls’ shoes?’ We did! They looked better and more stylish than any men’s shoes and complemented our new clothes. It’s quite ironic that Mick, Trevor and I chose these ourselves, considering our initial reaction to what we’d be wearing on stage in a short while.
So we had started to look more like a rock ’n’ roll band. At least, we thought we did.
One weekend at Haddon Hall Bowie started to talk about our stage clothes. He mentioned the films A Clockwork Orange and 2001, A Space Odyssey which we all loved. He said he liked the look of the ‘Droogs’ in A Clockwork Orange – who were dressed the same, all in white, their trousers tucked into black ankle boots – and thought we should look like a gang. He then showed us some drawings he’d done, of collarless bomber jackets with zip-up fronts and lace-up boots which almost came up to the knee. I think at the time we just shrugged it off as an ‘idea’, although we did like the concept of being a gang.
A week later we found ourselves in the fabrics department of Liberty of London, following David and Angie as they sorted through the shelves. Occasionally they’d ask us, ‘What do you think to this?’ We hadn’t really joined up the dots at this point so we’d answer dismissively, ‘It’s all right.’ Between ourselves we’d be saying, ‘This isn’t really rock ’n’ roll, is it!’
Having said that, the four of us had been to see Alice Cooper at the Rainbow, Finsbury Park, when he toured the UK in 1971 and his band wore very similar outfits to the ones we eventually had made, although I think theirs were less stylish and less well made, and they didn’t have the boots. (Funnily enough his band was originally called the Spiders, before becoming the Nazz and then simply Alice Cooper.)
Back in Beckenham swatches of the fabrics they’d chosen were brought out. Freddie Burretti had helped refine Bowie’s concept and it was he who’d suggested the outfits should be different colours – pink, blue and gold – so we had the gang image but it was less menacing than the ‘all white’ of the Droogs. It was decided that Trev would look best in blue as he had dark brown hair. Angie suggested that Mick would look best in gold as he had blond hair. That only left one colour!
‘I’m not too sure about pink!’ I said.
‘I know what you mean,’ Bowie said thoughtfully, ‘but it takes a real man to wear pink and pull it off.’
I obviously fell for this line as that’s what I ended up wearing.
The Droogs also wore a codpiece and Freddie used an idea from the Stirling Cooper jeans to simulate this idea, adding a separate piece of fabric cut in a zigzag from the waist down to the crotch on either side. (The influence of A Clockwork Orange was also heard in the live show, because we used the electronic version of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony from the film’s soundtrack to open every gig.)
We had a second set of outfits that were just as outrageous. Mine was a brown and gold top with gold lamé trousers. Trev had another blue outfit but the top was made from a flock material. Mick’s was a sequined maroon jacket and black trousers. Bowie had a black and white flock top with white satin trousers. They were all made in the same style: collarless bomber jackets and tucked-in trousers. All these clothes were made by Susie Frost, Zowie’s nanny. Freddie may have helped make some of Bowie’s outfits, too.
The boots were a kind of trendy looking wrestling boot, flat and laced up the front and made of coloured patent leather. Mick’s were green, Trev’s were blue and mine were dark pink. We all also had a pair of black patent leather boots while Bowie had his red ones.
During this deep discussion on who was wearing what, which went on for some time, Angie burst into the room and in a panicky voice said, ‘You’ve got a problem, boys. Ronson’s just packed his case and headed for the station. He said it’s all too much for him, he’s quit the band!’
Bowie said to me, ‘Go find him and talk to him, do whatever you have to do to get him back.’
So I made my way to Beckenham station to find Mick sitting on the platform looking very pissed off.
‘Where are you going?’ I asked.
‘Back to Hull,’ he said. ‘I’ve had enough. I can’t go on stage wearing clothes like that. I have friends who’ll see me. It’s all too much, I just wanna play guitar.’
‘I understand what you’re saying,’ I said, ‘but it’s not going to work wearing jeans and t-shirts, is it? I remember when we were in the Rats you wore Apache boots and a long tasselled waistcoat and wristbands. That was over the top for the time, plus I’ve seen pictures of you wearing a real girlie frilly shirt so it’s not that much of a leap, is it?’
We then talked about how it would either work brilliantly or not at all and there was always the possibility that we could be laughed off the stage, but it was worth the risk, wasn’t it?
Eventually, after much talking it through, he said, ‘I suppose you’re right’, and we headed back to Haddon Hall.
Quite a few people have claimed that I’m the one who said, ‘Fuck off, I’m not wearing that’, but this time it wasn’t me.
As well as the clothes, the shoes, the lighting, etc., what was still needed to complete the transformation of us all, Bowie concluded, was the hair.
A young woman called Suzi Fussey worked in a local Beckenham hair salon where she did Bowie’s mother’s hair. Mrs Jones would talk to Suzi about her son and eventually Suzi was asked to come up to Haddon Hall to do Angie’s hair. While she was there Bowie asked her, ‘What would you do with my hair?’, which was shoulder-length and brown at the time.
‘I’d cut it short,’ Suzi replied, which she did.
So he had the start of what would become the Ziggy haircut. The colouring of it would come later. I don’t remember exactly when.
Daniella Parmar, a muse of Freddie Burretti’s, often came over to Haddon Hall with him. She would regularly have different coloured hair; once it was very short, peroxide blonde with an ice-cream-cone shape cut into the back and dyed in three colours! This inspired Bowie to look for a more synthetic hairstyle for Ziggy. He found a girls’ magazine with a model on the cover who had red hair (apparently she was a Kansai Yamamoto model, though I didn’t know that then). He copied the cut and colour and had Suzi carry it out. When his hair was finally completed he asked, ‘What do you think?’
‘It looks amazing,’ I said. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it, especially on a guy.’
My hair was now shorter, and styled, but it was still brown. A couple of months into the tour, I decided I would have the Ziggy cut and also have it bleached blond. It made me look a bit unearthly, perhaps like a member of Ziggy’s family.
Back then there wasn’t the range of hair products we have today; in fact, the trick to the Ziggy hairstyle, which stood up on end, was a ladies’ setting lotion called Gard, which you spread over your hair before blow-drying it straight. We needed Suzi to join us on that tour so she could do all our hair, and she also became wardrobe mistress.
Later again on the tour, Trevor would have his long brown hair dyed jet black and Angie worked on those incredible sideburns by spraying them silver. Mick’s blond hair was styled and highlighted.
The transformation was complete.
On 11 January we unveiled Ziggy on a pre-recorded session for BBC Radio’s Sounds of the Seventies with John Peel. It wasn’t broadcast until 28 January, though. We went back on 18 January to record another session for the same programme, this time with Bob Harris, to be aired on 7 February. Both were recorded at the BBC Maida Vale studios.
The set list was ‘Hang On To Yourself’, ‘Ziggy Stardust’ ‘Queen Bitch’ and ‘I’m Waiting For the Man’, for both shows. On the Bob Harris show we did ‘Five Years’ as an extra number. This was just the four of us with Nicky Graham on piano.
After that, on 19 January, we began a week of rehearsals for the British dates at the Royal Ballroom on Tottenham High Road, driving up there from Beckenham at lunchtime and going through the whole set, twice each day, non-stop. As I sat at the back of the stage I could see the three other guys interacting up front so I’d suggest things to them, like standing back to back for the beginning of ‘Queen Bitch’, and then kicking away from each other when the heavy chords began, because it looked exciting that way. We’d adjust the lighting as we went along, too.
Everybody threw in ideas, although you had to be pretty sure it was a good idea before you suggested it, or Bowie would ignore it. The show wasn’t choreographed to within an inch of its life, but most of the major movements on stage were planned, along with the lights, to complement the music. I enjoyed being part of the creativity.
In the midst of rehearsals, we had our second shock to the system when we read an interview Bowie had done with the Melody Maker saying that he was gay and always had been.
This was completely new to us, despite the environment we’d lived in at Haddon Hall. He had his camp moments and effeminate poses but we assumed if he was gay he’d have mentioned it to us at some point. We’d got used to him doing things to get attention so we thought this was just another example. I must admit we never asked him outright as we’d never witnessed anything that made us think he was.
After the interview even Angie said, ‘You could have thought of your wife and at least said you were bisexual!’
Attitudes towards homosexuality were different in those days as it had only been decriminalized five years before in Britain. So, true or false, it was a courageous statement to make. It definitely sent shock waves through the music world and focused a lot of attention on Bowie and the Spiders. Still, all this – the clothes, Bowie’s statement – felt like a massive risk. When something outrageous hasn’t been done before, you worry that you’ll be a laughing stock and you’ll never get another gig in your life – which was a consideration, believe me.
Mick did an interview with a magazine right after that. His first statement to the journalist was: ‘Before you start, I’m not gay.’ More comments like that would have blown everybody’s cool, so Bowie stopped us doing interviews. Of course, with the way we dressed now, most people assumed we were gay anyway. This was tough for three northern boys like me, Mick and Trevor, but we had a down-to-earth sense of humour about it.
We saw that people were genuinely unnerved by us. We would go into studios dressed the same way as Bowie, and the engineers would look at us with unease. You could tell from their faces that they thought we were gay because Bowie had said that he was. There was a certain attitude towards you.
We thought it was funny, though. I remember Mick and me sitting on the sofa in one studio, while engineers were tweaking the mixing desk six feet away – and you could feel the atmosphere. They were uncomfortable, as if they didn’t know what they were letting themselves in for. What were we, they wondered?
Mick nodded towards one of them and said to me, ‘He’s got really nice legs, hasn’t he?’
‘No, the other one’s legs are better,’ I said.
As the engineers cringed we cracked up laughing. They just looked at us, faces bright red.
‘You think we’re gay, don’t you?’ I said.
‘Well, we weren’t sure . . .’ they answered.
We had that a lot, but we just played around with it.
At the beginning of February we recorded a session for The Old Grey Whistle Test, presented by Bob Harris, which was British TV’s major music programme at the time. We performed ‘Oh! You Pretty Things’, ‘Queen Bitch’ and ‘Five Years’. I’ve never forgotten what happened with ‘Five Years’.
We’d done a run-through so we knew where the cameras were going to be and I felt fine. But on the final run-through someone had decided that, as ‘Five Years’ ends with just drums, it would be better to finish on a close-up of me. I wasn’t aware of this until we were actually recording and at the end of the song the main camera started coming closer and closer to me . . . It was unexpected and I was absolutely terrified. All I could think was that millions of people were going to be watching me. I hope I managed to disguise my feelings but I’m not sure if I did. When June saw it on TV she spotted my suppressed terror.
And then, almost two years after I first came down to London and met David Bowie, we were finally taking the music out on the road. After all the recording we’d done, I was really looking forward to playing the songs live although I still felt some reticence about how the look of the show would be received.
The first gig of the Ziggy tour was at the Toby Jug, a large, red-brick pub in Tolworth near Kingston, on 10 February. About sixty people were there and we came on around 9 p.m. Before the show we got changed into our stage gear in a tiny dressing room and we could hear the punters outside drinking and chatting. When we went on stage, we played that little pub as if it was a stadium. I watched Bowie, Mick and Trevor up front; they were full of energy, and made sure the crowd gave them their full attention. It was a great start to the tour.
We were optimistic, and we knew we’d build up momentum as time passed – but some of the early gigs were only half full. The girls usually liked it, but most of the guys didn’t: the show was so over the top and outrageous, especially in small spaces like those.
I’ve no idea why we played such small gigs to start with, although I appreciate that we weren’t really in a position to play bigger ones because it hadn’t all taken off yet. The audience were right on top of us – in hindsight far too close.
We mixed up songs from Hunky Dory and Ziggy Stardust, with numbers like ‘Space Oddity’ and ‘My Death’ by Jacques Brel, which Bowie performed halfway through in an acoustic part of the show. Although a lot of the show had been worked out in rehearsals, playing every night is really the only opportunity a band has to fine-tune things and develop as a live act, and that’s exactly what happened.
Ziggy was the cosmic yob . . . posing, pouting, high-kicking like Rudolph Nureyev one minute and a futuristic Elvis the next.
Bowie was finding his character night after night. From my view at the back of the stage he was trying things out and discarding them left, right and centre. At the same time the rapport between Bowie and Mick was taking on new dimensions. Mick was a natural hard-rocking macho man, stomping and posing around the stage, often making grotesque faces as he pulled off the ultimate guitar performance. He was the perfect counterpoint to Bowie’s effeminate, androgynous alien alter ego, and soon to become rock god, Ziggy.
Trevor and I held down the rhythm section and never let up for a moment, driving it hard and heavy where needed and playing with as much feeling as we could muster between us.
The chemistry between the band was really working and it felt fantastic and so right. This was what rock ’n’ roll was all about and what we’d all talked about creating months earlier. Exciting and ass-kicking.
Now, on those early shows on this tour we’d hang around with the crowd after the show, wearing all this finery, because we hadn’t yet got into the mindset of leaving the stage and locking ourselves away in the dressing room after we played. We would chat to the fans, mainly girls, who tried to get very friendly with us, not realizing that the male members of the audience were becoming antagonistic.
‘Queers!’ shouted some bloke from across the room one night.
We ignored him, but there was a silence around us and we knew that trouble was brewing, so we took off.
After another show when the atmosphere got threatening again Bowie said to Mick, ‘You said you had a roadie with the Rats who was pretty tough, right?’
‘Yeah, Stuey George,’ Mick replied. ‘He lined up an entire audience against a wall once and made them shut up!’
This was true. Our mate Stuey was as hard as nails. The Rats played a gig at Cottingham Hall near Hull back in 1969, and there was some aggression from the audience. Stuey went out there and made every single one of them stand against the side wall of the venue until they’d calmed down.
‘Why don’t you ask him if he wants to come and work for us?’ asked Bowie.
Stuey was a black ex-boxer and, that old chestnut, a lovable rogue. If I ever questioned him about his past, he would grin cheekily and say, ‘It’s all just rumours, Woody, just rumours!’ He could always take a joke which, being around the Rats, was fortunate. I remember his girlfriend once banned him from coming with us to a gig in Leeds – a situation he took seriously. After ten minutes of our jibes – things like ‘It’s all right, Stuey, we understand’, ‘What’s it like being under the thumb?’ and, ‘So now we know who wears the trousers’ – he got in the back of the van with the equipment.
‘My girlfriend could be waiting somewhere down the road,’ he said. ‘She’ll probably flag you down but don’t say fuck all, or I’ll get killed.’
Half a mile down the road there she was. We pulled up alongside her and wound down the window.
‘Have you seen Stuey?’ she asked.
‘Yeah, he’s hiding in the back of the van,’ we chorused.
She started to scream abuse at him from outside while Stuey banged on the partition. ‘Just go, just drive’.
He later got in the front of the van with us and said, ‘You lot are a bunch of bastards, you’ve got me in so much trouble.’ But he could always take a joke.
So Stuey joined us from Hull, moving into a flat in Beckenham. He came to every gig we did on the Ziggy tour after that. Tony Frost joined him not long afterwards, because he’d done martial arts and was another tough guy. We were relieved, because in the end somebody would definitely have got hurt if we’d continued with no security. The mere presence of those two mean-looking dudes was enough to stop any potential trouble from then on.
Bowie seriously impressed me as this tour began. He had this opinion about shaking up the music business, and how the Ziggy album and tours were going to do just that. He kept hinting in the press that everything was about to go off the scale when it came to the live show. The whole idea of being subversive through rock music started with him, and he was the first musician with the guts to actually go out and do it.
The British tour rolled on. As Bowie said himself later on, Ziggy was all about small beginnings. He was right, too, but it didn’t take long for us to move up to bigger venues. We went from London, to the Midlands, to Glasgow, and to Sunderland, among other places, in February alone, and then we went back down again to the West Country and the south coast in March.
Bowie was loving it. He gave his all every night, and from our perspective on stage with him we could see that the crowd were as excited as he was. Early on in the tour it would take a while for them to warm up, and I’d be worried that our look was too much for them to take on board. In fact, there were several gigs where there was hardly any applause until about the fifth song, which was a bit unnerving. After one such show Bowie seemed very anxious.
‘What the fuck is wrong with them?’ he asked. ‘Don’t they know they’re supposed to clap? They just sit there open-mouthed, staring at us.’
One of the crew interjected: ‘David, they’re in awe. It’s like they don’t want to miss anything and they’re not quite sure how to respond.’
But as time passed the audiences became consistently enthusiastic, even at the start of the show. We knew we were on to something.
As we were touring the UK, Tony Defries was delivering the finished album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars to RCA Records in the USA.
Then ‘Starman’, backed with ‘Suffragette City’, was released as a single on 28 April in the UK. Suddenly we were on the radio again, and when the Ziggy Stardust album itself came out on 6 June it went straight in at Number 7, peaking at Number 5. Finally we were headline news.
The promotion continued with us performing ‘Starman’ on a show for Granada TV called Lift Off With Ayshea on 16 June. We were all getting changed in the dressing room before the show started when Bowie did something we hadn’t seen him do before. He took out a bag containing make-up!
We watched in disbelief as he applied various strange substances to his face . . .
‘Aren’t you putting make-up on?’ he asked.
The answers from us varied from ‘Fuck no’ to ‘No fucking way’.
‘It’s a shame,’ he said. ‘You’re going to be seen by hundreds of thousands of people and your faces are going to be green under these TV lights.’
He played us brilliantly: we looked at each other and we didn’t even have to speak or discuss it. None of us wanted to look green!
He then asked us to get made up for the live shows, too, and we didn’t like that at first – but as Bowie himself later put it, once we found out the effect the make-up had on the girls, we had no problem with it.
After all, Elvis had worn a bit of make-up on stage, so it wasn’t like it had never been done before, and I remember seeing Paul Jones of Manfred Mann buying make-up from the chemist’s in Bridlington once. But it quickly reached ridiculous levels.
‘Who’s nicked my fucking mascara?’ Mick demanded as we got ready for a show one night.
‘Don’t look at me,’ Bowie yawned in response.
‘I haven’t got it,’ I said.
Mick stomped off to accuse Trevor. It was hilarious, and yet again I’d reflect on how far things had come since we were playing small clubs in Yorkshire.
A funny thing happened early on in the tour. Mick used to bend the strings on his guitar so much when he played that he’d go out of tune, and sometimes he would walk across the stage mid-song and try to tune Trevor’s bass to his out-of-tune guitar.
Trevor hated this because to the audience it looked like he was the one out of tune. This occurred on a few nights until one night Trevor lost his cool and swung his guitar at Mick’s head. Mick responded by doing the same.
In terms of pure theatre I thought this looked amazing, and I remembered the Artwoods doing a similar thing years before, so I suggested to Trevor and Mick that they have a fight with their guitar headstocks during the solo in ‘Width of a Circle’. Mick arranged to give Trevor a nod when he was about to swing at him, and Trevor would back up. The idea was that they would just miss each other.
Then I told them that it would look even wilder if we put a strobe light on as well, although unfortunately they couldn’t see each other as clearly, so they’d come off stage all scratched from being hit with each other’s strings and occasionally they did hit each other on the head. Bowie loved all this, and it had the added benefit of giving him time to do a costume change.
We kept touring through June, playing shows in Sheffield, Middlesbrough, Leicester and elsewhere. These were middle-sized venues and universities, so we were making some progress.
Bowie fucked off to New York for a weekend in June to see Elvis Presley perform at Madison Square Garden. He later explained, ‘I arrived late and our seats were right down the front and I’d made the mistake of wearing one of my Ziggy outfits. I was the only one there wearing glam clothes.’ He added, ‘I felt embarrassed.’
As an aside, the UK glam rock scene was fully established at this time. Bolan had appeared on Top of the Pops performing ‘Hot Love’ with glitter under his eyes in March 1971 and kick-started the movement, in the eyes of many. Bands like Sweet and Slade followed suit. Bowie took it to another level, though . . . Bowie’s own views on glam came out in an interview in the Telegraph about five months later: ‘I like Marc Bolan’s and Alice [Cooper’s] work but I think we’re in very different fields. One does tend to get lumped in. But I think glam rock is a lovely way to categorize me and it’s even nicer to be one of the leaders in it. I had been very much on my own. There’s security in being part of a trend. With a little bit of luck, if I keep working hard, I can probably withstand it.’
Piano players came and went. Nicky Graham did the most piano playing with us; he worked at GEM and later went on to be a very successful producer and record company executive. He also worked as a gofer for us, but one night he failed to get tickets to one of our shows for one of Angie’s friends, after which he suddenly wasn’t in the band any more.
Around that time, Mick bought a car for his family up in Hull, and it got vandalized. Some wanker wrote, ‘Ronson is a poof’ on it. It didn’t get any easier when we got to the famous blow job moment at Oxford Town Hall on 17 June, a couple of weeks after the Ziggy album came out.
Mick had been looking for some new tricks to do with his guitar; he’d already incorporated playing his guitar with his teeth during one of his solos. We’d been talking in the dressing room that afternoon about how Chuck Berry did his famous duck walk while playing, and Hendrix played guitar with his teeth and also set fire to it. Dave Edmonds had played his behind his back. Pete Townsend had ‘windmilled’ his and smashed his guitar to bits.
‘We need something like that on stage,’ said Bowie. ‘All of those old ideas have been done. I’ve got an idea of what to do, but don’t freak out and look surprised when it happens, Mick.’
None of us, Mick included, had any idea what he had in mind.
When Bowie got down on his knees in front of Mick that night and pretended to play his guitar with his teeth, Mick’s back was to the crowd, so they assumed Bowie was pretending to give him a blow job. This was understandable, because he’d grabbed Mick’s arse with both hands.
Some of the crowd laughed, some of them were speechless: none of them knew how to react.
I asked Mick what he felt about it after the show.
‘I dunno, Woods,’ he said. ‘It’s not really what I was expecting. People are going to give me lots of stick about it, aren’t they?’
There wasn’t much I could say to that, because he was right.
It became a regular part of the show and was definitely a press moment for us, one of a few that took place that year. We didn’t even know that photographer Mick Rock had taken pictures of it happening, but it went on to be hailed as one of rock’s classic moments, especially when it appeared on a full page in Melody Maker immediately afterwards. The journalists loved it, but I’m not sure the public were too keen; it was controversial stuff for 1972 but it made us infamous on both sides of the Atlantic.
As a result the band’s profile was even further enhanced. A few shows later, we were playing at the Croydon Greyhound, with Roxy Music supporting us, and they had to turn away a thousand people who wanted to get in. A thousand! That’s how popular we were getting. Along with this popularity came the girls. I’d like to sum this up by saying we worked hard, we played hard and we partied hard. After a show we would be pumped on the adrenalin and it was hard to come down. The groupies helped relieve us of the extra adrenalin! Bowie and Angie had an open relationship so I guess we all followed David’s lead. Later on when I popped the question to my girlfriend June this was something I had to address. I did ‘recover’ from this conversation . . . more about that later.
On 6 July it got even crazier. We’d completed around fifty concerts and we had about another ten or so to do on the UK tour. To actually be able to perform night after night to packed audiences was amazing. All our fears about how we’d be received had been allayed; the audiences were amazing and wilder than we’d ever imagined. As we’d progressed through the tour we were continually tweaking elements of the performance to improve it. For instance, it seemed distracting during the show if, as very often happened, a couple of roadies had to walk on stage to fix something wearing their normal t-shirts and scruffy jeans. This definitely spoilt the illusion for the audience so it became policy for them to dress all in black. This was all part of the professionalism. We were all in high spirits, our confidence through the roof.
The single ‘Starman’ had been getting lots of airplay and was actually climbing the charts and we were asked to do Top of the Pops, which was recorded on 5 July, to broadcast the next day. You may remember how massive that programme was in the seventies: if you were on it, everyone saw you. It had a huge viewing audience of between ten and fifteen million. This was a real milestone moment for us.
Since deciding to be a musician at fourteen, this was the show I dreamed of appearing on – and now it was actually happening.
There were about six stages in the TOTP’s studio and there was an invited audience who were moved about between the various stages so as to be in camera shot for each particular artist.
We’d done a run-through, as had every other band that was on that day. The drums for some reason were out in front of Mick, Trev and Bowie, an unusual set-up, but nobody seemed to mind or even mention it.
I remember there was a corridor from our dressing room to the main stages. Status Quo were appearing that day, too, and we found ourselves standing opposite them waiting to go on. We were dressed in all our finery, including full make-up, and they were dressed in their trademark denim. We couldn’t have looked more different. We gave each other nods and laughed when Francis Rossi said, ‘Fuck me, you make us feel really old.’
Bowie played his part to the max, camping it up on stage, and at one point he threw an arm around Mick’s shoulder. It was a bold move and quite a shocking gesture to make at this time, especially considering all the press concerning Bowie’s sexuality.
During the line ‘I had to phone someone so I picked on you’ Bowie pointed directly into the camera and from reports at the time and ever since then this became a pivotal moment in his career. The impact of that performance was felt in millions of living rooms across the UK. It also landed the single in the top ten of the UK charts two weeks later.
Although we knew we’d done a good job, I have to admit at the time we didn’t feel there was anything outstanding about that particular TV appearance. But it seems that a generation of future rock stars, too numerous to mention, were inspired and since then I’ve had the opportunity to speak to countless fans who told me of the buzz it created in the playgrounds and streets across the country the next day.
What we did realise was that we were now famous. From then on there were always fans camped outside the flat on the front doorstep, male and female, and we’d have to step over them to get to the shops. If there were too many, we sneaked out the back door and climbed over a wall.
Kids would bunk off school, arriving at some ungodly hour in the morning. By the time we got up and saw them they were obviously freezing. We’d tell them, ‘You’re supposed to be at school!’ and they’d say, ‘Yeah, but we had to come!’ and so sometimes we’d invite them in. Mick would make them breakfast and we’d talk about music and school and so on.
Sometimes Bowie would come along and they’d gasp and then fawn over him. One group of kids told him that they were doing a project at school about him and his music, and wanted to ask him questions. He agreed, and he slipped into ‘artist-being-interviewed’ mode. Occasionally he’d say things to shock them, but, again, that was him attempting to create an effect.
In fact, even shopping took on a different perspective after this. Mick and I would be in a greengrocer’s shop having selected our fruit and vegetables, and would take out money to pay for them only to be told, ‘No we don’t want paying. We saw you on Top of the Pops.’
Two days after Top of the Pops we played the Royal Festival Hall in London. It was a concert to raise funds for ‘Save the Whale’, one of the many causes espoused by Friends of the Earth. The poster for the event showed Bowie astride a whaling harpoon. Also appearing on the bill as support that night were Marmalade and the JSD Band.
Kenny Everett, the famously anarchic DJ, was the compere for the evening and introduced Bowie as ‘the next biggest thing to God’. The reviews afterwards were amazing, Record Mirror, for instance, announcing that Bowie ‘looks certain to become the most important person in pop music on both sides of the Atlantic’. But for us it was a special night as we had a surprise guest appearing with us. This was to be Lou Reed’s first solo live appearance in this country. We had a short rehearsal with him during soundcheck; it didn’t take too long as we had already been playing the tracks in our set at various times.
I thought Lou was cool. He definitely rose to the occasion and had been out and bought a black velvet suit decorated with diamond patterns of diamanté, like a glam Mexican. Towards the end of the seventy-minute set Bowie introduced Lou and we played ‘I’m Waiting For the Man’, ‘Sweet Jane’ and ‘White Light/White Heat’. The two of them singing those songs together was amazing and, needless to say, it went down a storm.
Talking to Lou that night, he told me he’d had a great time. ‘The British audience is very different to what I’m used to – they’re more attentive. Playing places like Max’s Kansas City, where everybody just freaks out and there are lots of drugs, is completely different.’
He asked me if I knew any of his music. I said, ‘Yeah, all of it’, which surprised and delighted him.
He also said he’d enjoyed performing with us because we’d played his stuff really solidly. I told him he reminded me of the early beat poets in NYC and I really liked the sense of decadence he managed to capture on his early albums. The conversation wasn’t long; they never were with Lou as he seemed to have an ability to down a bottle of whisky in no time at all. I thought he was a sweet guy, though.
Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground were not that well known in UK at the time, and probably had a small following of a few thousand in the States. It was Bowie’s intention to raise Lou’s profile in the UK and to help him with a new album. In fact, Bowie and Mick would co-produce the recording, which would become Transformer. The original plan was for the Spiders to be Lou’s band on the album, but this was later changed as it was considered a bit too confusing to have Lou Reed and the Spiders From Mars.
We had a reel-to-reel tape machine back at our Beckenham flat, so every night after the sessions, which started in August, Mick would play me rough mixes of what they’d done that day. I thought it was great, especially as day by day I’d hear the songs building up. ‘Perfect Day’ was beautiful and I loved ‘Walk On the Wild Side’. Mick and Bowie’s production was amazing. Transformer would go on to become a classic album.
Our next outing was to the Friars Club in Aylesbury. What made this unique, apart from a brilliant audience, was the fact that RCA had spent $25,000 to fly over a select group of American journalists to review the show. Defries had seen this as a perfect opportunity to create a media frenzy prior to our scheduled arrival in the US in September.
That night we did an impromptu version of the Beatles’ ‘This Boy’. We’d only ever done this once before, in Liverpool as a nod to the Fab Four. From reports at the time the reviews were very favourable.
Bowie had announced our next gig to the NME who were at Aylesbury: ‘Hello, handsome, my name’s David and I’m going to be at the Rainbow in lovely north London with the Spiders From Mars, some very pretty people called Roxy Music and a gorgeous butch blues singer called Lloyd Watson this Saturday and Sunday. It would be just too, too divine if you could make it there – and if you can’t make it there, just be there, hmmm? It’s going to be the most exquisite concert of the year.’
It was David’s idea to put on a whole theatrical production for the show at the Rainbow Theatre on 19 August; a second show was added on 20 August when the first one sold out. We appeared on the poster as Ziggy Stardust and his band the Spiders – the first time, as far as I’m aware, that we were billed this way.
As I’ve mentioned, a major influence on Bowie as a performer was the mime artist Lindsay Kemp. Earlier in his career Bowie had joined Kemp’s mime classes and had actually toured with him as part of his show on several occasions. Now Bowie wanted to include Kemp and his troupe at the Rainbow and the pair of them would choreograph a show that embellished the music we were playing.
The stage itself was designed with six ladders leading up to various scaffold platforms. On three of the platforms were screens and at different parts of the show shots of such rock icons as Elvis, Little Richard and Mark Bolan were projected onto these screens, giving the idea that Ziggy had already joined that august band. Other shots included Warhol’s soup cans, Kellogg’s corn flakes packets and Marilyn Monroe – it was all very pop art.
The stage was covered in sawdust so any dragging of the feet by band or dancers left a visible trail of movement.
Freddie Burretti made outfits for Lindsay and the troupe. There were about six dancers if I remember correctly; the outfits made them look like they were covered in spiders’ webs. They all wore very ghoulish make-up. At one point Lindsay dropped down a rope from the ceiling dressed as a very freaky angel, smoking a three-foot-long joint.
One of the actors/dancers was a guy called Jack Birkett, who was almost blind – we watched him marking out the stage before the show so he would know where he was and didn’t miss any lighting cues. During the show he would run to the front of the stage really fast and then stop near the edge. It was quite nerve-wracking watching him.
Throughout the whole set they performed choreographed scenes that from my vantage point, sitting beneath a scaffold section, helped create probably the most bizarre, theatrical performance ever – I doubt it has ever been equalled.
It was also the first time Bowie wore an outfit by renowned Japanese designer Kansai Yamamoto, whose model had influenced Suzi Fussey for David’s hair. Bowie called it ‘his bunny costume’; it was later known as his Woodland Creature outfit. It was a red leather playsuit or romper suit, and it didn’t have legs! Mick, Trev and I wore the outfits from the second half of our normal show which were like our others but had collars, and were black/silver, giving a metallic appearance.
Aside from a couple of days at the Rainbow, once the full stage set was in place our rehearsals took place at the Stratford Royal Theatre, which is not really a rock ’n’ roll rehearsal venue; it’s for actors and theatrical performances. It was very ‘proper’ that we did it there.
There was a bar in the theatre that was frequented by actors, lighting technicians, etc., and during a break in rehearsals the four of us went there for a drink in our ‘onstage’ outfits. A guy who obviously had no idea who we were came up to us.
‘Are you from the cast of Star Trek?’ he said.
Without batting an eyelid, and in unison, the four of us answered, ‘Yes.’
‘Which episode? he asked.
‘It’s a new one, hasn’t been shot yet,’ Bowie told him.
‘I’m not aware of that one,’ he said.
What was funny was that later on that day we actually saw William Shatner, better known as Captain Kirk, in the bar.
The Rainbow shows were a resounding success. Once again Bowie had surprised us, demonstrating that he had more strings to his bow than we’d previously imagined.
The tour’s official photographer, Mick Rock, was at the show and videoed parts of it which were later included on the video for ‘John, I’m Only Dancing’, our next single.
The press got it. ‘The whole evening could be judged a wondrous success,’ wrote Chris Welch of Melody Maker, although he added, ‘Eventually the faint suspicion grew that certain sections of the audience were slightly stunned and bemused by the jive David was laying on us.’ He concluded, ‘By God it has brought a little glamour into all our lives, and amen to that.’
‘This was perhaps the most consciously theatrical rock show ever staged,’ said Charles Shaar Murray at the NME. ‘With perhaps the finest body of work of any contemporary songwriter, and the resources to perform this work to its utmost advantage, there really isn’t anything going that tops the current Ziggy show,’ he added. Murray also quoted Lou Reed as saying that the show was ‘amazing, incredible, stupendous – the greatest thing I’ve ever seen’. Thanks, Lou, that was nice.
It turned out that to stage these two shows had been incredibly expensive so these were the only ones we did on that scale.
I met Mick Jagger at the Rainbow; he came to a rehearsal and was cool. He was mainly interested in my drum kit, for some reason. So was Paul McCartney; they both commented on my drum sound. McCartney came to several rehearsals and sat and watched us with his wife, Linda. We had a whole piss-taking thing going on, where our roadie would continually wind us up about how he was well in with all the big stars. He wasn’t, but he’d do this whole routine about ‘Me, Paul and Linda are best mates’. He would stand behind Paul and Linda without them knowing, point at them and himself and give us a thumbs up.
I met Ringo, too, and we talked about drums. Elton John was also there. He is quoted as saying, ‘What will I see tonight? I think I’ll see an amazing show. I’ve followed him since he was doing gigs at the Marquee years ago. I remember him from The Lower Third and all that rubbish. I just think he’s great.’ I didn’t speak to Elton that night but ran into him at the Beverly Hills Hotel during the US tour. More about that later. The interest we were getting was all a bit of an ego boost; after all, these were the rock hierarchy, and they’d come to see us play.
Incidentally, I found out several years later when attending Joe Elliott’s (of Def Leppard) wedding, where I met Brian May, that Queen had come to see us play on many occasions and had based a lot of their image on Bowie and the Spiders.
And while I’m name-dropping, around this time I’d started to meet other musicians I liked, for instance Iggy Pop, who was around quite a bit as he and David had plans to work together. He was a bit alien to me, which I realize is a bit rich given that I was in a band with David Bowie. We had very little in common, but he knew what he was, and what he liked and didn’t like – his opinions were very strong. His stage show at the time was intense: he thought nothing of ripping his chest open with a mic stand. Bowie and Iggy seemed to come from opposite ends of the spectrum both musically and as performers. But I did like The Stooges, we’d watch films of him with them and I was blown away by his performances. He had that unpredictable edge, a bit like Jim Morrison, where you never quite knew what he was going to do next. Maybe that’s what they had in common.
I was fortunate to meet one of my heroes, Led Zeppelin’s drummer John Bonham – one of the world’s most famous musicians at that point; we went for a drink in the Ship on Wardour Street one night while we were recording at Trident. He was a big bloke, and he liked a pint. I thought he was a great guy, despite the fearsome reputation he had when he was drunk. Obviously we talked drums and we had a good time putting the world to rights.
I later met Jimmy Page and Robert Plant at the Crown in Tottenham. I was introduced to Robert Plant in the dressing room and he said, ‘Woody Woodmansey, I know that name’, and I said, ‘Robert Plant, I know that name’ . . . I’d just watched him perform from six feet away and was still blown away by his performance, so most of the conversation was me telling him why he was so good.
By now I was recognized in the street a lot, which I liked, unless I was trying to get some shopping done on Oxford Street or somewhere. I’d turn around and there’d be maybe fifty people behind me. I couldn’t very well say, ‘I’ve got shopping to do!’ I’d chat with them and sign autographs until my arm was dropping off, and would often run out of time to get any shopping done. But I met some genuinely nice people who told me what the music meant to them. I had no problem with that.
So after all the time and hard work we’d put in over the last couple of years, we had a single and an album in the charts . . . we’d arrived and kicked some ass along the way, at least in the UK. The dream was becoming a reality.