Woody Woodmansey: A spider man's memoirs of his journey with Bowie

IN March 1970, Mick “Woody” Woodmansey was a factory worker by day and an ambitious young musician by night.

He dreamt about making the big time but coming from Driffield, hardly a rock music Mecca, the odds seemed stacked against him.

Then one day a phone call came out of the blue that changed his life. He was asked if he fancied joining a band in London and he agreed. This would have been unremarkable had it not been for the fact that the person who asked him was David Bowie.

Over the course of the next three years Woody, along with fellow Yorkshiremen Mick Ronson and Trevor Bolder, became the Spiders from Mars, Bowie’s legendary band that played on some of his greatest albums including Hunky Dory, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars and Aladdin Sane.

Following Bowie’s death in January this year Woody is now the last surviving member of member of that band and in his new book – Spider From Mars: My Life With Bowie – he charts this tumultuous period and the rollercoaster ride that ensued.

He started writing the book a couple of years ago and it tells his own story as well as the highs and lows of his life with Bowie. “There were all these myths and legends and the actual story David never told fully, Mick never told and Trevor didn’t. So I felt I needed to put the record straight,” he says.

Woody was born and raised in Driffield. “Believe it or not in this little Yorkshire town there were four bands and as we started to play further afield that’s where I bumped into Mick Ronson,” he says.

Ronson came from Hull which, as Woody points out, had a thriving music scene. “There were some good bands in Hull, it was quite a creative place musically at the time. But you really had to move to London in order to make it.”

He and Mick went down first before later being joined by bassist Trevor Bolder, who they knew from the local music scene.

Woody recalls his first meeting with Bowie. “I was wearing patchwork jeans, moccasins, had hair down my back and a granddad T-shirt. He opened the front door and was wearing a rainbow T-shirt, red corduroys and red shoes painted with blue stars and I thought ‘ok, he certainly looks the part’. I hadn’t seen anyone dressed like that before.”

He didn’t just look the part either. “In the first few hours of meeting him he played some of his songs on acoustic guitar. I’d left my home to make it in the big smoke so I was willing him to be good, and he was.”

Together with fellow musician and producer Tony Visconti they worked on The Man Who Sold the World. Despite garnering good reviews the album didn’t make Bowie an overnight star.

“It stalled a bit. He was going from one manager to another and we really wanted to go out on the road with that album because we thought it was going to set the world on fire. But it didn’t happen so Mick and I came back to Hull and put a band together with Trevor.”

Some months later Bowie asked them to come back to London, which they did. They all lived in his flat with the likes of Marc Bolan and Roy Harper among the music luminaries who dropped in.

This was where Bowie wrote his songs. “He’d open his door and say ‘Woody, I’ve just finished one, do you want to come and have a listen?’ So you’d be the first person to hear some of these tracks.”

There was one song in particular that grabbed his attention. “Even though he wasn’t a pianist hearing him clinking the chords of Life on Mars in his bedroom was a special moment. You could tell it was a good song. Then when we got in the studio and Rick Wakeman started playing it on piano our jaws just hit the floor.”

By now Bowie had tapped into a rich creative seam and it was through his alter ego, Ziggy Stardust, that he set out on the path to fame. Suddenly they went from playing to 40 people in a pub to thousands of adoring, and screaming, fans.

“It was absolutely nuts,” says Woody. “We had to have security guards just to leave the venue otherwise you’d get ripped to shreds. Many were the times scissors would come flying past your face as someone tried to get a piece of someone’s hair.”

It wasn’t just teenage girls who made up the Bowie fan club. “We would come out the back of a venue following a sound check and there’d be half a dozen articulated lorries parked up and the drivers were putting on make-up. They still had their work clothes on but they would be coming to the gig,” he says, laughing.

Woody says their Yorkshire background helped prevent the adulation from going to their heads. “We missed the Yorkshire sense of humour and attitude to life, but we carried that round with us when we were on tour. We took it seriously when we needed to but the rest of the time it was three Hull boys taking the p***. But I think that was good, it kept it earthed.”

However, just at the height of Bowie’s popularity in 1973 came his bombshell that he was retiring Ziggy, which he announced to the crowd at a gig at the Hammersmith Odeon. If this came as a shock to Bowie’s distraught fans, it was no less of a surprise to his bandmates. We were looking at each other thinking ‘what did he just say?’ It was disbelief. I threw a drumstick at his head but I missed.”

It was the last time Woody played with Bowie. But it was only later that he found out how much fame had taken its toll on him. “At the time we didn’t know how much of a hard time he was having with the whole Ziggy thing. On the first tours you’d go on stage and do the show, come off and straight away we’d be having a laugh and a joke and you were still talking to David Bowie. But later on he’d come off stage and you were still talking to Ziggy.

“It reached the point where he was like an actor who couldn’t get rid of a part. I understood later on that he had to find some way out of it. If he’d kept the Spiders from Mars as his band for the next few albums that wouldn’t have worked because they were attached at the hip to Ziggy. So he had to make a clean break.”

They crossed paths a few years later in France where they were both working. “I spent some time with him and we had a good chat. We talked through the years and he said that period of going from nowhere to the top was the ultimate for him, so it was nice that we left on good terms.”

They stayed in contact over the years and then in 2014 Woody got together with Tony Visconti to put together a band to tour The Man Who Sold the World album.

At the start of this year they played a gig in New York on Bowie’s birthday. “It wasn’t planned but Tony phoned him up from the stage and he said ‘good luck’ with the tour and we got the crowd to sing happy birthday, which he liked.

“But then two days later we were in Toronto and we got a phone call telling us that he’d died. We knew he was ill, but we didn’t think he was that ill. It was quite a shock for all of us.”

Bowie may no longer be with us but his music is and Woody, now 65, feels privileged to have played a part in it. “I’m extremely proud of what we did and to work with such a great performer and songwriter,” he says.

“I set off as a young lad dreaming of getting to the top and for me that dream came true.”

My Life With Bowie: Spider From Mars, published by Sidgwick & Jackson, is out now priced £18.99.

The Spiders from Mars & Yorkshire

Woody Woodmansey played on some of David Bowie’s most famous records including, The Man Who Sold the World, Hunky Dory, The rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and Aladdin Sane.

He was joined by fellow Yorkshiremen guitarists Mick Ronson and Trevor Bolder and following Bowie’s death earlier this year is the last surviving member of the quartet.

After leaving the Spiders in the 1970s he went on work with a number of musicians including Art Garfunkel, Dexy’s Midnight Runners and Def Leppard frontman Joe Elliott.

Woody set up the band Holy Holy, which includes Tony Visconti, performing The Man Who Sold the World album live for the first time.