Woody Woodmansey: 'There’s nowhere else I’d rather be than sat on a drumkit in front of an audience'

Asked why they’ve decided to call it a day, Driffield-born Woodmansey – ever down-to-earth – quips that his bass-playing bandmate, now aged 82, is “really past it”. However, he adds that the real reason is the difficulty they’ve encountered since the Covid pandemic in finding available venues that “make a decent schedule, so that you can not have a week off between gigs”.

To complicate things further, “all the band have different projects going and they’ve all taken off”, he says. Visconti, who has over the years also worked with Marc Bolan, Paul McCartney and the Moody Blues, remains in demand for his production skills; singer Glenn Gregory is regularly touring with Heaven 17; keyboard player Janette Mason has a “jazz gig doing Ronnie Scott’s”; and guitarist Paul Cuddeford has joined the Boomtown Rats.

“Somebody happened to say, this is getting so difficult I can’t see you handling doing another (tour),” Woodmansey recounts. “So we said unless something changes, this might be the last one. Then some bright spark had it as the promotional idea.”

For his part, Woodmansey, 76, hopes it doesn’t prove to be their swan song. “We all enjoy it,” he says, “but it just got so hard. You’ve got a promoter and an agent and then other different promoters and then the venue people – so many things had to align to just get one concert that also didn’t give us four or five days off so you just spent all the money that you’d just earned in hotels and eating and travelling.”

Once bitten by his experiences with Main Man, Bowie’s notoriously loss-making management company in the 1970s, it seems the drummer is twice shy. “What do you mean I haven’t got any money? I’m number one in 17 countries,” he says, recalling a conversation from the era with a shake of the head.

Playing live has been a way of life for Woodmansey since the 1960s when he was in such East Yorkshire bands as The Mutations and The Rats – where he first met the guitarist Mick Ronson who would later recruite the drummer for the Spiders From Mars.

“That’s something I really enjoyed, seeing the whites or the blues or the browns of people’s eyes, and seeing in front of you whether you’re getting a response,” he says. “People are not stupid, they let you know if they like one song better than another, so you’ve got an indicator of are you doing well, is this worth doing, do people enjoy it. And I love it anyway. There’s nowhere else I’d rather be than sat on a drumkit in front of an audience. It’s been like that nearly every tour, this is where I’m supposed to be.”

It’s now 10 years since Bowie’s death, but Woodmansey has welcomed another chance to perform the songs that the Spiders recorded with him on such albums as The Man Who Sold The World, Hunky Dory, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane. “For me, there was the quality that David had in his writing at that time,” he explains. “He was writing decent songs before that but it wasn’t a constant every one’s a winner, baby…

“I remember when I first got together with him and he played me most of the stuff that he’d done before I joined and I was, like, God, I don’t like it, and then he played me one song and I said, Did you write that? and he said, yes, and that for me was enough, from a Yorkshire drummer I could see that there’s potential here – and that was Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud. It took me on a journey – and that’s always been my test of a good song: does it connect with me, does it take me somewhere I want to go or I’ve never been?”

When Bowie “really got the writing together” for Woodmansey was Hunky Dory in 1971. “He came back from America and he said, ‘I’ve found the missing ingredient’. I said, what the hell is that then? He said, ‘More Bowie’. I went, what a stupid statement, but a bit later I saw that OK, he’d realised himself that he’d been a bit too influenced by what was happening, he thought he should have a bit of that, a bit of that and a bit of that and then put a bit of David in it. It was from his viewpoint but it had a sprinkling in it of two or three other people and it watered it down.

“When he came back from America after seeing Iggy Pop play and Lou Reed, they didn’t have any pretentious anything, they wrote about what their lives were, they weren’t trying to imagine being in an office working and writing a song about this guy who’s left his girlfriend. They didn’t give a damn about that, it was ‘I’m on the streets of New York or Detroit, this is what’s happening and I want to be your dog’ – and I think Bowie got that. The writing after that, it wasn’t all the same, there were different styles on Hunky Dory but every song was a good song.

“So to me, it was him proving through Hunky Dory that he could write, it was him taking ownership of what Bowie wanted to say, whereas before I don’t think he had, he was, for me, a bit flighty. He’d say, I’ve just finished another one, and I’d go, wow, that’s good, and the next day another one and I’d go, OK, that’s completely different but just as good. I’m proud of being involved in that. He called it his rocket ride to stardom, that whole thing with the Spiders, he said ‘I probably wouldn’t have made it without getting together with you guys. With what you’re doing I’m able to write what I want to write’.”

Woodmansey says Bowie took the Spiders – who also featured Trevor Bolder on bass – on a cultural journey. “Going to see plays, going to see ballet, going to see lighting directors and what they did because he said, ‘I’m going to ask you, what colour do you think should start this track’ or ‘does it look boring if for three quarters of the song nobody moves?’ We were all on the same page with what we were trying to do.

“He had this thing of the future’s not set in stone, especially in rock ’n’ roll, and if nobody’s leading it then it’s free, so let’s lead it. I was all right with that. He did that mostly throughout his career. Occasionally he pleased himself more than anything else, odd albums where it was ‘Well, I want to do this, I don’t care’, but he had integrity, ‘that excites me so I’m doing it’.

“To have been there with the early Bowie when he got it together, that meant a lot to me to have been a part of that. Because if you have one wrong person on something like that it doesn’t work. You have to have all the boxes ticked with no shadow of doubt – and we managed that.”

Holy Holy play at O2 Academy Leeds on September 4 and Hull Connexin Live on September 19.