It’s 50 years ago this month since the album that was to cement David Bowie’s place in rock history – Aladdin Sane – put him at the top of the UK album charts for the first time.
And the title has more than one meaning for Mick ‘Woody’ Woodmansey – the last surviving member of the legend’s old band.
Because the part-time drummer was just a hard-up 19-year-old in 1969 when he got a call from the then up-and-coming Bowie inviting him to join his new group.
Woody had recently landed a well-paid job at an East Yorkshire spectacles factory – but he dreamed of a full-time career making music and knew he had to give it a go.
Years later he knew he’d truly have been a lad insane if he’d turned down a place along with Hull mate guitarist Mick Ronson in the Spiders From Mars.
Woody went on to provide the backbeat for four era-defining albums – The Man Who Sold the World, Hunky Dory, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars – and that first No 1 album Aladdin Sane.
“I still pinch myself,” says Woody. “Bowie gave me the chance to create as a drummer in a band with a good writer and performer, with songs that inspired us.”
Official Charts Martin Talbot says Aladdin Sane was truly inspirational. “It was his first UK No 1 and topped the chart for five weeks. The cover featured his now iconic lightning flash. It says: ‘I’m Bowie, and I’ve arrived.’”
By the time Aladdin happened, Woody was already cool with the Bowie agenda. “We wanted to kick the music business up the a*** – it was not supposed to be dull, brown and boring with everybody looking the same. It was supposed to be more of an art form, and that’s what this was.”
Woody, now 73, vividly recalls his first meeting with the star at his flat in Haddon Hall, a Victorian villa in Beckenham, South East London, where he lived with first wife Angie. “He opened the door and had auburn hair, red corduroy trousers, a rainbow T-shirt with a silver belt, bangles and bracelets and blue shoes with a red star on each shoe that he’d clearly done himself,” he says. “I’d never seen a man wearing bracelets before. Then he played me a song and I thought holy sh**, that is a good.”
Spiders Woody, pal Mick and bassist Trevor Bolder – also from the East Yorkshire music scene – paid £7 a week rent to live in the Hall, dossing on the floor.
“They were good times,” says Woody. “You’d be in the kitchen making toast and you’d hear chords and lyrics like ‘ Mickey Mouse has grown up a cow’ then Bowie would shout ‘Woody, I’ve finished another one, come and listen.’”
Recalling a shopping trip to London, he says: “We were in Liberty’s materials department and David was handing me rolls off the shelves. I was honestly thinking ‘Great, we’re going to have curtains’ Then they started measuring me up.” There was yet another step-up in what Bowie wanted after he’d been in the US promoting The Man Who Sold The World. Woody says:
“He’d seen Andy Warhol, Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground and he had a different angle. He said we needed more ‘Bowie’.” What followed was an education for the Spiders. Woody says: “We’d finish recording and he’d say, ‘we’re going to see a play tonight.’ I’d ask what it was and he’d say ‘I don’t know– I’m not interested in the play. The lighting director is the best in London’.
“He took us to the ballet and we bought crisps and popcorn and people were shushing us. But it was amazing to see the choreography and use of the stage and the lights.”
Soon the hits and rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle were in full flow. Woody says: “We tended to pull in a lot of beautiful people, but also the freaks and weirdos. I remember finding a dagger with a dead chicken on my door and being told that was a hello from LA.”
The release of Aladdin Sane in 1973 sent Bowie’s fame into overdrive following the success of The Rise & Fall Of Ziggy Stardust & The Spiders From Mars the previous autumn.
But Woody noticed tensions were developing on their 1972-73 Ziggy Stardust tour. He says: “You’d start a conversation with David and he wouldn’t answer and you’d just get the unnerving ‘Ziggy look’. He started staying in different hotels to us.”
Soon there was an argument over pay. Three months later, at the end of their tour, the band played Hammersmith Odeon in July and Bowie announced it was “the last show we’ll ever do”. Woody says: “It was a complete shock. I threw a drumstick in his direction.”
Four days later, 10 minutes after Woody had married girlfriend June, his manager phoned to say that was it.
Woody didn’t meet Bowie again until 1976 in Paris where he was recording album Low and they went for a meal. “Bowie said, ‘that rocket ride from relative obscurity we had, I’ll never experience that again. That was the buzz and you guys helped me do that.’
“He said ‘If you ever want or need something, I’ll always get back to you’.” After that, they stayed in touch – on the phone every Saturday. “No matter where we were, we’d talk music, family and jokes,” says Woody.
In 2013, Woody joined Bowie tribute group Holy Holy alongside one of the star’s old guitarists Tony Visconti.
He spoke to Bowie for the last time in January 2016 on the star’s 69th birthday coinciding with the release of his final Blackstar album. The call ended with Bowie saying: “I’ll catch you later.”
Two days after that he was dead. Woody had no idea his friend had liver cancer. Looking back, he feels huge gratitude to the legend who changed his life.
Now working on an album with Joe Elliott and Phil Collen of Def Leppard, Woody says he has also become an artist, like his old bandmate. He says: “Seeing Bowie had this ability to take any art form – dancing, fashion, choreography, light – and excel at it opened me up, too.”
- Spider From Mars: My Life with Bowie by Woody Woodmansey (Pan, £8.99)
