The Spiders from Mars’ Woody Woodmansey: “Being David Bowie’s drummer was one hell of a wild ride”
To look at Woody Woodmansey, you wouldn’t necessarily know the stories he can tell. He’s a born and bred Yorkshireman, now ageing into his mid-70s, and as he sits over Zoom donning a simple baseball cap and plain T-shirt, it’s almost unfathomable to consider the life he’s lived.
But as the drummer speaks, his mind opens up into a treasure trove world of kaleidoscopic musical memories, all with one effervescent figure emanating from the heart of it: David Bowie.
At the dawn of the 1970s, Bowie’s career was already on a stratospheric rise, having bolted out of the blue with ‘Space Oddity’ at the close of the previous decade. But the ether of the universe clearly had some enthralling effect on him, as not long after, he set about creating the ultimate backing band for what would turn out to be some of his most worldly and prolific adventures – and thus, The Spiders from Mars were born.
There was no telling, for any of those involved, just how far the band would soar. Still, it’s an utter testament to the power of iconic albums like The Man Who Stole the World, Ziggy Stardust, and Aladdin Sane that drummer Woodmansey and supergroup Holy Holy can still go out to perform Bowie’s most famous cuts half a century on and still reel in the audiences old and new, as they are set to continue doing with a UK tour in the coming weeks.
The longevity of these songs is no bigger a surprise than to Woodmansey himself, who laughs recalling the time he offended a group of teenage fans by asking if the records they were offering him up to sign were really for their mothers. The engagement with the audience is different, too. “It wasn’t so much a big thing of the audience singing along back in the ‘70s,” he muses. “Now they do, but it’s strange when it’s a dark subject and they’re singing it like a Taylor Swift song.”
Looking back over a lifetime, Woodmansey may not feel as connected to the rush of youth as he once did, but it’s clear that the early 1970s still remain as fresh in his mind as if they were yesterday. His first meeting with Bowie rings true to all those elements – a real coming of age, and a moment where the world opened its horizons. “Well, I came down to London from Yorkshire, and there were a few culture shocks,” he tells me. “I’d been into blues music and progressive rock at the time – [Jimi] Hendrix and Cream and Jeff Beck, things like that – so I was dressed accordingly,” he explains.
But meeting the Starman himself blew all expectations out the window. “All I’d seen [of Bowie] was a flyer for an open-air concert that he did up in the north of England, and he had curly hair, so it would be about ‘Space Oddity’ time – that’s all I knew about him. When he opened the door to his place, he didn’t have the curly hair; he had straight hair, same length as mine, but he had a rainbow T-shirt on, red corduroy trousers, a silver buckle belt that was quite prominent, and Clark’s shoes, but he’d sprayed or dyed them red, and then two stenciled stars, one on the top of each shoe. So to me, that was like, ‘Whoa’. I thought, ‘Well, maybe everybody in London looks like that.’”
Striking looks aside, however, there was only one real quality on Woodmansey’s mind – the voice. “It was just a fascinating day,” he remembers, evidently transporting himself back. “But I didn’t really know if he could sing or not, and then he picks his guitar up and just played a song to me. And at the end of it, I was just like, ‘Oh my God.’ I said, ‘Did you write that?’ And he went, ‘Yeah.’ I went, ‘Oh, that’s really cool.’ He could sing, and he just had the bottle, I guess, just to sit there without flinching and sing it to me. It took me on a journey.”
That notion of journeying did indeed become the beating heart of everything Woodmansey achieved with Bowie in The Spiders from Mars, ranging from raucous on-stage spats to the very genesis of the sonic brand they created. “We never really considered ourselves a glam rock band,” he states. “We were disconnected from all that – we did things and wore things because it added to the show or it made a better effect for the audience.”
As the years wore on and The Spiders from Mars eventually disbanded, Woodmansey could evidently recognise the cultural phenomenon that they whipped up, and thus joined the ranks of Holy Holy, flanked by Bowie’s prolific producer and occasional bass player, Tony Visconti. The band were always set on continuing the legacy of that shining era as their tagline, but never was that so sharply pulled into focus as when the main man suddenly passed away in 2016.
“We were touring when he passed away,” Woodmansey reveals. “We spoke to him about a day and a half before, because we were told he was gonna come down and sing with us when we played New York – we played New York on his birthday. He didn’t come, so that was just a rumour, but during the concert Tony said, ‘Well, he didn’t turn up, shall we give him a ring, wish him happy birthday?’, so we stopped the concert and just gave him a call and he answered. We had a chat, and it was quite emotional.”
What no one could have expected, however, was that only a day and a half later, by the time the band had travelled to Canada, news would filter through that Bowie was gone. “Meeting people around that time, it was like they actually lost a brother or a sister,” Woodmansey said. “It was like a family member that had gone – a crucial, stable part of their existence.”
But with the words of their leader still ringing in their ears, Holy Holy knew they needed to go on. “David always said, ‘If you’re booked to play, you play’,” Woodmansey noted. “So we went, ‘We’ve got to do that. We’ve got to play.’ So we continued touring and the audiences came, but it was so, so emotional.”
But like he did when he was living, the spirit of Bowie’s music always carried them through. “I made a point of going out every night and just saying, ‘Look, this is not a funeral. It’s a celebration of him and his music, and he would want you to actually get through this, have a good night, listen to the music, and get off on it’. And I swore my head off until we did,” Woodmansey smiles. Devastating as it was then, almost ten years on, it’s the legacy that Holy Holy are always determined to achieve – not least through their current tour, and others they have in the future pipeline.
Bowie was the beating heart of everything, and although The Spiders from Mars went on to stratospheric success, Woodmansey could never quite believe his luck given his humble beginnings. “Coming from a little town in the middle of Yorkshire,” he says, “to performing at Carnegie Hall and big stadiums with your Andy Warhols and the creme de la creme of the entertainment business sitting out there watching you – it was one hell of a wild ride.”
