Spider from Mars

by Woody Woodmansey

  ‘Yeah, definitely,’ I muttered, in my usual quiet way. Faced with a band of musicians who were all older and better than me, I was crippled with shyness. But inside, I was happier than I think I’d ever been. When I told the Mutations about the offer they all agreed I was right to take the job.

  It turned out that Johnny, who was only in his early twenties, had developed arthritis in his arms. He’d only found out when he was riding his bike one day, couldn’t turn the corner and crashed. When he was getting checked up they told him that he shouldn’t make too many movements with his arms or he’d lose the use of them. That meant drumming was out. Everybody was gutted for him.

  I played my first gig with the Roadrunners the following week, which was terrifying, because they were good musicians with several years more experience of professional gigs. Fortunately, I was a quick learner, and I knew a lot of the cover versions they wanted me to play. As a bonus they gave me Johnny’s Premier drum kit, which was a vast improvement on the crappy Salvation Army kit which I’d been playing with the Mutations. The gig was at a church hall in Barton-upon-Humber and we played covers of songs by the Beatles, the Small Faces, the Who, the Stones and Tommy James and the Shondells.

  Now I was in a real band for the first time, which felt great – like the next step on an important journey. The Roadrunners were good musicians and they were organized, with gigs lined up, and their own instruments and transport. June started making stage clothes for us, and we’d head to gigs dressed in beige, red and even purple suits, worn with black or white polo-neck sweaters.

  I got on really well with the other guys. We had the same sense of humour: we’d recite entire Goon Show programmes in the back of the van. We did some pretty stupid things to amuse ourselves. Once, when we were driving to York, we saw a farm shop with a number of signs outside saying ‘Potatoes, peas, carrots’ in ornate lettering. We stole the signs, but we didn’t just throw them away like a bunch of morons, we kept them in the back of the van. Then when we were heading back that way a week later, in the early hours of the morning, we hung them back up again, to surprise the farmer who probably thought his signs were gone for good.

  We had a lot of laughs in that band. One of our favourite places was a club in York called the Enterprise, and when we were playing nearby we’d go there for a few beers after the gig. A guy called Guppy ran the club, although perhaps it’s a bit generous to call it that: it was basically a dank cellar that played cool music like Tamla and early soul.

  It was pitch-dark in that place, apart from a single red light at the far end of the dance floor. The other end was completely dark, so when you danced with a chick at that end you had to manoeuvre your way down to the light to see what she looked like. Guppy had a special room upstairs, where we’d listen to the Goons albums. That was fantastic, because we loved all that stuff, and we’d hang out there all night, laughing our arses off.

  If we were going into a pub with two entrances, we had a sure-fire way to unnerve the clientele. Dave would go in one door, I’d go in another, we’d catch sight of each other and dramatically shout out ‘Mick!’ and ‘Dave!’ Then we’d run together into the middle of the pub and pretend to kiss, with a hand pressed between our mouths. Pint glasses would smash all around us, with people even more unnerved when they saw our long hair.

  We weren’t really trying to shock people; we just thought this was hilarious. But in retrospect, antics such as this one were an early, milder version of the gender-bending stuff that bands would be getting up to a few years later, not least the band I was in. Perhaps change was in the air, even at that stage.

  Despite all the fooling about, the Roadrunners were a highly professional band and I travelled all over the county for the first time with them. We still didn’t have a manager, but the guitarist used to call the booking agent each week and see what gigs he had for us. At one point we supported the Herd, Peter Frampton’s band, at Leeds University. They were a big deal, and really dominated the crowd when they played live; Frampton had been the ‘Face of 1968’ in a magazine called Rave.

  He was a good guy, and really validated me by coming into our dressing room and saying, ‘What’s your name? I’ll see you at the top’, a hell of a compliment from a musician as talented as he was. I never forgot that, and made a point of encouraging younger musicians when I’d made my own mark a few years later.

  We looked shit-hot, by the way. There was a shop in Driffield called Alec Hall’s, which was a ‘gentlemen’s outfitters’. A couple of young guys worked there who would buy in weird stuff from London, all the way through the mod period. They’d show us their new collections when we popped in on a Saturday and we’d buy clothes on credit, paying a bit off each week. That way we had a good flow of new clothes coming in. We wore things like hipsters, two-tone shirts, kaftans and long black Army & Navy coats.

  Of course, my dad didn’t understand any of this obsession with wearing the right clothes and playing rock ’n’ roll. How could he? Our generation didn’t want to look like their parents, but he would never have grasped that, even if he’d been prepared to make the effort. Back then you were supposed to toe the line, get a trade and be a proper grown-up like your parents were, but that’s never happened to me, and it never will, so that was a losing battle for him. It’s like that old joke: a kid says to his mother, ‘When I grow up, I want to be a drummer,’ and she says, ‘You can’t do both, son.’

  With hindsight, I can imagine what all this was like for my dad. Back then, his generation had come through the Second World War as teenagers and been aware of some truly terrible things – things that kids like me, who had escaped all that, couldn’t possibly imagine. He hadn’t fought in the war himself, but he’d been in some nasty skirmishes in Hong Kong. I remember he told me that he was on guard duty one night when Chinese snipers were about. He was shitting himself all night, because they could kill you at any moment from their position up in the hills. That doesn’t exactly make you the most tolerant person afterwards.

  My dad’s generation just wanted to settle down, look after their families and encourage their kids to get a trade and do well in life. When we rebelled against all that, it must have been a real shock for them. You can imagine just how much worse it was when we started growing our hair long and wearing the most outrageous clothes imaginable, especially in Yorkshire.

  Pretty soon my father and I were in a war of our own. He didn’t like me coming home late after playing gigs with the Roadrunners. He’d lock the front door, so I had to sit in the outside toilet for a couple of hours with only a little paraffin lamp for company. In the winter that was bloody cold. Sometimes my mum would wake up in the night, take pity and come down and let me in. I’d creep up quietly to my bedroom without waking up my dad. None of this was going to stop me playing in the band, but it wasn’t exactly good for my morale.

  My parents thought I’d thrown my talents away by becoming a musician. I know that they just wanted the best for me, but to their generation the idea of me becoming successful as an entertainer or a performer was no more than a dream. In those days you were pushed towards having a trade. I remember that if anyone was out of work in our town, you knew who they were. Nobody stayed out of work for long, because everybody wanted a job, no matter what it was. That was the attitude around me.

  After a fight with my father he’d kick me out and I’d say, ‘It’s OK, I’ll go and live with June’, because she had her own flat by then. That didn’t go down well, of course: men and women weren’t supposed to live together unless they were married. After a day or two, my dad would send my mother over to get me back, saying, ‘He’s forgiven you!’

  It seems trivial now, but we were still arguing about how I looked, with my long hair and jeans covered in satin patches of different colours and leather trim around the pockets. I certainly looked pretty weird by Driffield standards, but in comparison to what I’d be wearing a couple of years down the line it was fairly sedate.

  One day I was sear
ching for my jeans, but I couldn’t find them anywhere. I asked my mum if she’d washed them and she said no, they were in the dustbin. I went and looked – and there they were, covered in eggshells and potato peelings. My dad had thrown them in there because he hated them so much. ‘Thanks, Dad,’ I thought, and got them out and put them on, filthy as they were, because I didn’t give a damn.

  Meanwhile, things weren’t going too smoothly with the Roadrunners. There’d been a bit of trouble in the band between one of the members and his girlfriend: she’d caught him playing around with other women, and so she gave him an ultimatum – her or the band. He quit, and the rest of the members quit shortly afterwards, so there was no more Roadrunners and I was out of a gig for about three months.

  I wasn’t going to stop playing the drums, though, and I auditioned for a few bands. Some of them were pretty talented: one of them was psychedelic rockers Iron Butterfly, who were best known for their song ‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida’, although I had no idea why an American band would be auditioning in London. When I got there, I found about a hundred and fifty other drummers all playing their kits in a big hall. It was an almighty racket, and the band wasn’t as musical at that point as it later became, so I decided I didn’t want that gig, even if I got through the audition. I was also invited to try out for a group whose singer went on to join Sharks, who were successful in the seventies. Their bass player was a guy called John Bentley, who later joined Squeeze. They were playing a form of West Coast Americana, which was a bit trippy for me and not really my thing, so I decided not to bother.

  At the time, the coolest band in Yorkshire were the Rats. Their guitarist, Mick Ronson, had a great reputation, which I realized was fully deserved when I saw the band at an open-air festival in 1969. I was blown away by his presence on stage and his guitar playing; he was four years older than me and had been playing with bands since 1963, when I was just a kid. It later turned out he’d seen me drum with the Roadrunners at the same event.

  The Rats had experience, having spent time in London doing gigs, but they had never quite got the attention they deserved from the record companies. The music they made varied from blues to rock covers and even psychedelia – they’d been known as Treacle for a while. They were one of the first bands from our area to get really big amplifiers – their stage was filled with gear and it looked really impressive.

  A few months after I saw Mick play at that outdoor event I was at Vertex doing overtime on a Sunday when I looked up from the glazing wheel at my workbench and the Rats were standing there. They’d sneaked through security and asked people where I was.

  ‘We’re the Rats, and my name is Mick Ronson,’ Mick told me, before introducing their singer, Benny Marshall, and their bassist, Keith ‘Ched’ Cheeseman.

  Mick looked very cool: he had long blond hair and was wearing a crisp white shirt, a long black coat and neatly pressed black trousers with black slip-on shoes, almost like a young English Tom Petty.

  ‘Pleased to meet you,’ I said. ‘How did you get in here?’

  ‘We sneaked in,’ he smiled. ‘We needed to talk to you.’

  It turned out that the Rats had come all the way over from Hull to ask me to join them. That was quite a compliment, and they were all really nice guys, so of course I took it seriously.

  Mick said their drummer, John Cambridge, had left and that they wanted me to join the Rats. He added that I’d have to come to the audition and pretend I hadn’t got the job yet, as they’d promised an audition to six other drummers who had insisted on having one.

  ‘No problem,’ I replied. Inside, I was delighted. This was the break I needed. I’d liked being in the Roadrunners, but the Rats were a much more professional band – and I knew that I’d fit in with a guitar player as good as Mick.

  I did the audition, joined the band and we started gigging that week. It was clubs and pubs once more, just like the ones I’d been playing with the Roadrunners – but the Rats travelled more widely because they’d been going longer. I remember we did a lot of town halls. It was semi-professional gigging, because we were all still working and we didn’t make much money from the band.

  Later I found out that the Rats had wanted me, probably after seeing me play, because Mick hoped to move the band on to a more professional level and thought I would help with that. John knew some people in London and we heard that he went down there to join a band called Junior’s Eyes, which played original material as well as backing other musicians. One of these was a guy called David Bowie, but I knew very little about him so Junior’s Eyes barely crossed my mind. I was too busy concentrating on the Rats.

  In retrospect, both Mick and I owe Johnny a nod of gratitude: if he hadn’t had the guts to move to London, Ziggy and the Spiders would never have happened in the way they did.

  Mick was the focus on stage, of course, but the Rats didn’t have a leader as such – we all pitched in. I liked him a lot: he was funny, shared my sense of humour, and we dressed the same way. He had learned to play the piano and the violin, and to read and write music up to a certain level, before he jumped to the guitar, but that wasn’t something he bragged about. He probably thought we’d take the piss out of him if he admitted he played the violin. Later on, he’d draw on those other talents to create musical arrangements on songs that are loved the world over. He told me once that he was always striving to achieve the same tonal qualities in his guitar playing as he did on the violin.

  I’d had some laughs with the Roadrunners, but it was another level of enjoyment with the Rats – because they literally didn’t give a shit about anything or anybody. When we took on a new roadie, for example, he had to undergo an initiation where we stripped him naked in the middle of a city, and then we’d fuck off and leave him there for twenty minutes. We did this to one guy in the outskirts of Leeds, leaving him in nothing but his boots, and then drove off for a coffee. Half an hour later we went back and he was hiding in a doorway, as well he might.

  On paper all this stuff might sound a bit harsh, but I can assure you that it was all in good humour and a big part of our bonding process. Anything went in that band. We had a stupid rule where if the van drove around a roundabout and one of us shouted, ‘That was nice, Daddy! Can we do it again?’ the driver had to go round the roundabout again. The rule was cast-iron: even if we were running late for the gig, because we’d got there late from work. Sometimes, the driver had to go round eight or nine times, because it was funny, to us anyway.

  I remember we did one gig in a gymnasium, run by these massive bodybuilders and bouncers and other heavies. These blokes were telling us that some arseholes had been nicking weights from their gym, and that if they ever found out who the culprits were they’d tear them limb from limb. Our singer, Benny Marshall, was a bit lazy when it came to helping clear up the equipment, so to get our revenge we secretly took some weights and stuffed them in his bag.

  We packed up the gear, without any help from him as usual, and came to get him when it was time to leave. ‘Come on, Benny!’ we shouted, as he stood talking to some of the bodybuilders. He went to pick up his bag, but it wouldn’t move. Trying to behave like everything was normal, he kept talking to them but he couldn’t hide the look of terror on his face. He got away unscathed, though. Another time we piled all the equipment that we had on his bed and went home. He cursed the hell out of us because he had to shift it all himself. Any trick like that which one of us dreamed up, we did it.

  I had my first experience with drugs in the Rats after a roadie of ours went down to London and brought back some grass. The idea of drugs was quite shocking to us back then, because they weren’t easily obtainable and did not really come up in conversation. Even Mick, who had been around a bit, didn’t know about drugs because he was raised a Mormon. He didn’t even drink alcohol.

  It probably wasn’t the best idea to smoke my first joint right before a gig. Billed as ‘The Rats Reform’, the show in Hornsea was sold out because we had quite a reputation in those parts,
and also because the band had been in a hiatus for a while and it was a comeback gig of sorts. We were nervous because about four hundred people were coming to see us, so the roadie said, ‘Have a pull on this, it’ll help.’ We did and he was right: our nerves disappeared.

  We kicked the gig off with ‘Crossroads’ by Cream, playing it in every style you can imagine: calypso, blues, reggae, skiffle . . . everything. At the end of the set we came off saying, ‘That was fantastic!’ We didn’t realize that we’d been playing the same number for forty-five minutes. We were out of our minds, just from that bit of grass. I never even noticed the crowd’s reaction but it can’t have been good.

  The roadies looked at us in disgust and said, ‘You can pack your own fucking equipment up. We’ve never been so embarrassed!’ So they pissed off, and we howled with laughter. That taught me and Mick not to do drugs when we were working.

  People were so innocent about all that stuff back then. It’s hard to believe, but one night we got an old shoebox, wrote ‘Drugs’ in big letters on it and stuck it on top of Mick’s amp while we played. It really freaked people out, but it was just a joke. That’s how naive the audiences were back then – people genuinely believed that if you had drugs, which you obviously would if you were a degenerate rock band, you’d keep them in a special, clearly labelled box.

  Drugs didn’t play a major part in my life at any point, partly because their effects scared me. After that first experience, we went to a dealer’s house in Hull for more grass, and I was shitting myself. There was a guy there on acid and it freaked me out, so I knew right away I would never do anything like that. That helped me later when drugs were more readily available, in that I was never interested in doing more than smoking grass.

  Again, despite all our fooling about, the Rats were a serious band. We covered songs from Jeff Beck, Hendrix, Cream and many old blues tracks. We once played a gig supporting Jon Hiseman’s Colosseum. Part of our set included a drum solo, which I had to perform before Hiseman himself, who was a world-famous drummer. Talk about pressure – but I did it anyway, and his roadies told me that Hiseman thought it was great that I had the balls to do it, and he enjoyed it.