Woodmansey’s band Holy Holy is appearing at Connexin Live
Woody Woodmansey of band Holy Holy(Image: Marc Wiles Management)
When David Bowie famously told the audience at the Hammersmith Apollo in 1973 that it would be “the last show that we’ll ever do”, he was of course not telling the truth. That quote proved to be the starting point for his career defining shapeshifting into soul, then krautrock and on to a wide array of other styles.
But for his band that night, The Spiders From Mars, made up of guitarist Mick Ronson, bass player Trevor Bolder and drummer Woody Woodmansey, that quote would turn out to be true, with Bowie going to work with an entirely different band for his next album of original songs, Diamond Dogs (1974). Frequent band changes would be a fixture of Bowie’s career until his death aged 69 in 2016, but none of his bands have been remembered as fondly as The Spiders From Mars.
This is perhaps in part down to their namecheck in the title of his glam magnum opus The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars (1972). But the Spiders’ allure also comes down to them ranking among the greatest rock and roll bands of all time, and also, despite all hailing from Hull, being one of the most glamorous, as one of the first to embrace the androgynous style which would define 1970s glam rock.
“At first it was like David’s saying that you boys are putting make-up on, and then he got three lads from Hull answering at the same time (no), and I can’t really say what we said,” Woodmansey says of the first time he was asked to glam up for the Spiders. “He just didn’t bat an eyelid, he said, ‘oh, that’s a shame’, I remember saying, ‘what do you mean a shame?’.
“And he went, ‘well, you haven’t played under these strong studio lights, and it makes you look like an egg, your face will be an egg, and you’ll be a bit green, you’ll look a bit ill, and you’ve probably got family watching, and there’s like about a million people watching you’.
“And then it went quiet, and we all went, ‘so what do you do with this thing?’, we actually looked like three ladies of the night when we finished the first one, we thought it was good, but it was disgusting really.”
Woodmansey says that the group eventually learned to love the make-up and flamboyant clothes. He said: “It was weird at the time because you went somewhere like New York, and I remember going out of a wrong door from, it must have been Carnegie Hall or somewhere like that, and I got where the audience were, and there were groups of people that all looked like Bowie and the Spiders.
“And I was like, ‘holy s**t, are they among that lot somewhere?’, I had to, like, check it out, and then you go, ‘wow, no, I’m in the wrong place’…
“It was good being part of a cultural change and seeing it, I mean, a truck driver would pull up behind a gig somewhere, a normal truck driver in his gear, big whatever behind him, and you watched him put his make-up on in the wing mirror.
“He still looked ugly when he’d got it on, but you know he was into it, and it was good, it opened people up to not suppressing things.
“They were able to be like, ‘OK, I want to do this’, or, ‘I want to be a ballet dancer’, not necessarily the truck driver, but you know, or, ‘I want to be a writer’, and it made it possible.
“We used to get thousands of fan letters saying, ‘I always wanted to do this, and after seeing you play and buying the albums, I’m going to do it, I’ve just enrolled in college to do this’, and you thought that’s good, you’re encouraging people into the arts to go for it.”
After the break from Bowie, Woodmansey worked on singer Dana Gillespie’s 1974 Weren’t Born A Man album, recorded an album with Bolder and Ronson called The Spiders From Mars in 1976, and formed his own band, Woody Woodmansey’s U-Boat, who released an album in 1977.
But by 2014, the temptation to play those old Bowie tunes was too much, and Woodmansey teamed up with producer Tony Visconti, who worked on 11 of Bowie’s studio albums, including The Man Who Sold The World (1970), Low (1977) and his final record, Blackstar (2016), to play those songs once again in Holy Holy.
Woodmansey says the band, which has been going for more than a decade, is all about keeping the music alive: “Especially nowadays when there’s so much rubbish that’s like instant coffee, it’s like a McDonald’s coffee, a lot of the music, I’d rather not have one.
“And his songs were so evolutionary, revolutionary, they were on the edge all the time.
“I think the only people that managed to do that were the Beatles. You used to wait for the Beatles’ next single to see what they were doing, to see how different the sound would be, and the whole world waited for that, and David’s the only one that really got near doing that.
“You were waiting for his records going, ‘where’s he gone? What’s he going to do next?’, so that’s important for future generations and people that were into Bowie anyway.”
Woodmansey says he loves performing for the Bowie fans, whom he calls “a special breed” from the early days, but the band are now preparing for their own curtain call as they struggle to make touring viable in 2026.
“It got increasingly difficult because of everybody’s work schedule for one thing,” Woodmansey explains. “It got really hard to find a date where you didn’t have a week off between gigs, at which then you spent all your money in hotels and that.
“But it got really hard, and I think even since Covid, a lot of the top bands have pencilled in a lot of the venues, whether they do them or not, and then you can’t get in there. So putting a viable tour together was getting really hard, and then somebody said, ‘maybe this is the last one we can actually do’, and it just grew into an idea, and we didn’t really acknowledge it and say yes, it is.
“And then somebody said, ‘well, that’ll sell a lot of tickets’, so (we said) ‘yeah, go on then’.”
Visconti interjected, saying: “Should the opportunity arise, I’d be open to doing it again next year, because it’s so much fun. We’re a good band and we’re all friends, it’s not awkward or anything, we really love playing this show.”
The final tour, which has Heaven 17 singer Glenn Gregory on vocals, reaches Hull’s Connexin Live tonight (Saturday, September 19).