The WDM’s NICK HORTON chats to drummer Mick ‘Woody’ Woodmansey – currently on tour with his ‘supergroup’ Holy Holy and celebrating the music of his former Spiders from Mars bandmate, one David Bowie

Imagine having some sort of superpower and be able to turn back time more than half a century, to a glorious epoch when you’re in your late teens and early twenties.
Now imagine you were at the centre of a cultural explosion and an integral part of a musical force of nature to send countless thousands of teenagers’ school days insane and persuade countless more to flush their work down the drain.
That superpower is well within the gift of Mick ‘Woody’ Woodmansey, the drumming powerhouse behind David Bowie’s backing band The Spiders from Mars from 1970-73.
And you can relive those gorgeous early days of glam rock with Woody’s ‘supergroup’ Holy Holy, featuring long-time Bowie associate and producer Tony Visconti, still rocking at a sprightly 81, and Eighties electro pioneers Heaven 17 vocalist Glenn Gregory, who finish their current hugely successful UK tour with a date at the Bournemouth O2 Academy on Friday, June 6.

“The reaction of the audiences so far on this tour has been fantastic,” Woody tells me.
“It’s been a huge challenge for us. We would normally end a tour with a big show in London, but that’s where we started this time (at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire on May 15) and then warm-up across the country.
“We’ve toured the UK, America and Japan previously but this time, everything just seems on another level,” the 75-year-old added in his gruff east Yorkshire accent.
Woody teamed up with Bowie in early 1970 at the suggestion of guitarist Mick Ronson, a former bandmate in Hull’s The Rats, with Trevor Bolder later joining on bass.
“I first met David at Haddon Hall (the derelict mansion in Beckenham which was Bowie’s HQ). He answered the door in a rainbow t-shirt, bright red trousers and red and blue painted shoes,” Woody revealed.
“I’d just come down from Hull looking pretty rough with long hair and ripped jeans and thought: ‘Woo, okay’.
“He showed me some of his mime films (with Lyndsay Kemp) on a projector on the wall and I thought ‘What the **** is this?’.
“I’d made a sort of mental checklist: Can he sing? Can he write? Is he intelligent? Is he a good front man? Does he have any fashion sense?
“To be honest, I found his earlier stuff a bit lightweight as I was into tough blues/rock and prog. Then he played his newer songs and I thought: ‘I’ll give it a go’.”
Woody drummed on four of Bowie’s albums: The Man Who Sold the World in 1970, Hunky Dory in 1971, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars in 1972, (when everything went stratospheric) and, finally, Aladdin Sane in 1973.
(And if you can find a more outstanding consecutive series of albums by any one artist, I’d probably point you in the direction of Diamond Dogs, Young Americans, Station to Station, Low and Heroes, but that’s just my personal opinion.)
The bulk of the Holy Holy set list is taken from the four earlier albums. But which songs have really gone down well and which do you enjoy playing? I asked.
“Space Oddity seems very emotional for the audience,” explained Woody, “and Quicksand (from Hunky Dory) is also a key song, and we never, ever played that live with David.
“I personally always enjoy playing Moonage Daydream. It just takes me somewhere else in the universe. And it’s a thrill for me to play Ashes to Ashes as I wasn’t involved with David at that time.
“I’ll let you into a secret. We have a very special arrangement for that one,” he confides.
It’s not the first time Woody has played at the O2 in Bournemouth. He gigged there in August 1972 on the Ziggy tour when it was known as the Starkers Ballroom.
“I thought Bournemouth was just somewhere people retired to,” he said.
Well, I reckon there will be several hundred 60, 70 and 80-something glam rockers in the moshpit on June 6 who might think otherwise, don’t you?