Woody Woodmansey of Holy Holy – Interview Part 2!
Woody Woodmansey and Holy Holy appeared at o2 Academy in May 2025. Alan Neilson did great job of reviewing the event and also had prior access to Woody himself to conduct an in-depth interview with the rock ‘n’ roll survivor. Part one concentrated on the then upcoming gig. Part two is a much longer discussion about Woody’s history with Bowie and those seminal albums. So strap yourselves in for a long and entertaining interview – part two!
AN – One of the things I wanted to talk about in just a tiny introductory way was, I live in Stourbridge, which is in the Black country in the West Midlands. This area is called the Black Country and ever since I moved here and already knew The Man Who Sold the World, I always thought, is the song Black Country Rock off the album about here, because obviously Sabbath are from here and Led Zeppelin, and Slade. And I just wondered, was that intentional, or did it just come out of nowhere?
WW- You know, in those days we’d say to David, ‘Oh, what’s this one about?’ And he’d usually say, ‘I have no idea.’ You know. Thanks a lot! But then, you know, you had to create your own story to be able to know what to play and then play it. And hopefully it had some bearing on what he was trying to put across, you know what I mean? Because you’re trying to embellish what he’s doing and make it communicate as a rock song. And that one was like, I kind of took it and that’s what it was. It was Black Country. It was all those bands. It’s just about that. That was my take on it. I don’t know if that was his.
AN – Okay. It’s interesting, because obviously it’s not a metal album, but it’s bordering on heavy rock and there’s a lot of heavy stuff on there. I’m just trying to think if Sabbath had made their debut at that point yet, or what influences you had when you were making that (NB: Black Sabbath was recorded in late 1969 and released February 1970. The Man Who Sold the World was recorded from April 1970 and released in April 1971)
WW- Well, Mick Ronson and I had come up through, well, I guess a lot of the early changes in music, you know, from the Stones through to you know, Kinks, the Who, and then up to Cream and Hendrix and Led Zeppelin. You know, that was our route and we were kind of sitting in progressive rock. So we did like some Jeff Beck tracks and Mick was a big fan of Beck. And when you closed your eyes, it sounded just like Jeff Beck. He was really into getting things right even in those days, you know. So, that’s where we were.
AN- I have read that the music on The Man Who Sold the World was initially arranged by you, Mick and Tony, and David turned up at the end and added lyrics, although he commented much later on this was not quite the case. It does sound like David counts in the title track, so he was clearly a part of the recording. I can imagine that certain songs came from jam sessions, but who had the final say on the song structures and arrangements and how did you set up in the studio?
WW- The way we recorded that album was…… I mean, it was the first time I’d been in a major studio in London, you know. Mick had done a couple of sessions, I think he’d done one for Elton John and Michael Chapman, who was a folk guitarist (NB: the album was Fully Qualified Survivor). He’d done some stuff there. That was the only studio stuff Mick had done. Tony was going to play bass and produce. He said, “I don’t know how to approach this. I don’t know how to play rock”, and Mick just gave him Cream albums and said, learn that and you’ll be all right. And it’s really funny when you look back. And Tony did, he just was like, ‘Oh, yeah, I got it, yeah’. I mean, David would just go, ‘Okay, we’re in the studio next week’ and we set up like a band as though we were going to do a gig. We didn’t even go into the separate rooms or partition everything off. We just set it up like a live band and David would come and he’d go, ‘I’ve got this one’. We’d go, ‘What’s it called?’ And he’d go, ‘Oh, it’s the, it’s ‘The Cyclops’, okay?’ Some concept there. And he’d go, ‘There’s this bit (plays riff) and then there’s this, and then this bit, I don’t know where this bit goes.’ And we’d go ‘Oh, wow.’ To us it was, well, we’d never really done original stuff before, so to Mick and I, it was like, okay, maybe this is how it works you know. And then we just, we’d just play the chords and piece it together like a cut and paste, really, as a band. Well, that that bit sounds good following that. Just go back to that because that’s really nice. And then you’d have a backing track. And then Tony would say, David, you know, we’ve finished that, do you want to come and put a vocal on? And usually David would go, ‘I haven’t got anything written for that one yet.’ You know, and Tony would push him a bit and then 20 minutes later, he’d come with the lyrics and melody. And I’d go, ‘Oh, are we doing The Cyclops? and he goes, ‘No, it’s not Cyclops.’ ‘Well, what is it then?’ And he’d go, ‘It’s The Supermen.’ Oh, right! Pretty close then! So we did the whole album like that. Which was, looking back on it, it was quite a strange way to work.
AN- And how long are we talking now? Was it a couple of weeks this was made in, or over a longer period?
WW- Yeah, yeah, probably the backing tracks and stuff were done in a couple of weeks, and then we were into overdubbing percussion, guitar and synthesiser and vocals and all that stuff. So quite a long time, weren’t it? Probably the longest time we spent on an album. Yeah, it went shorter after that.
AN- Because I assumed, as that was the first one with Mercury, he may have had less money for studio time and would have been asked to make it quicker.
WW- Yeah, I think that pressure was there. It seemed to be there on all the albums anyway. And I think Tony was the one feeling the pressure because he was down as producer. So he had to go, ‘Well, you got to write it now because I need the vocals doing today.’ You know what I mean? Bowie would be like, ‘Yeah, all right, okay.’ He’d just sit in the foyer of the studio and write the lyrics. I mean, he’s very fast. He was. And it was his.., I guess it was David’s first attempt at Rock. He hadn’t been really that heavy, you know. So it was his take on it, you know.
AN- That does shine through, I think, in the performances from the four of you on the album. It might be rock, but it’s so different, which is, you know, testament to the players on there, really, the three of you and David, it’s like rock, but it isn’t rock. And I think that maybe that’s why it didn’t sell well because people are thinking, well, it’s not. It’s not rock.
WW- Yeah, yeah. Especially with that cover, what’s happening with it?
AN- Well, this is it. It’s odd now because it was released in America first, wasn’t it, with that cartoon cover?
WW- Yeah.
AN- And then months later, it was released in the UK with the dress cover. Do you know why that happened, why there was such a delay between the US and the UK releases, I think it was like from November to April, maybe six months after?
WW- Yeah, I think there was a refusal to release it. With that cover. I mean, I didn’t really get into it at the time. I just remember hearing something about that. That’s why. Because the cowboy cover carrying a gun was a complete surprise to us. I mean, you know, a lot of things that Bowie introduced to his work and to us, because we had to work with him, it wasn’t over one weekend. It was gradually introduced, I guess, just as he thought of it, or whether he was preparing us for what was to come. I’m not sure, you know. He’d kind of go, ‘Woody’ and he’d be up this big staircase (at Hadden Hall) and he’d come down with the dress on. And you know, none of us had ever seen that. Do you know what I mean? Well, I’ve never seen a guy wearing a dress if it wasn’t for comedy, you know. If one of our mates from Hull had done that, you’d all have a good laugh. Do you know what I mean? But it wasn’t that, you know, it was a serious, artistic statement. And I just immediately thought, it’s like the Renaissance you know? And that’s what I said to him. And he went, ‘Oh, good’, you know. Okay. I didn’t know at that time it was going to be on the album cover.
AN- And obviously the Hunky Dory cover art is in a similar sort of vein, isn’t it? That old sort of Hollywood legend look, which kind of follows that through. I’m guessing you weren’t involved in that because you were there to record the songs, and then all the artwork and any other business was separate I guess.
WW- Yeah.
I mean, we did studio shots when David was having his. We had a photo session for Ziggy. And we were all there for that. And I think we probably would have all been on the cover if it hadn’t been pouring down with rain in the middle of London. He said, ‘I want to do something something outside’, and we went ‘Piss off! I’m not going outside it’s pouring down.’
AN- I always wondered whether that was true.
WW- It is. If it hadn’t been raining, we might all have been in a phone box.
AN- Can you imagine all four of you in there?
WW- With the dress!
AN- It’s funny because there’s so many things that are written about that period and some of it you think, well, is that true? And I always wondered whether that story was, you know, why is he on his own out there. Because it’s a band thing; in the photo that was inside, I had a gatefold with the four of you in there. And I always thought as a kid, this is a band. Okay, it’s David Bowie, but it’s a band. Because it sounds like one, doesn’t it? Right from the off, it’s a band.
WW- All the different facets that we had to get involved in, it was like, it was like Queen, really. Like the band Queen, you know, it operated like that.
AN- And can I ask, you know, the period from when The Man Who Sold the World was being finished and Hunky Dory starting, I know there’s quite a few BBC sessions that have been released recently, is that what you were doing for those months between the recording of those albums? Because I heard one story that Mick went back to Hull to learn music orchestration.
WW- Yeah, I mean, all bits of that is all true. I mean, Mick and I had been mainly on the road or doing clubs or universities in a band. So we were pretty into touring. We liked live work, you know. And because of David’s management situation and the record company contract, there was no money, really. So we couldn’t even get set up to be able to go out on the road, and I don’t think it was really on his mind 100% at that point because he was kind of; he’d done an album, but I don’t think he’d still kind of really made his mind up, ‘Am I going to write for musicals?’ Which sounds weird, but that was what he looked at.. ‘shall I just write for other people?’ ‘Shall I go into acting?’ ‘Should I…’, do you know what I mean? ‘Where do I actually fit?’ He hadn’t really made that commitment to a purpose, if you like, you know? And so we were sat around not doing a lot. And we did a few gigs, and I remember we had one at, I think it was Leeds University, and we were just going up with a drum kit, Mick was going to play bass and David on acoustic and we’re going to do it. So Mick and I went up in a taxi actually with our equipment in a taxi. David went up in his Rupert the Riley (NB: a 1930’s Riley Gamecock vintage race car) with his gear in the back. And we’d, you know, obviously The Man Who Sold the World didn’t take off like we thought it might, you know, because we loved it. And then, he’d kind of done a couple of vocal things that we didn’t really like, I’m being really honest, honestly.. it really wound us up a bit. And we couldn’t quite adjust to it. So on the way to Leeds we.. funnily enough, there was a signpost and it said Leeds, so many miles, Hull, X amount of miles. We’d been talking about this and I can’t remember whether it was me or Mick, just went, ‘Do you want to go home?’ And we went, ‘Yeah, go on then.’ So we went back to Hull and put a band together and started gigging and we did places like the university circuit, really. And places like the Cavern. It was nice to be able to play those gigs, you know. And it never really got mentioned again. Then David phoned up, maybe in about four months he phoned us back and said, ‘You have to come back’, you know. ‘I haven’t been able to do anything worthwhile with anybody else. So I need you back here. I’ve got new management’. That was what he said. And we’re going to work towards another album, blah, blah, blah. And it wasn’t really happening for us in Hull, for Mick and I. So we just said, ‘Shall we go back?’You know. I think Angie mentioned it later, probably during Aladdin Sane: ‘Oh, yeah, I remember when you boys left David on his own’, you know, and we were going, ‘No, I don’t remember that.’
AN- Hunky Dory, which is the album you made after you kind of left David, is to me, one of the best albums ever made, never mind just from David’s work. It’s immaculate.
WW- It’s a funny album that.. it’s probably my favourite, just from the songwriting and the production and the playing on it. I think we’d all, you know.. you’re still going through a lot of changes as musicians. I mean, we were. You know, you’re constantly changing, but we were going through a lot of changes then because we were right on the edge, you’re right on the edge of the business and you’re trying to make it. So you’re trying to soak up everything you can, you know? And David had gone on this promo trip to America for The Man Who Sold the World, he met Iggy Pop, met Andy Warhol, met Lou Reed. I think he met Lou Reed.. he wasn’t quite sure whether it was Lou Reed or somebody pretending to be him.
AN- I heard that story, yeah.
WW- Yeah. It’s true. True. That’s pretty funny. Anyway, he brought back tapes of Iggy’s concert in Detroit, I think it was, and some tracks of Lou’s and we sat and listened to all that. And we were kind of branching out into different music, what was around. We were very into Neil Young at the time, listening to his production and whatever. Lennon’s solo album was really like, had something about it that we liked and we kind of got round to it.. and and I know people say that, less is more when you’re playing, but we really kind of got that. That that’s really what was needed and you had to apply that. Especially with David’s vocal. You know what I mean? To make it work, you couldn’t do a drum fill straight through it.. the most important part of the song you know and you do a drum fill! So we were learning that. And if you find the right thing with a song, it doesn’t need embellishing that much. You know, a good song? And so we started to play like that and he started to write differently. He came back from America and he said, ‘Oh, I learned.’ He said ‘I always knew there was some ingredient missing.’ And I was like, I’m intrigued, what? What’s missing? And he said, ‘More Bowie. Need more Bowie..’ and then we chatted a bit and I kind of interpreted it that like, which I thought this as well, he always had a little bit of somebody else mixed in with his songs. There was an influence there that was too much of an influence almost. You know? And I don’t think he saw that. He was trying anything and everything. And the ‘More Bowie’ was like, ‘I’ve just got to write what I want to write and how I want to do it.’ So then when we started Hunky Dory, he’d bring a completed song, he’d have written it at home. He had a guitar in the bedroom, he had a piano.. no, a piano in the bedroom, guitar in the lounge. You’d just hear him playing away and he’d go, ‘Oh, Woody, just finished one.’ You’d go in and play Life on Mars? or something. You know, and you go, ooh, wow, yeah, that’s good. So there were complete songs. Lyrics, melodies, everything. You know what I mean?
AN- How much direction were you given for your parts, and who ‘directed’? I ask this because many of your parts are so recognisable and clearly written by a drummer: I am thinking about Five Years, the drum fill into the non-chorus in Ziggy, the fills in Changes etc..)
WW- He never told us what to play. He just left it up to you to play. And different to Man Who Sold the World, was that you didn’t get like five attempts at putting that track down. You learned early on, you maybe got one or two takes. If it went to three, it was looking pretty bleak, you know. Sometimes you’d only heard the song once at Haddon Hall. And then you’re in the studio and he goes, oh, we’re doing ‘blah’. And I go, is that the one that..? yeah, okay. And we’re like, well, is there a middle eight? This is the Spiders all going, is there a middle eight? What does it go out on? How many choruses? We’re like, oh! you know.. so you’re on a knife edge, you know what I mean? Because you don’t want it to go to a three take dark place. You don’t want it to go there. And you also want to do a good job . So we’ve got like five, ten minutes at the most to just quickly go, it’s blah, it’s blah, yeah, I’m sure it goes there. Sometimes you could go, David, what’s the end, what’s the end chords? And then he goes, it’s blah. Oh, yeah. It’s like it’s a middle eight thing you know. And then he’d just go, ‘Ken, are we’re rolling?’ which meant the light, the studio light came on.. and you’re in. Bang, you were in, you know. So like something like Starman was second take. We’d only played it that night ever. Life on Mars was second take. Jean Genie was first take. We’d never played it before. That was just playing it, bang! straight up that’s the one. When we first did that, you’d do a track, I can’t remember what track it was, and you had to walk up these stairs in Trident studios in London, from the studio floor up to the control room upstairs. And we said, oh, shall we go up and listen? We just laid one down. And I’m thinking, well, I don’t know if I got it right. I’m not sure if.. I’m not sure where it went. I don’t know what that bit was. I’m thinking, you know, I’ll have a listen. So you’re listening to it and I’d think, oh, I got it right. Oh, that’s good. I thought it was that there. And then I’d go, should we go and do another one? And he’d go, ‘No, no, no, that’s it.’ We go, what? ‘I got it. That’s what I want.’ And we go, that’s the first time we played it and we only heard it this morning. He’d go, ‘Yeah, that’s what I want.’ Early on I would think, he’s an idiot. He’s an idiot! Do you know what I mean? Because we, not that we were like experts in the studio, but we weren’t novices, so we thought, well, at least.. I’ve heard bands going like 10 takes or some do 9 takes. At least 10 takes and then pick the best one. But no, you’ve just done your first take and he’s going, ‘That’s it.’ And you’re like, oh my God. And then he go, ‘Okay, let me put my acoustic on it.’ He’d do that and it opens it up and you think, oh, that’s quite nice. That’s nice. ‘Let me do a bit of a vocal’ and it would go, bang! Oh my God, what I played and Trevor and Mick played made more sense. Do you know what I mean? It just came to life. And then I realised he didn’t want you to labour it. If you do four or five takes, to some degree, you’re remembering, you’re playing from memory what you might have done on the second one that was really good and how you did it. So you’re already in muscle memory and kind of tributing your own talent. You’re not right there in the now. You’re not right there creating. And that’s what he wanted, without saying. So we did everything like that. It was bang! And it did get onto the record. That kind of edginess, that liveness.. knife edge on some of the songs, added to the atmosphere of the song, you know. It worked.
AN- It’s amazing to me because things like Changes, Oh, You Pretty Things, Quicksand, where for large parts of it, there is no drums, for instance. And then you come in on a chorus and then you’re off again. And then you come back in again. To me, it’s like, that must have been worked out intricately.
WW- Well, yeah, I mean some little bits like that would be mentioned, just, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s where you come in there on that and then we just do that as piano and vocal.’ So that was just mentioned. So at least you had some clue. You didn’t just bang all the way through it and hopefully you followed the arrangement, you know, but put just generally, it was the other way.
AN- You come from a rock background and you make The Man Who Sold the World, and then you come into Hunky Dory, and then through Ziggy, you’re creating rock tracks like Suffragette City, but then you’re doing like Lady Stardust or Soul Love or something, which are softer, or Lady Grinning Soul, which is much softer. Is that something you just had in you, that you could literally go, I’m going to do this and then that.
WW- Because you’ve come up from age 14 playing covers, they weren’t all meaty rock tracks. You might do The Beatles ‘Michelle’ or something. So you kind of learnt how to play all those things. You didn’t necessarily specialise in them, you know. But then when you had to do it, your overriding policy was you are playing drums for the song. What does the song need to make a song work, to make it emphasise what he’s singing about or where it’s going? What beat needs to go along with that. So when you just hear the chords and his voice, it just became natural to play what was needed. When we did Five Years on Ziggy, he’d played it to me and Mick on the Friday and we were in the studio on the Monday, and I said, What are we doing today? And he went, ‘Five Years.’ And I hadn’t even clicked what it was called. And I went, oh, is that the one you played on Friday? ‘Yeah’. Yeah, we’ll do it. And then he went, ‘We’re just about ready to start,’ and he went, ‘Oh, by the way you start this one.’ Thanks a lot! And my first thoughts were like, oh, I’ve got a chance to show off. You know, do a few flash bits, a few cymbal crashes, a little bit of John Bonham, you know what I mean? All the bits I wanted to put on a record somewhere, you know. And then I thought it’s about the end of the world. I kind of knew that’s what it was about. I went, it’s not going to feel like that, what’s the point of showing off? You’re not going to be around that long. In the end, I just went ah.. and kind of more got into the emotion of the end of the world. And just went, I just started playing. And then he just went, ‘That, that, do that. That’s perfect.’ And I went, oh, good, I thought that would work. And then I went, when I started it, I thought, I’ll hit a cymbal. I went, I can’t be fucking bothered. You know what I mean? It was like, I was really in the moment: It’s the end of the world.
AN- It’s so distinctive that drum pattern that you picked. I mean, it’s a 6/8 time signature, isn’t it, for Five Years and for a long time, I used to think, and I’ve read this as well that other people thought it was in 5/4 because it it kind of, it moves in a strange way.
WW- Yeah, it does. It’s the stop, but it hasn’t stopped. It’s just, yeah, it just seemed to add to that feeling of like it’s all hopeless and we’re going.. we’re going to die.
AN- Yeah, it’s a fantastic beat. It’s perfect.
AN- Can I just ask you, because this period of your career and that period of time fascinates me, in as much as that you went from The Man Who Sold the World, that didn’t sell, Hunky Dory also didn’t sell, and then then you were beginning to make Ziggy. Was there a feeling in the band, and David himself, that ‘We don’t know what’s going to work?’ You’ve mentioned that he might go and do songs for other people. Was there a feeling that you might just go.. forget it?
WW- Yeah, I mean, when I first met him and we got to know each other, there was that air of, ‘Am I a one hit wonder with Space Oddity?’ So that was very prevalent around that time. You had to kick that you had to kick that out of the way to some degree, as an attitude, you know. And then even he managed to do that. And we’d done Changes which got played every hour on Radio 1 and didn’t sell. And we thought it was really a song that should have gone. It was good. I think they even released Life on Mars. And you think, nobody likes it. (NB: the only single from Hunky Dory was Changes, which did not chart in the UK and reached 66 in the US Billboard Hot 100. Life On Mars? was later released as a single in 1973 after the success of Ziggy and got to number 3 in the UK). I do remember thinking, Have we gone a bit far too early, or whatever. Is that a bit too much for people to take? So there was that. And then you’re doing all the the dressing up, the stage things, the make-up, the.. and it’s all.. it could all end your career overnight. Do you know what I mean? Now that was riding along with it. But I guess the thing that pulled us through was we loved the music. It was the music, the songs, and what they felt like, we just thought they deserved to be out there and they deserved to be successful. You know, we’d put a lot of work in. He’d written some fantastic songs and he’d just keep going. It was just that persistence, you know.
Interview: Alan Neilson
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