In a speech that went down in rock ’n’ roll history, David Bowie killed off Ziggy Stardust, his most iconic creation, in front of a disbelieving audience.
Now, 50 years on, fans will finally get to see the entire legendary gig at London’s Hammersmith Odeon in a new digitally restored film.
The July 1973 concert was the last to feature Bowie’s band, the Spiders from Mars – Mick Ronson on guitar, Trevor Bolder on bass and Mick “Woody” Woodmansey on drums – along with a cameo appearance from legendary guitarist Jeff Beck.
But for Woody, the film brings up mixed feelings – not least as he had no idea Bowie was going to break up the band.
“We were really hot. I mean, really on fire,” he recalls. “I remember Jeff Beck playing on stage with us. It was amazing.
“We had one song left to do and David said: ‘This show will rem- ain with us the longest, because not only is it the last year of the tour, it’s the last show we’ll ever do.’ I was like: ‘what?’
“My head went round like The Exorcist. And Trevor looked at me and said ‘What did he say?’”
Woody, now 73, initially thought Bowie may have been ill or fed up, or was just saying it for publicity.
He says: “All the audience were crying and screaming. It was only a few days later I found out it was Ziggy that he was kind of killing off.
“We’d spent all this time building this whole thing up. And then bang, he just dropped it. So it was pretty hard and I was immersed in a black cloud for a couple of weeks.”
Woody says he couldn’t talk to Bowie at the after-party and he did not find out the band were no more until he spoke to
his manager. Of the new film, he jokes: “Oh good, I just got sacked in front of 2,000 people and now I’m in a film.”
Woody did not speak to Bowie for years. “I was doing sessions in Paris. And Bowie was doing his Low album. I hadn’t spoken to him since Hammersmith.
“Tony Visconti was producing the album and he phoned me and said: ‘David says why don’t you come down and hang out?’”
Woody was shocked by Bowie’s new look. He says: “I was looking around and I couldn’t see Bowie. And then I saw this guy with ginger hair, a beard, a check shirt on with baggy jeans and hiking boots. I just went ‘Bloody hell, I didn’t recognise you’.”
He says Bowie thanked him for the “thrill of a lifetime” for being part of the Ziggy journey and the pair made up. “It was like closure,” he admits.
Geoff MacCormack, a pal of Bowie since they were eight, was a backing singer at Hammersmith. He told he Mirror he was in on the Ziggy secret – and felt guilty because of it. He says: “It was mainly for commercial reasons and there was a dispute between his management, the record company and publishing company.
“But also David was 26 and he wanted to get into something else.”
Eric Hagen was 16 when he went to the gig and remembers Bowie’s speech: “Everyone screamed: ‘no, no, no.’ It was a huge shock. But what emerged after a while was that he was killing off Ziggy, not David Bowie.” Eric, now 66, describes the atmosphere as “hysterical”, adding: “He meant a lot to younger people who probably felt a bit different.”
The original film of concert came out in 1983 but did not include the full set including Beck’s performance.
Producer Ken Scott, who worked on The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust album, says Bowie – who died aged 69 in 2016 – would find the film “very funny”. He explains: “Ziggy is what rocketed David to the first plateau but he continued on. It was such a short period in his life but it’s the one that’s talked about.”
* The Eventim Apollo Hammersmith (formerly the Odeon) will host the global premiere of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders From Mars: The Motion Picture on July 3. The film is being shown in over 1,000 cinemas worldwide in July. davidbowie.com
