Woody Woodmansey

Driffield to Beckenham

Michael Woodmansey was born on 4 February 1950 in Driffield, a market town in the East Riding of Yorkshire, and it was the Hull music scene that produced the connection which shaped his life. Mick Ronson, the Hull guitarist who had already gone south to work with David Bowie, put his name forward when Bowie's group, then called The Hype, needed a drummer to replace John Cambridge in late March 1970.

By April 1970 Woodmansey was living at Haddon Hall in Beckenham with Bowie, Ronson and producer Tony Visconti, the four of them recording The Man Who Sold the World during the same period. Visconti played bass on that record, which makes the current arrangement less of a reunion than a continuation: the drummer and the bassist from a 1970 session have spent much of the last decade on stage together playing it.

Four albums and a sacking

The run of records is short, and what matters is how much of the Bowie story sits on it. The Man Who Sold the World came out in 1970, Hunky Dory in 1971, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars in 1972 and Aladdin Sane in 1973. Woodmansey drummed on all four and played the Ziggy Stardust Tour that took the character out on the road.

The ending was abrupt. Bowie retired the Ziggy persona at the close of that tour and dismissed his drummer in July 1973, shortly after the last show. The published accounts put the split down to a dispute over money and to the fact that Bowie had not told the band the final date was in fact the final date.

Woodmansey has since been frank about what he did not see at the time. Speaking in December 2018, he said the band had been unaware of Bowie's drug use during those years, that when they met again in 1980 Bowie told him he had tried to keep it off everyone's minds, and that there was "definitely a character change there through the last couple of tours".

The long middle

The decades after Bowie were busy without ever producing anything on the same scale. In 1976 he re-formed the Spiders from Mars as a band in its own right, without Bowie, for a self-titled album. In 1977 came Woody Woodmansey's U-Boat, a group under his own name, with a debut album that year. From May 1978 he was a member of Screen Idols, and later years brought work with Art Garfunkel, the Cybernauts and the band 3-D, where he is still listed as drummer.

In 2016, the year Bowie died, Woodmansey published his memoir, Spider From Mars: My Life With David Bowie, co-written with Joel McIver and carrying a foreword by Visconti. The same year he made headlines for declining an invitation to take part in Lady Gaga's Grammy tribute to Bowie and for criticising the performance afterwards.

Holy Holy, 2014 to 2025

Holy Holy began as a short UK tour in September 2014, with Woodmansey on drums, Visconti on bass and Glenn Gregory of Heaven 17 singing. A double A-side single, We Are King backed with Holy Holy, came out the same month. In June 2015 the band released a live recording of a concert built around The Man Who Sold the World, produced by Visconti, and that summer it played UK and Japanese dates. A short east-coast American run followed in January 2016, the month of Bowie's death, then a full tour of the United States and Canada in the spring. In March and April 2017 the band performed the Ziggy Stardust album in full, starting in Hull and moving across the UK, and it kept touring through 2019.

The line-up around the two founders has been stable. James Stevenson and Paul Cuddeford play guitar, Visconti's daughter Jessica Lee Morgan handles twelve-string guitar, saxophone and vocals, and the keyboard chair has been shared by Berenice Scott and Janette Mason.

Woodmansey himself was absent for a stretch. In early 2022 Steve "Smiley" Barnard took over the drum stool, a change the band's own account attributes to "medical differences" and which the drummer's biography links to his Covid vaccination status. He returned for the May 2025 UK tour, which played the O2 Shepherd's Bush Empire in London on 15 May, the O2 Ritz in Manchester on 18 May, the O2 City Hall in Newcastle on 21 May and the O2 Academy in Bristol on 30 May.

Reviewing the Manchester show for Louder Than War on 20 May 2025, Nathan McIlroy called it "triumphant, uplifting, euphoric". The set opened with Warszawa and drew heavily on the 1970s records, taking in Panic in Detroit, Drive-In Saturday, Changes, Time, Rock 'n' Roll Suicide, Life on Mars? and Moonage Daydream. McIlroy wrote of being moved to tears by one of Woodmansey's drum patterns and of noticing he was not the only one, and described the songs as sermons to the church of mad love for anyone who had ever felt like an outcast.

The final tour

On 11 February 2026 Visconti and Woodmansey announced Holy Holy: The Final Tour, a celebration of Bowie that they said would be the last time the group performed together. Sets are billed as running from the 1970 material through to Blackstar, Bowie's final album, with Gregory on vocals, Cuddeford and Stevenson on guitars, Morgan on twelve-string and saxophone and Mason on piano and keyboards.

Woodmansey's statement, carried in a 4 March 2026 report, gave the reasoning. "Since Holy Holy formed back in 2014, we've played to hundreds of thousands of Bowie fans around the world," he said, adding that the band had toured the UK, Japan, Europe and the United States and that the music connected just as strongly each time. With the V&A's Bowie exhibition open, the recent preservation of Bowie's archive and the tenth anniversary of his death, he said it felt like the right moment to come together again and celebrate what the music still means.

The UK run opened at the O2 Academy in Glasgow on 3 September 2026 and moved through Leeds on 4 September and Liverpool on 5 September, with Oxford on 8 September, Southampton on 9 September, London's O2 Shepherd's Bush Empire on 10 September, Bristol on 11 September, Manchester's O2 Ritz on 12 September, Lytham St Annes on 15 September, Birmingham on 16 September and Newcastle's O2 City Hall on 17 September. It closes on 19 September at Connexin Live in Hull, the city where the Spiders story began, with Gregory billed there as special guest and VIP packages including pre-show dining on offer.

Where that leaves Woodmansey is a drummer of seventy-six finishing a project rather than a career, on stage most nights with the man who shared a house with him in 1970, playing songs the pair helped make. No reviews of the September 2026 shows had been published at the time of writing.