Original subtitles

DAVID: Around '69 or '70,

Tony Visconti and I were on the lookout for a guitarist

to record with us on my new songs.

My then drummer, John Cambridge,

started pushing hard for a guitarist called Mick Ronson

that he'd worked with a couple of years before.

Tony and I were only too keen to hear him

so John traveled up to the North of England to talk to him,

and I think he put forward the plan to Mick

while Mick was marking out the white lines of a rugby pitch.

Anyway, Mick said he'd give it a go and he came down to London.

* The Jean Genie Lives on his back

* The Jean Genie Loves chimney stacks

* He's outrageous He screams and he bawls

* Jean Genie...

DAVID: Interestingly, in performance Mick played a lot more raw

and spontaneously than the work he did on record,

the energy and grit cut through the room

and he immediately established himself as a very impactful player.

I'd like to introduce you to the guitar player from The Spiders from Mars.

Mick Ronson!

* All the young dudes

Young dudes!

* Carry the news

Where are you?

* Boogaloo dudes

Stand up!

* Carry the news

* Teenage wasteland

* It's only teenage wasteland *

BOB: We had opportunities in the 60's

of self-expression that had never arrived to any general before ours.

MARY: Simultaneously, with that there was a whole bunch of people in America,

like Allen Ginsberg, that whole movement on the West Coast,

who were doing pretty much the same thing.

It was revolutionary but in an absolutely totally, non-violent way.

And the music that we had, we always said we had the best sex,

the best drugs and the best music.

BOB: And it all seems to be cool to get stoned or take a trip,

in fact, not only is it cool, it's kind of encouraged

that this is the way you arrive at creative expression.

MARY: And that was the setting that moved out into the suburbs in 1969.

I lived in Dagenham and I met David,

and a couple of days later he moved in,

and when he came, he just had one small rucksack and a Gibson 12-string.

He spent his entire time composing.

All the songs that were on his second album

were written when he was living

at 24 Foxgrove Road, my flat.

So David moved in and, yes,

he staged a very elegant seduction, very soon afterwards,

but we never observed lodger/landlady conventions.

We founded a folk club at the Three Tuns pub in Dagenham High Street.

It became an arts lab which was a movement at the time

that started in Drury Lane in London.

The Arts Laboratory in Drury Lane was kind of the template, really,

the sort of mixed media idea of merging

you know, music, dance, poetry, expression.

MARY: And it became absolutely, totally magnetic

for the entire youth movement of South London.

I used to do David's mother's hair, in Beckenham High Street, Evelyn Paget's.

And she used to talk to me about her son, David.

It was Mrs. Jones.

It wasn't until she mentioned Space Oddity that my ears kind of pricked up,

I said, "Space Oddity? Are we talking about David Bowie?"

"Yes," she said, "I'm his mum."

That's how I met his mother and then she brought Angie into the shop.

MARY: I came back after being away for a couple of days

and there was a notebook by the bed that said,

the sort of beginnings of a song, Beautiful Angie.

Angie Bowie was a very loud, American, young girl

who was definitely bisexual,

and was the main force,

strength behind David Bowie through to the Hammersmith Odeon.

* Soon you'll grow So take a chance

* With a couple of kooks

* Hung up on romancing

SUZI: The first time I saw David

he was walking down Beckenham High Street wearing a dress,

and he's with this girl who looks a bit like a bloke.

She had like, a man's suit on and heavy shoes and short hair.

DANA: I've always lived in my parents' marvelous basement flat

and David used to come round a lot, 'cause I had that big place,

the Fun Palace as Lionel Bart used to call it.

So... And Angie called it The Bunker.

MARY: As soon as Angie came on the scene, they started flat hunting.

And so she found this place just up the road,

rather pretentiously known as Haddon Hall.

It was this fabulous place with this huge, stained glass window, 20 feet high.

The whole length of the hall, not one window,

the whole wall stained glass, like a church.

That huge hall,

was absolutely full, it was an atrium,

trees, shrubs, it was glorious.

But you have to understand there were 18 cats

and the cats made themselves right at home.

So if you can appreciate that it took us two weeks

and probably ten gallons of bleach.

KEVIN: He was creating this kind of weird,

post sort of hippy, proto-punk, almost thing,

yeah, it was a weird setup in Haddon Hall.

BOB: It was kind of like the London equivalent of Andy Warhol's The Factory,

if you want to put it like that.

Kind of that's what David might have had in his mind that it could... become.

To me it was always like a set, it was like a stage set.

MARY: Mick Ronson appeared on the scene roundabout that time.

MICK: It all started with the drummer

that used to play in this group that I played with,

when I was living in Hull at that time.

I was working as a gardener.

I was kind of pushing a lawn mower round the school gardens, you know,

around the rose bushes and everything.

And he was the drummer for a short while in this group

that I played with called The Rats.

There were a few Rats around in the UK

but these particular Rats were the Rats from Hull,

led by a buy called Benny Marshall

and he had various line ups,

including John Cambridge and including Mick Ronson.

I remember seeing The Rats and thinking, "What an amazing guitarist!"

I didn't meet him at the time, I just saw the band,

but they were fantastic, The Rats, really, really good.

There was a lot of popular bands around

but The Rats, I think, was probably, you know, the most popular.

But of course, they would be, wouldn't they?

TONY: Mick had already played for a producer called Gus Dudgeon,

so we heard about Mick.

And it was John Cambridge who mentioned that,

"Mick was in my band, The Rats."

MICK: He played with another group called Julia's Eyes.

They used to back David Bowie on some gigs, I think, for a short while.

He said, "You've got to meet this guy, David Bowie," you know, I said,

"You should come down to London." You know...

TONY: But then it came as a complete surprise that he was a gardener

and he wasn't playing music anymore.

So I came down to London

and we were sitting round his house.

DAVID: I started playing some of my songs on a 12-string

and he plugged in his Gibson.

And even though he was playing at a very low volume,

the energy and grit cut through the room

and he immediately established himself as a very well defined player.

TONY: We had a John Peel show in two days to do

and it was just going to be John Cambridge, myself and David.

David was going to be on acoustic guitar,

but there was some electric guitar needed for the songs.

I mean, we were, you know, sitting around playing guitar, and like,

sort of cross-legged on the floor and everything, you know.

And I picked up the guitar and was just playing along.

TONY: When he played his first few notes

and just was getting his tone out of his amplifier

David and I looked at each other and we went silently, "Wow!" like that.

And he said, "I've got a radio show to...

"To play this evening.

"Will you come and play?" You know.

So I said, "Yeah, alright then."

So with a couple of hours of rehearsal Mick joined us.

MICK: I didn't really know what was going on,

so I kind of stood on his left side, so I could watch his hands

and watch where he was playing, you know.

And so I didn't know any of the numbers really,

so I kind of just watched him and kinda played through everything.

DAVID: He picked up chord sequences really fast

and he was then able to improvise around them pretty much immediately.

The radio show sounded pretty good considering how little rehearsal there'd been.

JOHN: Are you going to be doing gigs with this man?

DAVID: Yes, we're going to do some gigs, are we, Michael?

Michael doesn't really know, he's just come down from Hull.

And I met him for the first time about two days ago,

through John, the drummer, who's worked with me once.

JOHN: I see, but you are planning to go on the road, as it were?

DAVID: Yes, fairly shortly.

And I guess everybody kind of liked it

and then from then he said, "Why don't you just go back to Hull

"and get your things and come back down?"

ANGIE: We got to Hull, we got to Mrs. Ronson's house.

Ronno came from the back of the house,

in a shirt,

pale blue stripes and white,

and starched collar and the cuffs rolled up.

And he came in and he didn't see us, we were over here,

and he walked over to his mother and he grabbed her round the waist

and he gave her a big kiss on both cheeks.

And he said, "Well, Mum, I'm off now."

And she said, "No!

"David and Angie are here,

"and I think they want to talk with you."

He said, "I was going to meet them,"

and he came over and he shook David's hand.

Immediately they clicked, immediately,

and it was as though, you know, it was always meant to be.

He loved him enough to tell him to move in.

MICK: You kind of walk in the driveway and there'd be like these two big pillars

and eight or nine steps up to the front door, a big front door, you know.

When you walked in, you saw a big staircase right in front of you,

a great, big, winding staircase,

which sort of went up and it had this balcony around the top,

a very high ceiling.

And then you had the rooms off, different rooms off to the side.

These rooms were massive,

so it was like a mansion.

And it was real cheap too, you know, because David only paid £7 a month rent.

I'd never seen rooms that big before.

I come from like...

I grew up in a terraced house, you know,

a little, tiny, terraced house with no electricity upstairs and things.

We used to have a tin bath and we used to have to fill it up with a kettle.

ANGIE: So there they were living in Haddon Hall.

And I used to go down on Sunday,

there I'd see David and Angie hanging out,

David writing his songs, Angie finding food for everyone.

And there was the Spiders from Mars in their embryonic days,

sleeping on sort of mattresses up on the minstrels' gallery of Haddon Hall.

And that's when I first met Mick Ronson,

who from now onwards I have always called Ronno.

I can't bear it when people call him Mick

because if you talk about a Mick,

you know, I know about five Micks but there's only one Ronno.

There was like a little wine cellar downstairs,

man, it was tiny, this place.

And Tony Visconti went down there and he kind of, you know,

threw all the rubbish out and he put some sort of, like foam on the walls

and egg cartons and things like that, sound proofing.

And this was like a rehearsal room

and we only rehearsed in there,

I don't know, half a dozen times. I mean it was so...

It was like being in a dungeon or something.

TONY: Towards the end of the Space Oddity album

he was also present at the mixes.

So in those days you didn't have computer automation

and tape was quite noisy.

So I definitely remember Mick and David Bowie and myself and John Cambridge

all on our knees in front of the console,

pushing the volumes up and down and hitting the buttons

that were the on and off buttons for the tracks and all that

because tape was just abysmal in those days.

Yeah, it was a fun memory.

So Mick really joined into the spirit of finishing that album

although he just played on that one track, Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud.

MICK: We called the band, Hype.

We did one or two live things

and I was dressed in a gangster suit.

Tony Visconti was dressed as Batman or something with a cape.

TONY: Ironically, they made costumes for myself, John Cambridge and Mick.

And when it came to a costume for David we ran out of money,

so David got the short end.

MICK: I remember we played this gig at The Roundhouse

and I can't smoke grass or anything.

I remember this guy, he said, "Oh, hey, have a puff of this joint,"

and I thought, "Yeah, all right then, just two tokes or something."

Oh man! I was so stoned, you know.

I mean, I don't even remember going on and playing and getting off again.

TONY: What I didn't realize was that Mick was a trained pianist

and he studied violin when he was a kid,

so he had these two other major instruments under his belt.

And then he noticed that I had scored an arrangement

for something on The Man Who Sold The World.

So Mick was like, looking over my shoulder and he said,

"Can you teach me how you score?" because he could read and write music

but he didn't know the rules of scoring music,

when you write for a bunch of musicians.

You have to write all the parts underneath each other

and they have to all line up visually

and then you have to take it off the score paper

and write out the individual parts.

That I showed him how to do.

ANGIE: I watched him working with Tony Visconti one night.

And I said, "You want to write the parts, don't you?"

And he said, "Yes," and I said,

"Well, there's no shows, there's no gigs for a while.

"Why don't you go study music in Hull?

"Then you'll never, ever,

"have to watch someone else write the parts for you,

"'cause you have symphonies and orchestras in your mind." And it was like,

two weeks' later he was gone.

And Mick came back and he could orchestrate anything,

write parts for anything and he wasn't gone a year.

I'd heard the rumors that he was way more involved

in The Man Who Sold The World than David was.

* We passed upon the stair

* We spoke of was and when

TONY: In the recording studio when we were making The Man Who Sold The World

Mick was also looking over my shoulder all the time

and asking me why I did certain things,

and he'd be interested in the differences, all the choices you had,

you could have the settings this way or that way or that way.

He was much more than a lead guitarist, much more,

and I knew he could be.

TONY: We had done The Man Who Sold The World.

It was a rather obscure-sounding album at the time,

it sounded like nothing else.

The record company didn't believe in us,

so with that lack of enthusiasm David Bowie felt that

he needed to get a manager to really, launch him.

I started, basically, a record production company.

My expertise was making record deals.

And Lawrence Myers had asked me if I would come in

to help him and his sort of new partner,

by the name of Tony Defries, in developing artists.

TONY: Mick, and by this time Woody Woodmansey, they went back to Hull.

They were getting fed up 'cause they weren't getting enough money,

they were hungry, it was...

Yeah. There was a lot of things going on that were niggling them.

David was booked to play somewhere around Birmingham.

He was driving up in his Jag.

Woody and Mick were crammed into a taxi with all the equipment.

They got up to the M1 where you turn off to Birmingham

or you carry on up North and they said to the driver,

"Carry on up North, we're going home."

So David arrived at the gig without a band and had to do it solo.

So I went back to Hull.

We kind of got The Rats back together

and we went out and played some gigs, you know.

I think this went on for about five months,

and my father kept saying to me, "Why don't you get a job?"

Well, I didn't want to do that, I mean,

I didn't want to stay in the same town as I grew up in, you know.

I wanted to live, I kind of wanted to do something with my life.

I always wanted to do something with my life.

It wasn't that Ronno and The Rats had become like, overwhelming successes,

and plus he was in Hull.

It wasn't the gateway to stardom, was it, you know?

With no disrespect to Hull,

it's not really been noted for producing

a massive amount of great musicians,

except for Mick and the Spiders.

I mean, you're not going to be in Italy and they go, "Oh, yes, Hull.

"you have Hull... the wonderful..." It ain't gonna happen.

MICK: And then David called me up and he said,

"I've met this new manager, Tony Defries. You've got to come tomorrow."

I was a little depressed anyway,

so I was like poom, I was straight on the train.

I was straight back to London, you know,

and went straight to some, small demo studio.

And I was hearing new songs and David was all excited.

He was all bubbly and things were going on,

and Tony Defries was making plans,

you know like, "We're gonna do this, this and this and this and this."

So, it was kinda like really exciting, you know?

Tony then lost interest, to a certain extent,

because a man joined the team called Don Hunter.

And Don Hunter was the personal manager of Stevie Wonder.

LAWRENCE: Don said, "You know, he wants to leave Motown,"

so he...

He brought him in.

JON: And he had met Lawrence Myers and Tony Defries,

and he had worked a way to try and get them interested,

in breaking Stevie Wonder's contract.

LAWRENCE: He was under age and he was blind,

and he had no advice and he was going to be 21.

And we arranged that we were going to take over management

on the 21st birthday.

Well, that developed into a tragedy because...

someone kidnapped Stevie Wonder's mother.

And Stevie was incognito,

and there was some big pressure going on.

And Tony was saying, "No, no, we'll go..." I said, "Do whatever you want.

"I'm going home, it's over."

And he came back to the UK,

without signing Stevie Wonder.

And then about three months later,

huge Billboard,

full page ad in Billboard magazine, "Motown is the place for me,"

Stevie Wonder.

Defries comes back from America, disillusioned,

not been able to sign Stevie Wonder,

"David's got a hit, he's my artist! Right."

JON: And it was only at that time,

that he turned all his attention to David Bowie.

I was an old hippy, basically,

and we started Friars in June '69.

Basically we were doing it for the music,

we weren't doing it to make money.

We organized for Country Club and we organized Friars

and we organized certain other things.

We first put David on in September '71.

You know, we thought, "Well, we'll give it a go."

It didn't sell out, we had a 700 capacity.

I think we had about 450, 500 people in, something like that.

And I remember he turned up in the afternoon,

and he was wearing these big Oxford Bags, you know, and very long hair.

And then, you know, in that evening it was just an amazing gig,

it was a really magic moment in time.

I remember meeting Mick that day for the first time.

So yeah, we did this gig and he came out and he played most of Hunky Dory.

And I think that was the sort of world debut of Hunky Dory,

because it hadn't been released at that point.

RICK: I first met Bowie through Gus Dudgeon.

Gus was producing him and I played on

in Memory Of A Free Festival and a couple of other things.

And David called me directly and said he wanted me to come

to his house in Beckenham, he lived in Beckenham then.

I was living in a tiny, little two-up, two-down in Harrow.

And his hallway you could fit my entire house in.

And I just remember going...

And we went in and there were the lads from Hull,

as I lovingly called them initially, Woody and Trevor,

and it was the first time I'd met Mick.

And David said, "Some of these pieces I want to be very piano-driven."

JOE: I've heard it referred to as a folk record, that's complete nonsense.

It's acoustic glam is what it is.

RICK: We ended up in Trident Studios

and that was really the first time that I got to know Mick really well.

TONY: Lo and behold, Mick did all these beautiful string arrangements for David Bowie.

It's pretty obvious that he took charge of that record

and became the producer with Ken Scott.

I've got some...

secretive tapes of the sessions with Rick Wakeman,

and you can hear Ronson all the way through it, "No, you're doing it wrong."

And I instinctively would know what Mick was gonna play

and I think if he were around today and you asked him,

I'd hazard a guess he would say he would instinctively know what I was going to play.

He came up with the string arrangement.

It was his first ever string arrangement, the one on Life on Mars,

incredible!

How do you come up with something that good?

You've got to remember this is...

They were living in Haddon Hall, they had no money,

they had nothing, you know what I mean.

So everything was done on the cheap.

To pull off a string arrangement like that that sounded like

it could have been on a Sinatra record,

produced by some bigwig in New York was phenomenal,

it was a fantastic sounding record.

And when you get as far as there,

you would expect them to go back to...

But David does a weird thing.

Which is a, for those who understand is a chord of A flat,

but instead of an A flat in the base, it's an E flat in the base,

but then he does a thing of...

moving the chromatic scale.

I mean it works brilliantly but it's bizarre.

So you go...

Which is what I always call cinematic.

He thought, um...

I'm convinced David thought in pictures,

'cause all of his songs... you could...

Virtually all of his songs you could make a film out of.

Mad lyrics about Micky Mouse and cows and Norfolk Broads, and like,

okay, again, I just accepted them like, as this is this guy's art,

it's a bit off kilter, it's not Cum on Feel the Noize.

They were reasonably successful.

They were not unbelievably successful

but he was unbelievably successful,

because he had now gone into his various persona.

CHERRY: We were in rehearsal for Pork,

and Lee Childers who,

was the stage manager of Pork and a rock photographer, knew of David Bowie.

TONY: There was a little article about him in Rolling Stone,

as the man in the dress.

So he definitely was on my radar and on Cherry's and Lee's radar

as the guy who was married and had a kid but wore a dress.

CHERRY: We said, "We've got to go see him," you know,

and we were all pumped up because we were Warhol people

and we had just hit the town with a lot of publicity

and we kind of walked in there all full of confidence

and introduced ourselves to Angie.

So she went, "Oh, David will be delighted," blah, blah, blah, you know,

we all said we were Pork, Warhol members of the cast and everything.

* Andy Warhol looks a scream

* Hang him on my wall

TONY: He was very taken with The Factory,

with the whole idea of Warhol, about what he perceived to be The Factory.

We went to Andy Warhol's apartment when David met him.

He came in the room, he put on the tape of Hunky Dory,

and then left.

And then came back after it was all finished.

So

I don't know, it was a pretty...

It was a pretty strange thing to do, you know,

I mean, you put somebody's tape on and then you leave.

KEVIN: David wanted him to love this record

that he'd made about him called Andy Warhol

and Warhol didn't like it at all.

So I just sat there and enjoyed my wine,

cheese and crackers and everything else, yeah.

MICK: The next thing was the Ziggy Stardust thing

which really got into this heavier, more electric music.

DAVID: I think Mick's involvement was absolutely crucial.

He had the rock experience.

He had the sort of rock live experience, if you like,

with The Rats and the other bands he'd been in.

What he basically did is he rocked David up.

He brought it all together

and under the umbrella sound of the electric guitar,

and that's what Ziggy Stardust was to me,

it was much more of a rock album.

It was never like, um,

David Bowie upfront and you guys are all back there.

I mean, half the time Mick was up with David which was great to see.

* If we can sparkle He may land tonight

* Don't tell your papa He'll get us locked up... *

That magic moment that everybody talks about,

June the 6th, June the 12th, 1972, Top of the Pops.

He was singing the chorus of Star Man with Bowie

and Bowie threw his arm round him and the whole world supposedly shifted on its axis.

MICK ROCK: I mean it's such a simple thing, he was just putting his arm round a mate,

but people got very excited about it

with the homosexual overtone.

And the other moment, of course, was...

Was what is commonly known as the guitar fellatio shot.

I remember going to the side of stage

as I sometimes would, to get a different kind of look,

and there was David right noshing away on Mick's guitar.

He said that Mick was swinging his guitar around in a certain way

that he had to go down to keep biting it.

Bingo, you know, a sex act on stage.

But the problem was, they couldn't get it in the paper.

There was no room in The Melody Maker.

But what they did was to buy a page.

And it got seen in key places in America.

We played one or two gigs and I remember one gig we...

we played...

David wore a dress and I wore a dress.

No, no one ever wanted to put him in a dress. That's bollocks.

Absolute bollocks. David wouldn't have shared anything with anyone.

DAVID: Mick was a self-contained man.

He didn't seem to need much to keep him going.

His cigarettes, his guitar and a sturdy pair of shoes and he was ready to go.

A less needy person you couldn't find.

ANGIE: I just talked him into it, I just said, "Oh please,

"you've got eye lashes like a cow, put mascara on them and stop fussing!"

"Oh, when you say it like that, it's different.

"Oh, that's... Is that alright?" I said, Yes, now I can see your eyes.

"Is that too bad? I didn't ask you to wear lipstick."

He put lipstick on the next time.

He went "I'm not scared!"

Angela was the real outrageous one, you know,

she was always into the way things looked and she was, you know...

I love Angie.

She gets a little crazy, you know, I mean, she's like...

She's almost over... Too enthusiastic about everything.

It's like...

And bouncing down the road and doing all this,

and I'm thinking, "Mmm."

It was important, we had to make it theater,

we had to make it touring theater, rock and roll,

that excitement.

Angela was watching Star Trek one day

and said, "Wow, you should have boots like these."

And the Ziggy Stardust thing came.

It was after we went to see the movie Clockwork Orange.

JOE: I got to know Mick a bit but I've seen...

Really got to know Woody Woodmansey

and I got to know Trevor when we worked together in The Cybernauts.

The stories that they were telling us about, "I'm not fucking wearing that,"

and all that kind of stuff were hilarious.

DAVID: These guys all came from Hull, you know,

we're going to play in a rock and roll band, they liked the songs and all that.

And I said, "Yeah, it's great.

"Do you want to see what we're gonna wear?"

"Oh, yeah."

"No way.

"Not bloody likely, I'm not putting that on!"

I said, "No, believe me, you'll look great, it'll really suit you."

"Yeah, right!"

And so I don't know how I did it, I managed to talk them into doing it.

And a couple of nights later

we'd done a couple of shows and all these girls were all over them.

And suddenly the dressing room procedure was really different.

It's, "Right, who's got the blush?"

"Hey, Trevor, have you finished with that mascara?"

I remember this place we played.

It was this pub,

and the women in this pub were... Talk about a rough crowd.

And we had to...

And I remember we had to leave the stage really quickly,

because people were coming up with their stiletto heels,

and people were just...

They just wanted to beat the living shit out of us.

When he announced his bisexuality to the Melody Maker,

I think it was quite a shock, you know?

It wasn't a thing that you said, to the public.

You know, bisexuality was a thing that you kinda kept private.

The gay community really wasn't out of the closet in the UK.

In my experience David was never what I would call gay,

I never saw a gay side to him.

Not that I would have cared one way or the other.

He was always pretty heterosexual around me.

It was more about, I think, narcissism and having attention...

I don't think it was an issue with him, his sexuality was very fluid.

He did like the gay scene though.

I think he liked the sombrero, he liked the flamboyance of the queens

and the clothes and the outrageousness and the style.

JON: The Sombrero was a coffee bar in Kensington High Street.

They had two nights a week which was gay night.

I got invited down one night and I met up with David and Angie and I met Freddie.

And Mick Ronson was there,

and Mick went to go to the toilet and he came back and he said,

"Oh," he says, "I don't know who's gay and who's not gay,"

he says, "I walk into the men's room" and he said, "look."

He said, "Everybody was women and men

"and everybody in each one, nobody really knew who was where."

KEVIN: Freddie Burretti was somebody who David met

in the Sombrero nightclub in 1971.

MICK: Freddie was a very kind of striking looking young man.

KEVIN: They got on famously.

David was attracted to Freddie, there's no doubt about it.

David wanted to make Freddie a star.

So they put this thing together called Arnold Corns which...

was... Freddie was supposed to be singing.

And I think Freddie tried to sing,

and David sang along with it, too.

So on the Arnold Corns tapes,

what you were actually hearing, was David.

And Freddie was supposed to be the singer, but Freddie was not a singer.

Freddie is a clothes designer.

KEVIN: Freddie didn't have a musical bone in his body

but he helped create these wonderful outfits.

I mean, David wanted to get this guy involved in many ways

so that then this guy could then start making all his clothes for him.

* Freak out in A moonage daydream Oh, yeah *

KEVIN: People don't realize quite what a chance he was taking,

particularly after The Man Who Sold The World cover,

where he was wearing a dress.

BOB: Wearing a dress in Texas in 1969 if you were a man

was, you know... You were bound to provoke a reaction,

and that's what David did.

JON: David had gone to do a radio interview

and he'd been wearing the dress in the studio,

and had been talking about wearing the dress.

And somebody had turned up, with a shotgun,

and had decided to start blasting out.

And David got very worried.

You know, this vision of him dragging this dress up

and running off down the street.

It did cause a few problems because people would call you names and all this, you know.

I mean, people would kind of come down on you for it, basically, you know.

I mean, I wasn't bisexual or anything

but they figured like, "Well David Bowie's bisexual,

"then what's this guy doing playing with David Bowie?"

You know, "He must be gay as well."

We'd get the bus home from town,

and I remember a bunch of girls or whoever was on the bus

and they'd be going like, "Oh, that's your brother who's...

"you know, that poof drummer!"

You know, they couldn't even get it right, you know?

I was just thinking, "Yeah, okay!"

ANGIE: I said, "You have to understand

"lots and lots of lots of straight people support the gay community,

"not because they're gay, you understand?

"It's a question of freedom of choice.

"No one is expecting you to be gay!"

I think Mick kind of played the innocent boy from Hull a little bit, too.

He knew that was charming, I don't think he was as scared as everybody thinks he was.

MICK: If it bothered me, it bothered me maybe for three or four days.

What did bother me was,

I gave my mother and father a car, it was a white mini.

Somebody came along with black paint

and threw black paint all over the white mini.

It doesn't matter what people think about me,

but what mattered to me was what people did to my parents.

IAN: Mick was never really that way, I mean he was always Mick,

you know, he'd do the blonde hair, he'd do whatever he had to do on stage

but he was always Mick.

JOE: I'd been a fan of Mott The Hoople

since two years before they became known.

So I was the only kid in school

bouncing up and down in the playground when Dudes got released

and became a hit, going, "I told you so."

IAN: David had been working on that song with The Spiders,

but they'd run it into the ground.

So, I guess we came along at the right time,

and he offered it us at Defries's place off of Regents Street.

KEVIN: The bass player of Mott the Hoople phoned David and said,

"I'm out of a job. You haven't got a job, have you?"

And he said, "Why, what's happened?"

"Well, the band's broke up. We broke up." "You're joking!

"Right, don't break up! I've got some great songs. I'll write you something."

And David sat cross-legged on the floor and played All the Young Dudes,

and it was like...

It wasn't just Mott, it was Mott and Bowie!

A, I can sing it, B,

you know, it's huge. Why is he giving it us?

So we never argued and we just went in and it was David,

two nights, two evenings,

and that was Dudes.

And that song is a song of a generation.

* All the young dudes

Hey, dudes!

* Carry the news

Where are you?

* Boogaloo dudes

* Carry the news

MICK: I've always got on with Ian.

We've always been really good friends.

We worked together periodically, you know.

Ronson did a string arrangement for the All the Young Dud album

on a song called Sea Diver.

He wrote this whole arrangement and we got in there. I was having kittens.

Fortunately the guy totally got on with Mick, loved Mick.

And Mick...

This was the first time I was... You know, Mick was classically trained.

And Mick got on with a baton and arranged, did the whole thing.

And of course after the event I said, "How much do I owe you?"

and he said, "Twenty quid."

I'd never actually, up until then,

come across a guitar player that actually had his own sound

that didn't sound like everybody else.

And that was the first thing that really struck me about Mick,

that he had his own identifiable way of playing.

He played with a wah wah pedal half open

so he got this tone that nobody else had.

And I used to press the wah wah pedal on and just set it,

set on the tone,

and just leave it, leave it like that.

And I used to get this very kind of honking,

tone out of the... out of the amp.

It was very middle... very middle sound.

So that was how a lot of that came about with the guitar sound.

The rest of it was basically just plugging in.

And just plug the guitar in and turn it up, you know, and it's...

And away you go. Things like Jean Genie

comes from basically the Muddy Waters,

and the Anna Mann, John Lee Hooker, that kind of riffing.

I've thought for many, many, many, many years,

he deserves much more credit than he ever received for that,

for being a real individualistic type of player.

CHERRY: You know Bowie's history so you know he had

a whole mishmash of influences which young artists do.

He wasn't really rock yet.

TONY: When did everything change? When he met Mick.

The sound changed.

Everything began to change when he met Mick.

You look at that picture that I have,

of the two of them on the train eating lunch,

and they look so exotic.

There's that little look between them and they've got pats of butter

and peas and probably boiled potatoes,

and they look like they've just fucking landed.

Look at the state of those two.

But they also look like they're really like... There's a lot of this

sweet, conspiratorial thing.

We had two albums, two albums out,

and David decided, "I wanna go and live in America.

"I wanna really break America,

"I wanna go and live there, stay there as long as I need to,"

and I thought it was a very good career decision.

Tony said, "We'll open an office in New York."

And then I proposed he go to New York,

set up his own company, which proved to be MainMan.

I spoke to David about it.

I said, "This is what Tony wants to do. Is that what you wanna do?"

He said, "Yeah, yes, I really wanna go live in America,"

thanked me very much and off they went.

They all came to New York in the beginning of September for about a week.

That was when the signing at RCA.

LAWRENCE: I was quite close to RCA,

so I spoke to RCA and played the material

and did all the things you normally do to pitch an artist.

Tony said to me, "Is there a point at which you would give up your interest?"

So I said, "Look, if I get 500,000 pounds in the next three years,

"you're free." And I thought...

Five hundred thousand pounds, you know.

There's not that much money in the world.

And 18 months later,

they sent me a check.

They were very smart. You know, they got rid of me.

We came back to England and we started working on the Transformer album.

JOE: I knew who Lou Reed was, I hated the Velvet Underground,

I thought they were shite.

* How it came From Miami FLA

* Hitchhiked her way Across the USA

* Plucked her eyebrows On the way

* Shaved her legs And then he... *

And then I heard Walk on the Wild Side.

And I didn't know Bowie had done it,

but the only reason I heard it,

is because somebody at Radio 1 deemed it accessible enough to play,

because Bowie and Ronson had produced it.

So that moved him into the mainstream,

which he would never have achieved without Bowie's help.

MICK: Lou was great to work with.

That was a very good experience really.

I mean, just a really great album to work on.

The thing with Ronno is I could very rarely understand a word he said.

He had a Hull accent, he'd have to repeat things five times.

Mick probably found it difficult to understand what Lou was saying,

Lou found it difficult to understand what Mick was saying,

and somehow they met in the middle with music.

ANGIE: Lou Reed was like amazed at Mick Ronson's credits.

* Valium would have Helped that day

* She said, Hey, babe Take a walk on the wild side *

MICK: You know, Lou was so laid back,

you know, he'd kinda walk into the studio and go "Hey," you know,

sit down in the chair, put his guitar on,

b'lam, b'lam, b'lam, be all out of tune, you know.

And he'd be "I'm ready" and this guitar's like...

Way out of tune, you know, way out of tune.

And I'd kind of wander off and I'd say, you know, tune it up a bit,

and Lou used to look at me like you know, "Yeah, okay."

He didn't really care whether it was in tune or if it was out of tune really.

When I first got there I ate a hash cookie.

And it took about a month to recover.

You know, no one had told me, I didn't know.

MICK: Lou used to say some funny things like,

"Can you make it a little bit more gray" to me.

I mean then to me it was like, "What the hell's he talking about," you know.

I guess he was just trying to explain things in, you know,

a more artistic way or something, you know.

That kinda was going over my head a bit.

JOE: What Ronson's contribution was to the Transformer record

was quite possibly more than David's.

KEVIN: David was still not that conversant

with controls and studio desks.

He certainly needed Michael around to help with the arrangements.

JOE: Mick would have been the more hands-on guy, getting the sounds sorted,

getting the arrangements done, extending this chorus,

putting a right-up guitar solo on this song,

bringing in the echo stuff.

Ain't that beautiful? Wow.

JOE: I think he would have had more to do with that than David.

Boy, Ronson's good. Wow.

Isn't that amazing, just like that?

See, I think sometimes with a really good arrangement in parts you don't need a vocal.

That album,

was the flowering of Mick Ronson.

Tony began making trips to New York City.

CHERRY: We had been meeting with Tony Defries

and going with him up to the record companies and so forth and advising.

TONY: So every time he came to New York City he would call me up.

I'd have dinner with him,

I was a great listener. Tony really was a great talker,

and I was a great listener.

CHERRY: I knew a lot of DJs in New York.

TONY: We got along very well, Tony and I.

We just began to build this relationship.

Also Tony needed errands done. It was as simple as that.

"Zee, could you..." He called me Zee because we were both Tonys.

"Could you go to RCA and pick up records?

"Can you do this, can you do that?"

CHERRY: So when he was ready to bring Bowie to New York in '72

he hired us.

He made Tony Zanetta president of MainMan and tour manager.

TONY: There was no organization at all,

because I was selfish or self-centered.

I went to the desk and said,

give me the keys, blah, blah, blah. I started organizing,

so I could get to my room, thank you very much.

So I kind of became the road manager

without even knowing what a road manager was.

DANA: Everyone that was to do with MainMan,

they were all a bit kind of bonkers and mad.

That's what Defries attracted to the company.

These people were taken and put in positions that they'd never had before.

This was kind of exciting. I mean Ronno had never seen anything like that either.

To go on the first American tour, they decided they needed a pianist.

Enter Mike Garson.

MIKE: Tony Defries called me and he told me about Bowie.

But I was a jazz musician. I said, "Who?" When they called me up.

It's like nothing.

But within minutes of hearing him play I knew he had it.

Mick Ronson was the one who auditioned me,

so that's the guy who really I owe the respect to.

He was a great guitar player, a great string arranger.

When I auditioned he showed me the chords and showed C.

And I went C and E minor.

And that was the audition. He said, "You got it."

So as the... that's where David's singing...

So little by little, I started playing.

I did... Let me see.

TONY: So that first tour,

it started in September, it ended in December.

In three months we did only 17 dates.

The Ziggy thing really kicked off in Cleveland, Ohio.

Cleveland, Ohio is a great city for rock'n'roll.

The first day when we went to Cleveland we went by bus.

We thought that was the thing to do, we rented this bus.

We were staying at the Plaza Hotel

because again that was part of Tony's philosophy,

to be a star you had to act like a star.

Where does a star stay? Not the Holiday Inn, the Plaza Hotel.

There's a fountain right there next to the bus,

the Plaza, in front of the fountain.

And this bag-lady comes along.

She goes to the fountain,

she pulls down her pants, hikes up her skirt,

squats down and takes a big shit in the fountain.

And that was the Ziggy Stardust tour!

We were off to Cleveland right after that.

I said to Tony Defries, "Tony, what does a road manager do?"

He said, "Oh, Zee, just make sure they find Cleveland!"

We got there.

The spirits were great. The band was great.

The playing was great. David was in rare form.

TONY: We traveled all across the country.

We sat for two weeks in Phoenix 'cause we didn't have another date to go to,

till the next date was in Miami.

That's not exactly a great booking strategy.

The way he put it together,

could have ended up in complete disaster.

Because to go to America with a few gigs under your belt,

thinking we'll just add dates

was not what America was all about.

For two months in America we played about ten gigs.

So we'd play a gig and maybe have like ten days off and we'd play another gig.

And I think the performance,

the fact that people, however small the audience was,

word of mouth is the strongest marketing you could ever achieve.

And the performances were great.

So, it spread.

CHERRY: The ordinary people in New York and LA,

they got it, they were excited about it

because we had also had Mark Bolan,

who was wearing feather boas and makeup and everything.

So the door was a little open for something like David.

They were all decked out,

each in a different like worked out design, red hair, silver hair.

CHERRY: Suzi Fussey did the hair

and they knew they were getting great hairdos like nobody else had.

It was very professional.

Mick Ronson and David on stage together were very, very compelling.

You know, it's like the Rolling Stones.

It wouldn't be the Rolling Stones unless you have Keith Richards and Mick Jagger.

You know...

or The Who with like, Pete Townsend, Roger Daltrey.

You know, uh...

Or the Beatles without Lennon and McCartney.

Usually, a lot of these things...

When these groups happen it's usually in pairs.

TONY: So David studied mime and theatrical

and he was kind of up here and very effete.

Mick was kind of the opposite.

You know, he had these kind of like... these...

These kind of Fame kind of movements or something, you know what I mean?

And I'm like right, I'm like a bricklayer, so it's like...

I think I was more like a man and he was more like a woman, you know.

And the costumes were beautiful.

Beautiful fabrics, beautifully tailored.

So I think it didn't take them too many shows dressed up in their outfits

to embrace it, and they were smart enough to know, I think...

But yes, at the beginning I'm sure there was more reluctance than I ever saw.

TONY: Woody and Trevor were a little bit more, "Oh, my God!"

Not quite as adventurous as Mick.

We were all going to this nightclub and we were getting you know...

Everybody's like turning around and looking,

and David takes his male back-up singer and starts dancing slow,

just to get everybody really wound up and looking.

But I think he used the whole gay world in that kind of way to get attention.

* I'm an alligator

* I'm a mama-papa Coming for you *

MICK: We would play the Nashville Coliseum, the Chicago Dome.

You know, I remember these places were not sold out or anything.

Some of these places only had like, maybe 200 people in, 500 people in some of them.

But it created this whole press thing because it looked so good in the English press.

KEVIN: David sold out the Radio City Music Hall.

These images wired straight over with copy, front pages of the NME

and Melody Maker and Disc and Music Echo or whatever.

David's a big star in America.

MICK: They were all going mad. There was queues around the block and everything.

I mean...

It's amazing what the press can do, you know.

A lot of show-business, a lot of the music industry is smoke and mirrors.

And Defries realized that early on, you've got to act the part,

so they were spending money they didn't have, they were spending RCA money.

TONY: We spent about 400-and-some thousand dollars.

We grossed $100,000!

But by December, David was on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine.

And then you knew,

that this thing was gonna break right open.

TONY: And also there was a DJ in Cleveland that was very pro Bowie.

We went to Cleveland, we played 3,000 seats.

We went back to Cleveland in December and played two nights

on the other side of that music hall that sat 10,000 people.

So we went from 3,000 people to 20,000 people in three months.

With Aladdin Sane we was spending some time in America then.

Well, everybody says he was Ziggy Stardust in America.

And I suppose he was, 'cause there's a lot of references

to American people, American cities,

things that happened to Bowie while he was touring.

When you listen to Ziggy, there is no records that sounded like that,

or Aladdin Sane, records didn't sound like that.

That was Mick.

DAVID: He was actually brilliant at divining what I meant

when I would describe in words what I wanted

as the shape of the solo in certain songs.

The one on Time is a perfect example for instance.

One thing he adored doing while recording

was building up layered tracks,

so that there would be a great wedge of sound in certain areas of songs

and from there he could fly off into his sinewy lines and riffs in a heartbeat.

MIKE: The singing of David on Time

and Mick's playing and his ability not to be a show off,

the bottom line is, who laid out the arrangements, who was doing all the stuff,

who was giving me the chalks in the studio,

who was putting the earphones on,

who was saying, "That's a B Minor chord, Mike"? This was Mick Ronson.

TONY: First of all those first tours, nobody got paid,

none of us got paid, but everything was petty cash.

Tony put money, when there was money,

he put money... He would pay your rent if you had rent,

he'd put a certain amount in everybody's bank account

to cover their very, very basic living expenses,

like Woody and Trevor, Mick, they had a flat, or anything like...

Woody had a wife back in England,

so she'd get but not much, 75 pounds a month, something ridiculous.

But everything was paid for.

Someone in New York,

told them how much they were getting paid.

Exactly what happened is I was in the airplane, sitting next to Woody,

and he said, "What are you earning?"

And I said, "To tell you the truth,

"I'm embarrassed 'cause it's way lower than you guys,

"but I'm the new man on the block. I'm very happy with $800 a week."

And Mike thinks they're all making a fortune, 'cause this is like...

You know, he hasn't been involved in this kind of...

what to him was big deal rock and roll.

MIKE: And his face turned white,

and I think they were getting 30 pounds.

ANGIE: When Ronno turned around and then went to see Defries,

Defries turned around, did not tell David,

except maybe five or six hours later

that it was actually just a request for more money.

He said they'd come and been difficult.

MIKE: Defries was pissed off 'cause they went to him complaining.

TONY: So that started the beginning of the end of the Spiders.

They went to see Dennis Katz, who had been the A&R guy at RCA,

who was now in private law practice, he's a music attorney.

To see... So they wanted Denis to represent them, get them a real salary.

Well, this was treason

to Defries and to Bowie, treason.

IAN: I mean the whole Bowie thing, you know, disgusting.

I think he was on 40 quid a week throughout the whole thing.

It didn't matter whether you made a record or you did TV,

you did interviews, whatever, no, no, the whole thing, 40 quid a week.

SUZI: When I look back that was really unfair.

Mick should have been making a lot of money.

Or a point , a half a point or something. But he didn't get anything.

Defries and David took Mick to the side,

till I'd kind of calmed him down,

'cause first of all he's the key player and very needed.

So I don't know exactly what went on,

other than, "Okay, Mick, do this tour and let's keep going."

Basically it was gonna be that Mick would then become a MainMan artist.

MICK: I think the last tour we played of England went for six weeks

and we was playing two shows a night.

And the very last gig at Hammersmith Odeon,

yeah, it was pretty memorable because it was the last show

that we was gonna do in that form.

ANGIE: Cherry Vanilla and I would come in through the crowd.

They took a lot of photographs, I signed a lot of autographs.

DAVID: Angie! Darling, I've come to say good luck.

ANGIE: I went backstage, I had this little,

you know, going back stage to wish David good luck turned into this,

horrible episode.

You see how they pick on me and just you know make me feel terrible.

DAVID: You're just a girl. What do you know about make

Exactly, that's what I say all the time.

'Cause I went to see the boys, the boys looked great!

They were in a good mood, they made me laugh, we had a good...

you know...

I said, "I'll be there! You know that.

"I'll be there, shouting you on, cheering you on."

They said, "Yes, yes, good."

And then, they went on and it was such a brilliant show.

Of all the shows on the tour,

this particular show will remain with us the longest because...

...not only is it the last show of the tour,

it's the last show that we'll ever do.

Thank you.

MICK: I think Woody and Trevor were really confused,

because the band didn't know anything about this, until the encore.

And then David said this is the very last show we were going to play.

The people went, "What?"

It was like the wind was knocked out of everyone's lungs, they all went...

I couldn't believe it. I did the same thing. I was like...

Well, that's a turn-up for the books.

I was like, "Oh great, now we're out of work again!"

I thought, "Oh great, here we go!"

I was very emotionally hurt by this whole thing.

It was almost like we were all a little bit of Ziggy Stardusts,

and when it ended, it ended for all of us, you know.

But you know, David was still David Bowie,

Tony Defries still had millions of dollars

and the rest of us were standing there

like with our thumbs up our asses, now, what am I supposed to...

You know, last week, I had my own airline tickets and charge cards to everyone.

Now I dunno. Where's my rent coming?

It was very difficult. Your whole identity was wrapped up in this.

MICK: We played Japan before we played England,

and it was in Japan that the decision was made,

that the whole Ziggy thing should stop.

I remember David calling my room and he said,

"Mick, can you come up... can you come up here?"

And he was sitting in bed,

and Tony was sitting on the side of the bed.

And I sat in the chair on the other side of the bed

and then we talked about this thing.

He said, "Look, Mick, you know, we think that we want to do this."

SUZI: The only people that really didn't know were Trevor and Woody.

And I think that was so cruel.

I had sprayed Trevor's fucking those things,

those big side jobbies silver every night.

These were my kids, you know what I mean? I adored them.

I don't... I never had brothers that age.

They were like my brothers, I adored them.

Records are bits of plastic, you know, they...

they don't... It's not world peace, it's just ent...

It's great entertainment, but it's entertainment.

So if he decided to retire Ziggy, so what?

It was almost like, when the Beatles broke up.

The Beatles were much bigger than they were... than they were together.

The singers, they were so popular,

it would have been kind of silly to go out and play Ziggy

again and again and again and again and again.

'Cause you're not moving anywhere, you're not developing anything,

you're not growing, you're not doing anything,

you're just kind of repeating yourself.

It's lasted for so many years, that period,

the reason why it's lasted so many years

is because people can only remember it, they can't see it again.

And, uh...

They kind of didn't want it to break up at the time...

because it seemed like we was on such a roll.

We were doing so well, but yet we hadn't played Europe,

we never went back to the United States again.

Ronno continued on and Defries was going to manage him.

MICK: And then, we went to France

and we started recording Pin Ups.

And we were in this, what you would call almost like a castle.

And there was a chef and he'd stay there, so we were just doing music.

And no one went too far away,

you go to your room, come down the next day, start playing.

MICK: So it wasn't like, we ended the last show of Ziggy,

and then waited for a year before doing anything. It was pretty instant.

MIKE: The Pin Ups sessions were a lot of fun.

On a few tunes we hooked the piano up,

the grand piano to a Leslie speaker, Hammond Leslie.

And then we'd get this sound, yeah, whirling, exactly.

That was fun.

And it was so light and it was so easy

'cause it wasn't his music, he had nothing to prove.

And I think things began to suddenly spark between Suzi and Mick at that point.

Up till then Suzi had been like a big sister or little sister,

they were very close.

We saw Mick and Suzi sneaking off.

And I believe that was the beginning.

It was really romantic, it was a beautiful villa.

It was just outside of Rome, it was lovely.

And one thing led to another,

and by the time we left Italy Mick and I were, boyfriend and girlfriend.

* I laughed And shook his hand

MICK: I think Pin Ups was a great album, I think we played real good.

Lulu came out to Paris,

and recorded Man Who Sold the World.

And we recorded it right there and then

at the same sessions, at the same time.

Mike Garson played piano,

Mick Ronson and David, myself, everybody was singing.

And yeah, they had a party and we were up the whole night.

It was fun. It was a lot of fun.

When we finished Pin Ups, you know, Tony Defries said,

he suggested, he said, "Why don't you make your own album?"

After the shock ending of David,

David took a couple of years off.

Well Mick should have done the same thing, or at least taken a year.

You know, to figure out what he was going to do.

But the MainMan machine was in full motion,

and they said, "Now it's your turn, Mick, out there, off you go."

So he put together Slaughter, put together that tour, that show.

You know, Mick had the costumes and it was the big band

and we had the backing singers and whatever,

but you know, he was still sounding a lot like David

because he was half of David's sound.

The criticism was, it was like a Bowie concert without David.

CHERRY: I see a few celebrities in the audience.

SUZI: The audience seemed to like it,

but you could tell it wasn't really doing that well.

CHERRY: When he did that show at the Rainbow, that Defries had him do,

and it was supposed to be his big rock star coming out thing,

Mick was extremely nervous.

He wasn't ready to take over that stage at the Rainbow yet.

He needed some warm-up gigs.

SUZI: Mick suddenly had to shoulder all the responsibility.

He didn't have a Mick Ronson on the side

doing what Mick had done for David, it was just Mick.

So it wasn't as strong.

TONY: As brilliant as Mick was,

he's not really a front man.

We all were kind of in our megalomaniac MainMan phase

of we can do no wrong, 'cause look what we did.

Look what we did, we created a star. Mick's next.

CHERRY: Tony Defries only knew how to make one kind of artist.

That was a rock star in the image of David Bowie.

That's the way I feel, and he tried to do that do Mick

and I thought that was wrong.

KEVIN: What he didn't realize is Mick needed David, to really make that work.

SUZI: It was very difficult for him, I think.

So he did a lot of drinking. And that was... It kind of went, slid down a bit.

IAN: He just wasn't made to be a frontman, Mick.

I mean Defries said, "You're gonna be the next Bowie." Mick said, "Fine."

But that was as far as it went.

Your first solo album, Mick,

were you disappointed with the response to Slaughter?

Well, not disappointed because I think Slaughter, as an album did pretty well,

for somebody's first solo album.

CHERRY: Mick would have probably had a better career

going into orchestrating, arranging,

making movie soundtracks,

you know, and eventually make his own songs, albums, whatever,

but Defries pushed him right into, "You're the next rock star,"

and I don't think he was ready for that.

What he didn't realize is Mick needed David to really make that work.

He was uncomfortable if he was the central focus.

I don't know what sessions were which really.

The Diamond Dogs sessions, I don't know what they included.

It was just kind of went in the studio now and again.

It wasn't really to put an album together or anything,

it was just to record some tracks.

Because I was at a lot of those sessions

I only remember me and David there.

That's when it started to drift apart a bit.

He'd moved on from Mick too quickly

and in so doing, had prevented Mick

from getting the true acknowledgment,

for what he'd put into the creation of the sound.

With both Tony Defries in a business sense and David,

I think that they have a bit of an attitude that everybody is replaceable.

I was interested in the things I was doing

and David was getting into what he was doing.

He got rid of the whole band. They had a pretty short career with him.

I'd gotten a call

from a dearly departed friend named Michael Kamen.

He had done the music for the Joffrey Ballet, and David was there

and they got chattin' and then David said, "I need a guitarist

"because I'm getting ready to go do a tour,

"and Mick Ronson's left the band. Do you know anybody that might fit the bill?"

And Michael gave him my name.

I went and did an interview and I got the gig.

MIKE: He was a young kid who had a good...

like Keith Richards kind of sensibility

with a little Mick Ronson there.

Diamond Dogs, to me essentially is a Spiders album.

They just didn't play on it.

'Cause I know that Ronson was around when those songs

got played on the 1984 show for example,

in 1973, the album came out a year later.

He wasn't on it, but it still sounded like them,

and I was that angry with Bowie,

that he's dissed the band,

'cause Ronno and Trevor and Woody were part of it as far as I was concerned.

EARL: And I brought that up. I said, "Are you expecting me to sound like...

"Are you expecting me to be Mick Ronson?"

I mean, I was very forward about it.

"No. I like the way you play. You do..."

The Diamond Dogs show cost a lot of money.

It cost a lot of money to put together, it cost a lot of money to tour.

It was the big, clumsy set. I mean,

David decides he's not using that set anymore.

And that's it.

He's had it with the Diamond Dogs set.

But Defries was not happy about this.

I mean, it cost like $250-300,000, which sounds like nothing now,

it was millions then.

That was definitely friction.

ANGIE: And David was already doing drugs because he couldn't handle it.

SUZI: His drug use was huge, I think at one point in his life.

From like not doing any drugs suddenly he's like...

There wasn't enough cocaine in the universe.

DANA: It did actually get in the way of all sorts of things

and just trying to deal with him became more and more difficult.

This is not good. This was during the Diamond Dogs ce jour in New York.

I mean, Mick was gone by then.

Mick did a lot of work. Mick wasn't just a guitarist.

He arranged strings, he arranged songs.

You don't see credits for that, you don't see production credits.

As far as I'm concerned Mick Ronson produced some of those records.

I don't care whose name's on there.

I don't give a shit. It was Mick.

And he didn't get his due, he didn't get credited.

And he buggered out.

Hello.

Having contributed so much to the outstanding quality of David Bowie's earlier LPs,

then producing what I think was a vastly underrated solo album,

my guest tonight has just joined Mott the Hoople.

You know, of course, that I'm talking of Mick Ronson.

MICK: I always got on with Ian, yeah. He's a good bloke, you know.

We've always been really good friends.

IAN: And he was like the logical replacement for Bender.

I remember Buff came round to Wembley the following morning

and he said, "Is he in?" I said, "Yeah, he's in."

I'm looking forward to recording new material and fresh material, work,

and feeling more of a part of Mott the Hoople, rather than...

another guitar player just coming in and just learning the set numbers.

IAN: So then, the first thing we were doing was a European tour.

We were doing that but there was obviously a bit of friction,

which I... I mean, Mick is the nicest guy in the world.

couldn't understand the friction between him and the rest of the band.

JOE: From within the camp, it didn't work.

It worked with Ian, Ian was fine with it, but Buffin wasn't keen.

IAN: Mick had a problem in that he was still managed by Defries.

Mick was still on RCA, we were on Columbia.

And so if RCA sent him a limo, he would go in the RCA limo.

JOE: They're still traveling around in a transit van,

which I guess for moral would have been a little bit of a downer.

IAN: And we were tired, and little things would become big things.

So we just figured the writing was on the wall.

That's it, knock it on the head.

TONY: Tony and David had a very, very close relationship.

They would speak on the phone daily for hours,

everything was plotted out, everything was probably overthought.

LAWRENCE: And what Tony did was to put himself in between David and anybody else.

David's pretty capable but that's what he depended on Tony Defries for.

Tony Defries took all that out of his hands.

LAWRENCE: Dana says... Dana Gillespie,

we all had secretaries, we all... everyone had staff.

We all went to New York, it was wonderful.

TONY: And the communication began to break down.

It totally broke down during the Diamond Dogs tour.

SUZI: When David and Defries broke up, it was a standoff.

Defries owned David for another ten years.

I mean David did not win.

KEVIN: It was all starting to crumble.

Tony Defries was in America, Mick Ronson was in London, Suzi was in London,

and nobody was looking after them.

When I was with Mick I thought Mick was a pop star.

I thought we had tons of money!

You know, I thought we were living in this gorgeous place in Hyde Park Gate,

nine rooms and we had our own clothing designer staying with us.

I mean my only role-model was David and Angie.

I thought we had tons of money, I thought Mick...

I didn't know what Mick was only on 50 quid a week.

Mick was a school gardener, I was a hairdresser from Beckenham.

We had no clue about royalties

or how much money you could make or how much money there was around.

Mick and I didn't know. We had no clue.

IAN: And Mick's just going,

"We've gotta form a band, we've gotta go in now."

'Cause Mick was a very intuitive guy.

I mean, he sensed the drama

and that can usually lead to something good musically,

and so we formed a band, we went in and we did my first solo album.

I said to Mick one night, you know "Let's go down the Village,"

I knew this guy Paul Colby, owns a place.

We went to the Bitter End and we're sitting in there having a drink late afternoon.

Bob Dylan walks in with Bob Norris.

Dylan sits down at the next table to us

and plays the entire Desire album to Bobby Norris.

And Mick got drunk.

And he got thrown out, three times.

Paul Colby threw him out.

And the last time Mick said,

"If you throw me out one more time I'm coming back in through that fucking window."

So Colby let him stay,

and stay he did. And then he rang me, I went home

and about three or four days later Mick rang me and said,

"Here, I'm playing with Bob Dylan!"

Now Mick had never liked Bob Dylan.

This is what really jars me about this whole thing

is Mick had never liked Bob Dylan.

Mick used to think he sounded like Yogi Bear,

I mean, he certainly wasn't a fan,

and I wasn't either, we were glam rockers.

I actually was very fortunate to spend a little bit of time with him

in the summer of '77 in Woodstock,

because he got a bit involved there with the Bearsville record label.

I'm gonna scout out a few groups to produce,

for another couple of months or so.

I've got a lot of tunes out I've got to finish off,

and I've been in the middle of getting a record deal for myself...

And I have to say that at the time

Mick was feeling a bit low

because he'd begun to feel himself that

he'd been washed to the side slightly

in the wave of everything that had gone through,

and the slipstream had sort of veered him off.

And I think at that stage he was beginning to feel

that he hadn't been given quite the credit that he felt he deserved really.

SUZI: And then things got tough for us after that.

We didn't have any money.

I got pregnant and I was in Woodstock.

And Mick had a band, that's why he put a band together.

But it was nothing, wasn't going anywhere really.

We just lived from pay check to pay check really.

IAN: Money just genuinely didn't interest him

and it caused him a lot of grief.

But he just wasn't interested. He was only interested in the music

and various aspects of it.

I mean, to him if he could find a Mexican heavy metal band,

you know, to do in East LA, he was there,

'cause it was different, it was interesting.

I had a band called Rich Kids, and we'd just signed to EMI

and we were looking for a record producer.

And we tried out a bloke at EMI and it wasn't quite working.

And we had an office in Marylebone

and the phone rang one day and nobody else was there and I answered the phone.

And this bloke went, "Hi, is Pete Walmsley there please?"

And I went, "No, he's not here at the moment. He's popped out."

I said, "who's that?" He said, "Mick".

I said, "That's not Mick Ronson, is it?" 'cause I knew he knew him.

And he said, "Yeah, it is actually. Who's that?"

I said, "It's Glen Matlock," and he said, "Ooh, I've heard about you."

I said, "Look, we're looking for a producer for this band

"that we've just signed to EMI, are you interested?"

He went, "Yeah, all right then."

And I said, "We're rehearsing in a couple of days' time,"

and he said, "Well I'll come down." We were rehearsing in Putney.

And I went, "Oh, and bring your guitar."

And he went, "All right," and he did.

And he came down to rehearsal, and we knocked through a number or two

and then we went down the pub and we got on famously.

SUZI: He was touring and traveling and looking for work.

Literally he worked from job to job to job, just to pick up the pay check.

BOB: John Mellencamp was quite willing to give Mick credit

for the work that Mick did on Jack and Diane,

the way that Mick took that song,

created just an incredible riff, a structure to the song,

that John Mellencamp ever since has lent back and gone, "Wow!"

Jack and Diane had been the song that had been drifting around for ages.

Mick gets hold of it. It's an American number one.

SUZI: And then Mick went off and did Lisa Dalbello.

* Maybe I'm wrong Maybe I'm right

* Maybe I'm some Kind of lunatic *

But, that was the time he was meant to be producing Tina Turner.

IAN: And this is typical Mick.

He said, "You've got a corn on your toe," to Tina,

and Tina's a pretty big artist and all the rest of it,

and she just starts laughing, and Mick goes, "I've got corn on mine as well."

You know, so now they're comparing corns on their toes.

And Tina loves him, just loves him.

She wants Mick, she wants him to do the record,

and Mick worked his way through that one and wound up not doing the record, you know.

He was in touch with David quite a lot I believe,

right through that Morrissey period he was in touch with David.

EARL: I hadn't seen for Mick for a while.

And I was even surprised that he would even show up,

and I'd just had this guitar painted

and he's flinging it around

and he's putting dings in it and stuff like that.

I'm standing on the side thinking oh my god, you know,

and I think Mick saw my face and...

We were laughing about it later on. You know, but...

Yeah, I was going, "What the hell is he doing to my guitar?"

SUZI: He went back to working with Ian,

which, you know, Ian was great, he always used to pay us.

Towards the back end of his life, you know, the whole thing

with Morrissey, you know.

He got his own deal with Epic,

things were looking really good.

Somebody said, "Oh, your brother's Mick Ronson?" I said, "Yeah" and they went,

"Morrissey's really been trying to get in touch, want to find out where he is."

MARK NEVIN: Morrissey called me one day and said,

"Who should we get to produce the next album?"

And I had said, "Why don't we get Mick Ronson?"

And I put word out to a few different people

and the phone rang and I picked it up.

"Is that Mark?" I said, "Yes." "My name's Michael Ronson."

And I was like...

You know, trying not to look as excited as I was.

He said, "I hear you wanna talk to me about producing Morrissey".

So a few days went by and Mick called and said...

I said, "Oh, Morrissey said can you come to my house on Friday?"

He said, "Oh, I can't on Friday. I'm babysitting for my sister."

At the time Morrissey was the hottest thing in the world.

I thought, "Do you think she could get somebody else to babysit?"

He said, "Let me see what I can do."

And so from there, then we got all the connections happening

and he ended up doing the Morrissey album, Your Arsenal.

Morrissey was the last big check that Mick got,

that enabled him to, live as he liked.

Live in comfort, eat what he wanted,

the house was as warm as you wanna be,

but without Morrissey that would have been difficult.

MAGGI: My friend who was a radiographer,

said to me, "Your brother don't look well"

and I said, "No, he's not," you know.

"He's in a lot of pain and he's not well."

So he said, "What are they giving him?"

I said, "Well, this blood test" you know.

And he went, "Do you want me to do an x"

So I said, "That'd be great!"

So anyway, we took him in, we had no forms or anything.

It just so happened that he just took this x-ray,

and then he came out and he went,

he said, "Do you know what?" he said, "I think he needs to...

"I think I'd like to get a radiologist to see him."

JOE: When we saw him at the Freddie Mercury gig

he'd been working on Your Arsenal for Morrissey,

and he was tired, you know, he was...

First thing he did when he got to Wembley was lay down and go to sleep on a couch.

But then once he got his energy back he was up and about

and finally got to play on the song he should have always played on, which was Heroes.

ROGER: Yeah, the concert was kind of my baby actually

and one of the first people I spoke to was David Bowie,

and David said, "Yes, of course I'll come.

"Can I suggest we use Mick?"

I said, "Oh, that'd be wonderful, you know,

"especially as you wanted to do Heroes,

"and that would fit in perfectly."

And Mick, he said, "Do you realize he's really unwell?"

He asked the radiologist that was there, if she would actually do a scan on him,

and she was kind enough to say yes, she's a lovely lady called Jo Wright.

And she did this scan on him,

and then she took me aside, into an office.

Meanwhile, you know, this is all sort of... So we got there at nine o'clock,

so time was going on and it was probably about 10 or 10:30 then.

Michael's still walking around looking a bit gray and in pain.

And so she took me aside in the office and said,

you know, "I've just done his scan," she said,

and "I can see three tumors on his liver."

JOE: We were celebrating the death of Freddie Mercury

and everybody was having a great time.

Roger Taylor, John Deacon, David Bowie,

Mick Ronson, Ian Hunter, Brian May, me and Phil. It's like this is amazing.

The most exciting three minutes of my musical career.

You know, that really was a nice little part of the show I thought,

with David and Mick,

and there was a sort of completion there that was lovely.

And he was on great form, you wouldn't have known that,

this was a man who was terminally ill.

And then I got a phone call at the weekend from Mr. Morgan,

saying to me, you know, "I've got some really bad news for you.

"This is called carcinoma of the liver

"and your brother's got three months to live, or thereabouts."

I was like, "What?"

You know, I just, you know... Unbeliev... I just...unbelievable.

That was the longest drive of my life,

going to that hospital 'cause I knew what they were gonna tell him.

He just rang me up out the blue, said, "Here, I've got this and..."

Typical Mick, you know. "Here, I've got cancer."

"What?" "Yeah, and it's inoperable."

He didn't live just three months, he lived for 20 months after that.

Maggie was great with him. I mean she was.

She adored her brother, she really did,

and she was there a lot looking after him.

He loved his sister, he adored his sister. He was...

His sister was everything to him.

IAN: I remember I came for two weeks to Hasker Street,

and we went out and he was... It went, it disappeared for two weeks.

This is what it's like.

The last night we went down Roger Taylor's house, it came back.

I think that was when we had,

the big dinner, round the kitchen table,

the most we ever had round that table, that night.

And then to think just a few short days later, you know,

uh, no Mick.

You know, we'd had our ups and downs, Mick and I.

But as soon as I knew...

And he was...

There wasn't a second that we weren't together really.

As soon as I knew.

And then he started doing Heaven and Hull.

JOE: I got a call from Ian, he says, "Mick's looking for you.

"He wants you to sing on the album,"

and of course I'm like, okay, how soon do you want me to say yes? Yes!

Everybody helped out, and with a will, not because they had to,

you know, just 'cause they wanted to.

And we did the vocal on Don't Look Down and he produced me,

and he dragged me through the coals. "No! You're doing it wrong.

"Do it again. You can do better than that!"

I'm like, "This is great!"

Everybody pulled together to get that record out, finish it.

So we're not getting the beginning part or anything.

Yeah, well if we're getting the first two parts.

I made the thing into four verses you see,

two sung, one solo verse and then a sung verse.

SUZI: He went and played on a Bowie track.

They're bringing you in as the solo and then just keep--

MICK: I don't know where that is.

Right where you're coming in.

DAVID: It was the first real time that we'd worked together in almost 20 years.

We sort of kept track of each other through the years though.

Every time I go on tour Mick turns up somewhere along the line,

and comes and guests on the show.

And I asked him if he would come for old time's sake and welcome a song,

and he said he'd be delighted to do that,

and he came along, played his usual breath-taking solo.

SUZI: I think it's pretty obvious when we... you know,

having to ask people for money to support Mick,

was an awful thing to have to do.

I mean it was humiliating to say, "Look, you know,

"Mick's got no money and he's really ill and he's got nowhere to live.

"We've got a house for him but we haven't got any money."

IAN: And he was great. I mean, there'd be one hour a day

when he would feel good, with the morphine and everything,

and he would ring everybody. "How you doing?"

Not like how he was doing, "How are you doing?" You know.

He took one course of chemo,

and said, "This is going to kill me faster than the other thing."

So he started alternative healing.

And that's when he started working with Morrissey,

during that period, that's when he started working with Morrissey.

And I think he knew that his time was close,

and I think that he confided in Morrissey a lot. I think he did.

IAN: And then as he was getting worse and getting worse

I was ringing him and I thought I should maybe come over a bit, you know.

So in the end he's like, "Why don't you come over?"

So I came over and that was when he went, you know.

I was downstairs making a cup of tea, she was upstairs with him,

and that was that, you know.

DAVID: The band, The Spiders From Mars,

got me the kind of fame that I had in the early 70s,

and the lead guitarist for that band was Mick Ronson,

and unfortunately...

Tragically, he succumbed to cancer three or four days ago.

And in his passing I want to say that,

of all the early 70s guitar players,

Mick was probably one of the most influential and profound

and I miss him a lot.

And now I have to introduce you to two people to come up and accept this award.

That's his wife, Suzi, and his only daughter, Lisa.

To this day, when I meet people who have met him,

they usually don't talk about his guitar solos or his production skills.

They talk about what a decent, funny, down to earth person he was.

And for everybody else that listens to his music,

or has been influenced by him in any way, you know Mick rocks.

I think what people miss is me being there.

You know. 'Cause there was some electricity there,

there was something about this thing,

when two people get together,

there's some invisible...

energy, there's something that's kind of magic.

You don't... you can't put your finger on it, you can't say what it is,

but it's something there.

You can't describe it or anything. It just is.

And it either is right or it's wrong, you know.

It just happened, that it was right.

INTERVIEWER: Is there a way you could play something that would be commemorable

to your relationship and your time and your experience with Mick?

Well I've never played a tribute to him or written a piece for him.

And I would love to have the privilege to do it in this space

and since you knew him and I knew him,

and he really was my ally on that tour,

I'll try to just sit here and create something, okay?

Thank you.

JON: Do you think we would,

have had the David Bowie that we knew...

Yeah. without Mick Ronson?

No. No.

Would Bowie have been Bowie without Mick Ronson?

No, I don't think he would have done.

Not the same David.

It might, I think you would have had David,

but it wouldn't have been the same David.

Mick was absolutely fundamental to the way it developed at that time.

I have to say I think Mick's early work with David,

was essential to it, and it's some of my favorite stuff.

It's utterly brilliant.

I have to say I think David's genius would have shone through anyway.

I think there was nothing that was gonna stop that.

He was like a beacon.

But I think Mick was the perfect...

The perfect sort of complement in those days.

Mick and the other spiders,

brought him into that rock, made him a rock star.

Not a theater star, not a cabaret star, but a rock star.

I know that he had a big influence, musically, on David.

There's absolutely no doubt the icing on the cake

when it came to the musicianship was Ronson.

What he did is he made things easier for David.

You need to have somebody to come in and put the decoration on.

Ronno was the right man at the right time.

Mick's contribution was very important.

His body was built, he was gorgeous and glorious,

successful with women and could play the guitar like a virtuoso.

What more could you want?

He was one of the...

loveliest people I've ever met.

He was such a lovely guy, kind, very gentle.

He was very humble.

He was a fantastic arranger.

And... 'Cause I spent a lot of time with... at the time with David

and he used to say, "When I found Mick Ronson, I found my Jeff Beck."

You know he said, "I thought I've got my Jeff Beck here!"

He did have a very distinct way,

of being melodic but ferocious at the same time.

Not too many guitarists can do that.

I don't think Mick knew how good he was.

You know, I think if Mick had realized how good he was...

I think he thought that if he kicked up a fuss and left,

they'd just get somebody else.

I don't think he realized what a talented person he was.

I remember talking to him,

and you know, just about me being in Pistols and then the Rich Kids thing,

and he was going, "You gotta get it right. You only get one chance."

I didn't think much of it at the time, but looking back, you know, that's what he meant.

In creating the legend that is David Bowie,

Mick was a major, major part.

DAVID: It seems amazing really that Ziggy and the Spiders

were only together for about 18 months,

but there's no doubt in my mind, that the collaboration of Woody, Trevor and Ronno,

made for one of the best trios of its time.

DAVID: These guys all came from Hull, you know,

we're going to play in a rock and roll band, they liked the songs and all that.

And I said, "Yeah, it's great.

"Do you want to see what we're gonna wear?"

MICK: I think I was more like a man and he was more like a woman.

MAGGI: He was definitely Mr. Godlike creature with his shirt off

and his brown body and his blond hair.

CHERRY: All the females on the tour wanted to have sex with Mick.

DANA: He was so marvelous to tease, 'cause he was so good looking.

ANGIE: Take that shirt off! That's a surfer boy.

We're gonna get America!

MICK: People came to see me as much as they were coming to see him.

IAN: If you looked at David, he was like from another planet,

and then you looked at Mick, who was like God's gift to women, you know,

I mean, it was like a lethal combination.

DANA: He was a simple man from Hull who adored music.

EARL: I still rate Mick Ronson

as one of the most influential rock and roll guitar players in history.

MAGGIE: He was everything to me, he was not only my big brother,

he was like my hero, too.

IAN: I saw him write an arrangement on a Players cigarette packet.

ANGIE: There was so much wonderful stuff about him.

I ironed all the boy's shirts because of Ronno.

TONY: Mick kind of didn't even know who Morrissey was.

MICK: I got so stoned.

I've never been that stoned... I don't think

I've ever been that stoned in all my life, you know.

LOU: The thing with Ronno is I could very rarely understand a word he said.

He had a Hull accent. He'd have to repeat things five times.

TONY: And that was the Ziggy Stardust tour.

We were off to Cleveland right after that.

RICK: He knew how to elevate David that bit more,

and by doing that he elevated himself a little bit.

JON: I said, "Oh, well, anyway, great things come out of Hull"

and he said, "Yeah, only two good things that came out of Hull,

"was fish and my sister."

MICK: They just wanted to beat the living shit out of us.

IAN: This was the story of Ronson's life.

JOE: Great, brilliant. This is rock and roll. I'm all for it.

The equipment helps a little bit.

I mean I think more often than not...

it's in your own personality,

it's in your own make-up, it's in your own fingers, you know.

DAVID: Most recently we lost a great friend, Mick Ronson.

He was the lead guitar player with my first successful band,

Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders.

I was fortunate enough to know Mick,

right until the end of his life.

And in the last year of that life

I've gotten back very closely with him.

If Mick had lived on he would have become a major producer and arranger,

and of course he would have remained one of rock's great guitar players.