How the Spiders from Hull changed rock music for ever

David Bowie's performance of Starman on Top of the Pops on 6 July 1972 was a pop year zero, which inspired the likes of Ian McCulloch, Gary Kemp and Boy George to start pop careers, and which changed the way some people looked, thought and acted overnight. Even looking at it now, 39 years on, you can feel something of the frisson. Bowie – with his blue guitar, Ziggy Stardust jumpsuit and shock of spiky red hair – was described by journalist Mick Wall as a "gay alien from outer space", but it wasn't just the singer who looked and seemed extraordinary. Guitarist Mick Ronson and drummer Mick "Woody" Woodmansey were visions of platinum blonde and satin; bassist Trevor Bolder had outsize silver sideburns. As someone who watched it as an eight-year-old in Leeds, I can vividly remember straight-faced discussions in the playground over whether this strange creature that landed on our screens was an extra-terrestrial.

Back in those innocent pre-internet days, few of us could have guessed that the "Starman" was actually born David Jones in Brixton, or that the Spiders from Mars were actually from Hull.

In fact, the Bowie legend's unlikely roots in East Yorkshire go even deeper than Bolder, Woodmansey and former gravedigger Ronson's pivotal roles on many of Bowie's classic early 1970s albums, up to and including Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane. Late-60s/early-70s drummer John Cambridge still lives in Beverley and John "Hutch" Hutchinson, also from Hull, played with Bowie from 1969 to 1973, and on an early version of Space Oddity.

Not that you'd know any of this from visiting the Hull area today, where you don't hear Moonage Daydream blasting out over Hull City's ground or find statues of the Spiders next to the one of Philip Larkin. Instead, their only visible legacy is a ghastly, unloved old stage in Hull's Queen's Gardens, rather embarrassingly signposted the "Mick Ronson Memorial".

Earlier this year, when I tracked down various undersung characters from Bowie's past, Woody Woodmansey talked me through the unlikely process of how musicians from an isolated East Riding fishing port became Spiders from Mars.

Woodmansey, Cambridge, Bolder and Ronson played in the Rats, Hull's top band of the late 60s, before Cambridge played with Bowie in the London-based Hype and returned to recruit Ronno, who subsequently recommended the others for the Spiders.

When Woodmansey met Bowie, it was a "culture shock. He had on bright red trousers, red shoes with blue stars on them, a rainbow T-shirt you needed sunglasses to look at and bangles. Even the girls in Hull didn't wear many bracelets. I was thinking: 'Are we on the same planet?' But he was 24/7, a rock star already. We'd never met people who wanted to do it as much as we did and knew how to do it."

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Bowie opened the Rats-turned-Spiders to culture, even the ballet. "But to watch the lights, not the performance," explained Woody. "In those days rock lighting was red and green. He'd say: 'Watch how they use the lighting at the ballet to create atmosphere on stage.' People in pop didn't do that then."
Ironically, given how images of a glammed-up Bowie and Ronson have become some of the most iconic in pop, Ronno needed most convincing to don the platinum hair dye and androgynous, space-age costumes.

"He packed his suitcase and went to the station. He said: 'I'm a musician. I've got friends. I don't want them seeing me like that.' But we coaxed him back. Eventually we all realised you couldn't sing about a Starman who'd fallen to earth if you were wearing ripped jeans."
As Woodmansey tells it, the roots of that famous Starman performance were honed in tiny pubs, where Bowie benefited from his bandmates' superb musicianship, born of years of playing in East Riding pubs and clubs and in lost bands such as the Crestas and the Mariners. "It was effectively the same show as the Ziggy Stardust tour. It felt strange doing it pubs. Dangerous. When we started, they were throwing things onstage. The girls started to go for it and the guys didn't like that."

Then suddenly, that Top Of The Pops changed everything. Woodmansey remembers the 1970s as a time of "garbage on the streets and the three-day week. Then along came Starman and took people out of the gloom."

I'd have loved to speak to Trevor Bolder about those times too, and about his ferociously groovy bass playing, whicht took the likes of The Jean Genie and John, I'm Only Dancing to another level, but a scheduled interview in January was cancelled because he needed an operation and his tragic death yesterday sadly leaves Woody Woodmansey as the last surviving Spider.

When the sad news of Bolder's death broke last night, I found myself remembering the silver sideburns and impact he and his pals had on mine and other generations, watching that Top of the Pops in 1972. Somehow, the discovery that Bowie's most famous backing band weren't from outer space but were ordinary northern working-class blokes with Yorkshire accents didn't break the spell but strengthened it. When three mates and I subsequently trudged into Toni's barber shop on Town Street in Horsforth and asked the hatchet-faced demon barber for "a Bow-eh", it was because the Spiders from Mars had taught us that the mundane could be transformed into the magical. Indeed, that pop heaven came from Hull.

Recently, Spandau Ballet's Steve Norman and Gary Kemp and Def Leppard's Joe Elliott have been among musicians leading the cry for a proper memorial to Mick Ronson in his hometown. Surely that call must now be extended to one for a lasting tribute in Hull to the city's greatest band.