Graft and Glamour: How Hull shaped Mick Ronson
‘MODEST SUPERSTAR’: Mick Ronson
The Crow’s Nest, a music column by Russ Litten
Interview with Rupert Creed, co-author of Turn & Face The Strange: The Mick Ronson Story
A few years ago, a friend of mine came up to visit from London. He was big fan of everything David Bowie and was keen to pay his respects in the city that spawned The Spiders From Mars. I told him that Mick Ronson used to work for the council, landscaping the flower beds in Queens Gardens. My pal wanted to go and visit the hallowed ground. As we wandered around the damp grass and concrete he asked me if there was any permanent monument to his hero. There’s a Mick Ronson Memorial Stage, I told him. We went to have a look. There it is, I said, pointing to the nondescript lump of grey tucked away in the corner. We both stood and contemplated for a second and then my pal turned to look at me, incredulous.
Is that it, he asked?
I could only sympathise with his misgivings. It seemed that one of our city’s most bright and beautiful stars was largely uncelebrated in any lasting or meaningful manner. This sorry state of affairs was thankfully redressed during the 2017 City of Culture celebrations with the stage production of Turn & Face The Strange, the story of Mick Ronson brought bursting to colourful life by virtue of writers Rupert Creed and Gary Burnett and a host of supporting musicians. And now there is a book of the same name. I sat down for a cup of tea with co-author Rupert Creed to discuss all things Ronno.
Tell me about the origins of Turn And Face The Strange
“Back in 2017 we recorded about 40 to 50 people as research for the stage show, gathering their memories of Mick. I’ve always created theatre from people’s stories, oral histories and reminiscing. It’s an approach I’ve used since my days with Remould Theatre in the 80s, gathering accounts of the lives of fishermen, steelworkers, nurses and so forth. I’ve always been interested in that process, what that means to the authenticity and veracity of a piece of work.
“But by 2017 I’d got a little bit tired of traditional drama, so I arrived at this hybrid form of mixing story-telling with archive film, photographs, audio and live music. Gary Burnett was coming at it from a very personal viewpoint. He’d grown up around East Park and Mick Ronson had a big influence on him in terms of being a role model. When you’re a teenager and your destiny is either working in a factory or joining the army, being offered a route out of that through music, and seeing a local lad making good, it gave him a lot of encouragement.
Author Rupert Creed
“Gary pointed out that there had never really been a show about Mick Ronson. So he was coming at it from a very personal point of view and mine was a more theatrical angle. So we recorded all these people and started garnering all these fantastic stories. Then we asked Keith ‘Ched’ Cheeseman to put together a rock band for the show, and he brought in people like John Cambridge who, to my astonishment, had been Bowie’s original drummer. He was the one who started it all, really, the first musician from that Hull scene to go down to London and forge all these connections.”
It seems strange, in retrospect, that nobody had really documented Mick Ronson’s story before…
“Maybe it’s a Hull thing, the fact that we don’t big ourselves up enough. Imagine if this was Liverpool, Mick would have been celebrated like The Beatles. He was a huge rock star, but it’s back to that Hull thing. Anybody who walks about thinking they are a big shot gets brought swiftly back down to earth. Mick just had that wonderful self-effacing way about him. He was very practical. He just got on with the job.”
Did you find anything within the story that surprised you?
“It was all a surprise to me, because I didn’t know much about him. We didn’t hone in on the celebrity stuff. We were more interested in how the post-war working-class culture of Hull shaped the man, gave him that grounding, that apprenticeship if you like. When you look at that collection of musicians in Hull in the mid-to late sixties, it’s just phenomenal how they all connect. There was one gig in East Park, a free concert in 1969, and you look at the flyer for it, and the line up is David Bowie - who didn’t turn up on the day - Juniors Eyes, which was his backing band with John Cambridge on drums, Tony Visconti on bass and Mick Wayne, who had played lead guitar on Space Oddity. Also on the bill was The Rats with Mick Ronson and Woody Woodmansey and a band called Flesh, which included Trevor Bolder. And then you had Michael Chapman, a massively influential folk musician who Mick made his first recordings with. All those connections were being made in Hull in the late sixties which, by accident or design ended up forming David Bowie and the Spiders From Mars.”
It was no instant route to stardom was it?
“Mick was very resistant to leaving Hull. It was - and perhaps still is - a very parochial city. But he’d had his fingers burnt. It took him three goes to make it big. There was 1966 when, he went down to London and joined a band called The Voice, came back penniless and disillusioned. His Dad had always said to him, don’t try and make music your bread-winning career. You need a proper job. Keep music as a hobby. So he was determined not to make the same mistake again. He was playing with The Rats and had a job with the council as a gardener, and was pretty firmly fixed in Hull.
“And he was only doing cover versions, he wasn’t writing his own songs. He was very much a covers man. According to Ched, Mick was highly resistant to doing any kind of original material. Then John Cambridge persuaded him to go down to London again to hook up with him and Bowie, who at the time was struggling to find a musical direction that worked. And soon after they recorded The Man Who Sold The World, but Mick and Woody decided that it wasn’t happening quickly enough, there wasn’t enough gigs and they came back to Hull. Literally turned the van around and drove back to Hull, abandoned Bowie, left him to play a solo gig in Leeds.
“Back in Hull, they hooked up with Benny Marshall, the singer with the Rats, and formed Ronno with Trevor Bolder. But it didn’t work, because they just couldn’t write their own original material. So when Bowie rang Mick up in the May of 1971 and said shall we give it another go, Mick agreed. And from that point on they were firmly cemented as a creative partnership.”
I interviewed Woody Woodmansey and I wanted to ask him if he thought Mick had betrayed him when he got the sack from The Spiders. There’s that famous story about Woody asking the manager to put Mick on the phone and being told that Mick didn’t want to speak to him. What are your thoughts on that? Did Mick have a ruthless side to him?
“The more stories you gather, the more you begin to doubt any one person’s perspective or analysis. Did Mick sell his former band mates down the river? You could argue that he did the same thing with John Cambridge and with Trevor Bolder. There are two big aspects to this, I think. One, the creative aspect. You work with the people you want to work with, and when it’s going well it’s great, but when it runs out of steam you want to work with other people.
“Mick wanted to produce the best work he could. I think John Cambridge was the hardest one, because it was John who gave him that opportunity with Bowie and it was only a few months later that John got the push. But when you get to the Spiders and the Ziggy Stardust tour, it was very much an issue over pay. Mick was very supportive of them and wanted to get the band a separate deal. The moment the manager, Tony DeFries, heard about that, he put an absolute stop to it. He said to Mick, if you do this then that’s us finished. And he offered Mick an entire new route, post-Ziggy.
“Bowie had made it absolutely clear that he was going to stop it. Hammersmith Odeon was the last gig. So what were Mick’s options? He’d been offered a way forward for him personally, so he had to jump ship. I think the thing about personal loyalty, it’s not that it goes out of the window, but when it comes down to artistic choices, people either go where they think the best opportunity is, or the best creative outcome.”
Do you think Mick Ronson was aware of the influence he had? Not just as a musician but as an influencer through popular culture? I’m think of the moment Bowie draped his arm around him on Top Of The Pops, that whole androgynous thing, where a nation of parents spat their tea at the TV. So many present day pop figures, from Boy George to Morrissey, cite that as a pivotal moment in shaping their identity, how it emboldened them to truly be themselves. Do you think Mick was aware of that?
“My guess is no. They were always so focused on the music. Going back to The Rats, I remember Ched Cheeseman saying they all had other interest, like John Cambridge was into football, darts, going to the pub, whatever, but for Mick it was music and nothing else. So by the time you get to the Ziggy period, it’s going at such a rollercoaster rate that I don’t think they would have had any sense of any historical change with regard to stuff like gender identity.
“Bowie’s momentum, with his wonderful ability to find different forms of expression, they just went with it. The Spiders were up for being Bowie’s gang on stage, but when it came to wearing mascara and frocks and stuff, there was some initial resistance. That was interesting. We wanted to look at how northern working-class attitudes from Hull rubbed up against bohemian London-centric arty ideas, how they matched up. And I’m amazed they did go together so well.
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“There were only a few bust-ups over the bisexuality and the dressing up, but they soon came to terms with that, when they saw how incredibly successful it all was. That’s why the show and the book are both called Turn & Face The Strange. Mick really did have to face the strange. What he brought to it was his hard work ethic that was forged in the city of Hull. And that’s why it worked to such a phenomenal degree.”
I leave Rupert typing away in his writing shed, go back home and look up some old YouTube clips of Mick Ronson. As well as all the famous footage of the glam era, there is one interview that seemed to sum up the lasting appeal of this most modest of superstars. It’s 1992 and Mick is sat in a freezing cold Hammersmith Odeon, clutching a Fender Telecaster. He’s asked how he got that famous crunching guitar sound on such classics as Jean Genie. Mick looks a bit non-plussed. You just plug it in and crank it all the way up, he says. Then he blows on his hands, plays that spine-tingling intro to Ziggy Stardust, the clarion call that set light to a million teenage daydreams. He plays a few bars then stops, shrugs, smiles. Like that, he says.
Turn & Face The Strange: The Mick Ronson Story is published by McNidder & Grace and is available to order here.