'David Bowie stayed in our house in Hull'

"How much?" gasps John Cambridge as David Bowie tells him the cost of getting his car serviced in London.

It is 1970 and Cambridge, Bowie's drummer with The Hype in the early days of his career, has persuaded the fledgling rock star to drive up to Hull to get a cheaper MOT on his Rover 100.

Cambridge even persuades his parents to put Bowie up at their home in Brisbane Street – a working-class area near the city centre.

"He was going to get it serviced for a ridiculous amount of money. I said in Hull you can buy a car for that," he recalls.

Cambridge went on to help form Bowie's iconic band, The Spiders from Mars, which saw three more working-class lads emerge out of the humble streets of East Yorkshire into a world of daring glam-rock outfits and iconic music.

Artefacts from that time, including costumes and instruments, will be among those on display when a touring exhibition about Bowie's life and music – announced earlier this month – comes to Ferens Art Gallery early in 2028.

Almost six decades on, Cambridge still has fond memories of his time living with Bowie at Haddon Hall, a sprawling villa in Beckenham, south London, along with producer Tony Visconti.

Cambridge had been part of a band called Junior's Eyes that worked on Bowie's self-titled 1969 album (often known as Space Oddity).

"We had water pistols and all sorts at his house. That's how daft we were," he recalls.

When Bowie needed a new guitarist, Cambridge asked Mick Ronson, a council gardener with whom he had played in Hull band The Rats.

He says Ronson was painting lines on a rugby pitch on the Greatfield Estate when he convinced him to go to London to meet Bowie.

Trevor Bolder, a bassist from Driffield, also joined, while Cambridge was sacked and replaced by fellow Hull drummer Mick "Woody" Woodmansey.

While The Spiders from Mars were rocketing towards stardom, Cambridge was forced back down to earth and returned to his day job in plastering.

"When they took off and they were on Top of the Pops and going to America and Japan, I was thinking no one had even heard of me," he says.

"It did bother me I was still plastering on the building sites, having the radio on, hearing the songs and thinking here we go again, but what will be will be."

Today he is "just glad I was a little bit of a part of Bowie's history".

His memories include taking the star, along with Bowie's first wife Angie, around Hull pubs.

"In one pub we were walking out the door, a girl looked at him and said 'you look just like that David Bowie'.

"He just said, 'Yeah, a lot of people tell me that'."

One person who found herself caught up in the whirlwind of Bowie's Ziggy Stardust era was his hairdresser and wardrobe mistress Suzi Ronson – then going by her maiden name Fussey – who went on to marry Mick Ronson in 1977.

"David was really lucky he bumped into Mick, they blended perfectly on stage together," she recalls.

"It took off like a rocket ship. We just sold out all over."

She says Ronson, Bolder and Woodmansey were "boys from Hull who were just normal blokes, like bloke blokes".

Nevertheless, they embraced the flamboyant, daring and androgynous stage outfits "quite quickly".

"After three weeks you'd walk in the dressing room and someone would say 'where's my mascara? Have you got the blush David?'

"I think they realised girls still came after them."

She says Bowie once told Woodmansey: "It takes a real man to wear pink".

"I think Woody was a bit surprised, but he did it, he was good," she adds.

Cambridge acted as best man for Bowie when he married Angela Barnett in 1970.

He attended the star's 50th birthday and continued to receive Christmas cards from up until Bowie's death in 2016.

"David could be looking round Nasa and talking to a rocket scientist, he could talk on that level.

"Then he could go into a building site and see someone putting cement in a mixer and get on that level," he says.

Bowie broke up The Spiders from Mars in 1973. By then, Ronson was a highly respected musician in his own right and had co-produced and played on Lou Reed's influential album Transformer.

Suzi Ronson says: "I was heartbroken when they broke up, but my story didn't end there, it ended up with me and Mick and our fabulous time together."

Ronson went on to work with the likes of Bob Dylan and Morrissey while also recording several solo albums. He died of cancer in 1993 aged just 46.

Rupert Creed co-wrote Turn and Face the Strange, a stage show about Ronson and Bowie, with Garry Burnett.

"It was really the Spiders from Mars that cemented the sound of David Bowie," he says.

"Hull at the end of the line often gets overlooked and actually the whole element in David Bowie's success really shouldn't be underestimated."

The David Bowie exhibition, curated by the Victoria and Albert (V&A) Museum as part of a national tour, has brought together 100 highlights from Bowie's archive, many that have never been on public display. It will open at V&A Dundee on 4 November.

It will run at the Ferens, in Hull, from February to May 2028.

Listen to highlights fromHull and East Yorkshire on BBC Sounds, watch the latest episode of Look North.

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