Holy Holy At the Ritz, Woody Woodmansey, Tony Visconti and Glenn Gregory turn Bowie’s greatest songs into something gloriously alive.
The Ritz, Manchester, 12th September 2026
WORDS PAUL EVANS / IMAGES PAUL EVANS / ZIGGY EVANS
There are tribute acts. There are nostalgia tours. And then there is Woody Woodmansey’s Holy Holy a considerably more complicated proposition because, inconveniently, two of the people on stage actually helped invent the bloody thing.
Tonight, at Manchester’s Ritz, Woody Woodmansey and Tony Visconti aren't merely wheeling out the Bowie back catalogue for an audience hungry for the greatest hits. They were there. They produced and played on the records. They were part of the machinery that turned David Jones into David Bowie and then helped propel Ziggy Stardust into the stratosphere. This makes this less tribute act and more historical reenactment with amplifiers. And it starts beautifully.
Before a musician appears, the Ritz is filled with the strange, glacial sound of “Warszawa” from Low. No obvious greatest-hit fanfare, no instant singalong. Instead, Bowie arrives as atmosphere, distant, alien, slightly unsettling. For a moment, the darkness holds , it feels like we're somewhere in Berlin rather than Manchester. The lights go down. The room quietens. Conversations stop.
At the centre of tonight’s band is Woody Woodmansey, not an actor playing the part of a Spiders-era drummer, not somebody's hired nostalgia merchant, but the actual drummer who was there when this music was being invented on Hunky Dory and Ziggy Stardust. His drumming helped define the muscular, restless rhythm of Bowie’s early seventies work. Sadly, he is also the only member left from Ziggy and the Spiders.
That's quite a thing to process for me tonight. Alongside him is a band amazingly capable of doing justice to music that has become almost impossibly embedded in popular culture. On vocals is Glenn Gregory, best known as the frontman of Heaven 17, and there is something immediately compelling about hearing him inhabit these songs. He isn't attempting to impersonate Bowie. Instead, he approaches the material with the reverence of a lifelong fan who understands that these songs belong to everybody now, but that he has been given the extraordinary privilege of singing them tonight. Tony’s daughter Jessica Lee Morgan is also on stage tonight playing saxophone and 12 string acoustic guitar.
The opening drumbeat of “Five Years” remains brutally effective. The song remains one of Bowie’s greatest openings to an album and one of his most devastating pieces of songwriting. Gregory delivers it with seriousness and restraint while Woodmansey’s drums provide that sense of impending catastrophe. The Ritz crowd know every word. That becomes one of the defining characteristics of the night. There is a sense that many people in this room have been carrying these songs around for decades.
“The Width of a Circle” sprawls across the stage, heavy and psychedelic, refusing to behave. This is Bowie before the mythology had fully hardened, before the lightning bolt, before Ziggy became an icon and before every move was analysed as part of some grand masterplan. Tonight the song is gloriously unrestrained and a celebration of the period in which Bowie was changing almost by the minute, throwing ideas at the wall and discovering what happened when brilliant musicians were allowed to follow him into the unknown. “Lady Grinning Soul”, is elegant, sensual and almost impossibly beautiful, it is one of those Bowie songs that can make an entire room shut up. The arrangement has space. The performance doesn't overplay its hand. It simply lets the song hang there. The piano and guitar lines shimmer, the arrangement breathes and Gregory approaches the vocal with a tenderness that allows the song's romantic melancholy to come through.
The Ritz erupts for Ziggy Stardust a song that is now so familiar that it would be easy to underestimate how strange it must have sounded when it first appeared. A glam-rock character study about an alien messiah, delivered with the swagger of someone who knows exactly how ridiculous and brilliant the whole thing is. The famous riff cuts through the Ritz and suddenly everyone is exactly the age they were when they first heard it. The beauty of Holy Holy is that they don't try to recreate some museum-piece version of Bowie. They attack it. There is energy and looseness in the performance. The song is alive rather than preserved behind glass. And suddenly the question isn't whether Holy Holy can recreate Bowie. It's whether they can make you forget, for a couple of minutes, that you're listening to a song more than fifty years old. They can.
Glenn Gregory doesn't attempt to look or sound like Bowie and thank Christ for that. The last thing tonight needs is a bloke in a jumpsuit with lightning-bolt make-up doing a half-decent impression. Gregory instead approaches the songs as someone who grew up loving them. There is affection, but there is also enough confidence to avoid turning the evening into a fan convention with guitars. Because the danger with a night like this is obvious. How do you perform David Bowie songs in 2026 without turning them into a museum exhibit? How do you play music that has been dissected, reissued, remastered, analysed and worshipped for more than half a century without sucking the life out of it? Holy Holy's answer is simple. Play the songs hard and perfect.
“Time” is a highlight, with Glenn Gregory revealing that he has always loved singing the song. That affection comes through. It is theatrical, strange and slightly sinister, and Gregory throws himself into it without trying to cosplay Bowie. “Quicksand” slows things down further, perhaps one of the evening's most introspective moments. With “Changes”, the audience takes over. It is one of those moments when you realise just how deeply Bowie has penetrated popular culture. The words are somewhere in the collective memory. The jump from songs from Hunky Dory and Ziggy into “Ashes to Ashes” is significant. This isn't a band trapped in one period, The song's surreal imagery and electronic textures sound different from the material surrounding it, but the performance makes it belong. And then comes one of the night's genuinely interesting moments. “Eight Line Poem” wasn’t apparently performed live by Bowie and Holy Holy give it a new life tonight. The dedication of the song to Mick Ronson hangs over the performance. Ronson isn't here, of course, but his fingerprints are all over this material and the performance as usual tonight is perfect.
“Panic in Detroit” goes spectacularly off-piste. Glenn gets through the first verse. Then for a moment there is the unmistakable look of someone trying desperately to find the next line. There is a pause. Laughter. Swearing. More laughter. A brief regroup. And then they restart. It's brilliant. Because for all the mythology surrounding Bowie, Ziggy, the Spiders and those supposedly perfect albums, the reality was always musicians in a room trying to make something happen. The audience laughs with Gregory, the band gets back on the horse, and the song is better for it. That tiny cock-up somehow says more about the genuine love and spirit in Holy Holy than a hundred technically flawless performances. There is a warmth to the whole evening that comes from moments like this. These are musicians playing songs they genuinely love rather than attempting to manufacture some sterile approximation of Bowie.
“The Man Who Sold the World” brings darkness, “Drive-In Saturday” is all glam-rock swagger and “Space Oddity” tonight, still sounds vulnerable and lonely as Major Tom remains stranded somewhere between the stars and the radio. The room listens rather than simply sings before “Starman” changes everything. The audience erupts. If “Space Oddity” is Bowie looking into the unknown, “Starman” is Bowie inviting everyone else along for the ride. It is joyous, strange and gloriously melodic. It is difficult not to feel the emotional weight of it. The song has always carried the essence of Ziggy Stardust, but hearing it performed by musicians who were actually there makes the moment even more poignant. For a few minutes, the Ritz feels like it has been transported back to 1972. “Life on Mars?” is perhaps the most beautiful performance of the main set. Gregory doesn't attempt to duplicate Bowie's vocal mannerisms. Instead, he gives the song his own emotional reading, allowing the melody and lyrics to do the work and what a voice he has.
Before the encore, Woody Woodmansey and Tony Visconti share stories about their time with Bowie. Visconti recalls the recording of “Where Are We Now?”, revealing that Bowie's vocals were recorded in a single take, and that the vocal heard on the finished record is that very performance. There is something incredibly moving about that detail. One of Bowie's final great songs, carrying all the weight of memory, ageing, Berlin and looking backwards, was captured in one take. Visconti also talks about Bowie's extraordinary appetite for reading. During one of the recording sessions for Blackstar, Bowie was reading a book about Bone China. It is a wonderfully revealing detail because it captures something about Bowie that could easily be lost beneath the mythology: the relentless curiosity. The desire to absorb information, ideas and experiences from everywhere.
Woodmansey talks about the extraordinary energy of those early Bowie recordings. He explains that Bowie would play the band a song once before they went into the studio to record it. Once. That was it. The musicians heard the song, absorbed it and then played it. And suddenly you understand. The imperfections were part of the magic. Standing in the Ritz tonight, hearing these songs played by one of the men who helped create them, that philosophy still feels present. Woodmansey also turns his attention to the audience, telling Manchester how amazing they have been tonight. “Really amazing.” It doesn't sound like a rehearsed compliment. It feels genuine. The Ritz has been magnificent tonight. Loud when it needs to be. Quiet when it matters. Occasionally completely uncontrollable. Glenn Gregory echoes the sentiment, describing it as an honour to be allowed to sing tonight's songs. He tells us he was a big Bowie fan growing up. And that is when the whole thing clicks. He's not trying to replace Bowie. Nobody could. He's trying to honour the songs. There is gratitude. Gratitude for the songs. Gratitude for the musicians who created them. Gratitude for the opportunity to stand in a Manchester venue decades later and still feel the electricity of music first made in another era.
When the opening notes of “Where Are We Now?” begin Gregory has tears in his eyes. The room becomes almost painfully quiet. It is an extraordinary moment. The song itself is about memory and place, about returning to somewhere after years away and confronting the ghosts of what came before. Tonight, those themes become unavoidable. Bowie is gone. But the music isn't. And suddenly this song, which already carried such enormous emotional significance, becomes something else entirely. Gregory makes the performance human. There is no theatrical distance. He is a fan singing a song by someone who meant something to him, surrounded by hundreds, of people who feel exactly the same.
The Ritz explodes under red lights for the final encore, “Rebel Rebel”. After the introspection of “Where Are We Now?”, “Rebel Rebel” is exactly what is needed. It is loud, dirty, celebratory and completely irresistible. The riff takes over the room and suddenly nobody is thinking about mortality or legacy. They're dancing. They're shouting. They're celebrating Bowie. Tonight, Woody Woodmansey's Holy Holy understand that perfectly. They don't present Bowie as a sacred monument. They present him as a living force, chaotic, theatrical, experimental, emotional and occasionally gloriously imperfect. Woodmansey and Visconti’s presence have given the evening an authenticity that no conventional tribute could replicate. Gregory brings the perspective of the lifelong fan, singing these songs with obvious affection rather than attempting to become Bowie. And the rest of the band and audience complete the picture. Manchester sings every word. It laughs when things go wrong. It remembers. It celebrates. It cries. And then it dances beneath the red lights.
As I walk out of the Ritz, the final echoes of “Rebel Rebel” are still rattling around the building. Outside, Manchester is doing what Manchester does, taxis, traffic, people shouting, somebody smoking outside a kebab shop, the usual Saturday-night chaos. Inside, for two hours, we had been somewhere else. Somewhere with Ziggy. Somewhere with Major Tom. Somewhere in Berlin. Somewhere inside Bowie's extraordinary imagination. The songs breathe again. Woody Woodmansey was still there and Bowie, Ronson and Bolder were still there. Not as ghosts, not as a memory, but as music. Woody Woodmansey’s Holy Holy tonight have delivered one of those rare nights where the distance between past and present seems to collapse completely. This was not simply a band playing David Bowie songs. This was a piece of Bowie’s history being played and brought back to life by musicians who helped create it. And wow did they play it left hand.
SETLIST
Five Years
The Width of a Circle
Lady Grinning Soul
Ziggy Stardust
OTHER SONGS PLAYED
Time
Quicksand
Changes
Ashes to Ashes
Eight Line Poem
Panic in Detroit
The Man Who Sold the World
Drive-In Saturday
Space Oddity
Starman
Rock 'n' Roll Suicide
Life on Mars?
Moonage Daydream
Where are we now?
Rebel Rebel
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