So Spencer basically played Woodie Taylor's drum parts for the recording of the Southpaw Grammar album?
From Mozipedia:
"Over December ’94 and early January ’95, the band managed to record the instrumental foundations for approximately ten tracks: ‘The Teachers Are Afraid Of The Pupils’, ‘Reader Meet Author’, ‘The Boy Racer’, ‘Dagenham Dave’ and ‘Best Friend On The Payroll’, plus future B-sides ‘NOBODY LOVES US’ and ‘YOU MUST PLEASE REMEMBER’ and three other working titles, ‘LAUGHING ANNE’, ‘YOU SHOULD HAVE BEEN NICE TO ME’ and ‘HONEY, YOU KNOW WHERE TO FIND ME’. ‘It had a very acoustic feel,’ says Supple, ‘very different to how Southpaw turned out in the end. But there’d been a massive mistake. Morrissey’s tape player had been playing Boz and Alain’s demos at the wrong speed so the instructions he gave them about what musical key to use on the Miraval tracks didn’t correlate. Everything was in the wrong key so it was irrelevant. The entire session had to be scrapped.’
The Miraval sessions also marked the end of Woodie Taylor’s tenure with Morrissey. By early ’95, Spencer COBRIN had been reinstated as drummer for the singer’s first UK tour in over two years that February. His performance on that tour, as well as a trial session at Abbey Road playing along to the Miraval demos, convinced Morrissey to retain him for Southpaw. ‘He suddenly decided he wanted it rockier,’ says Supple, ‘and Spencer was a harder drummer.’
Fresh from touring, in March ’95 the band reconvened in the familiar surroundings of Hook End. ‘The whole session was very full-on,’ says Cobrin. ‘We’d just come off the road, so there was a real energy about Southpaw.’ [...]
In keeping with its new, heavier sound, many of the tracks rehearsed at Miraval were discarded for being either incongruously slow (the ballads ‘Laughing Anne’ and ‘You Should Have Been Nice To Me’) or light pop (‘Honey, You Know Where To Find Me’) while others including ‘The Boy Racer’ and ‘Dagenham Dave’ were sufficiently fortified by harder arrangements."
Now, I've never compared the drumming on the Miraval demos with Spencer's drumming on Southpaw Grammar but I suspect he did bring some of his own style and ideas to the table. I think The Operation would have sounded very differently if Woodie had played on it...