Bowie Drummer Turned Down Lady Gaga Grammys Tribute: “No, Fuck Off, That’s Stupid”

David Bowie’s former drummer Mick “Woody” Woodmansey has taken aim at the Grammys’ tribute to Bowie in a new interview with NME. Woodmansey, who played in the Spiders From Mars between 1970 and 1973, said he and Tony Visconti turned down an invite to partake in the performance, which Lady Gaga fronted alongside Nile Rodgers, because the idea seemed “tacky.”

“We looked at it and it was going to be like 14 or 15 songs in the space of four minutes,” Woodmansey said, “and we just went ‘no, fuck off, that’s stupid, that’s not going to represent anything good about him.’” He went on, “It was just, ‘why are you doing it?’ If there’s a genuine heartfelt thing that you wanna do out of respect, then you’d probably pull it off, but if there’s any other reason, it just gets tacky, and obviously you can’t stop that, they have a right to do it as they want to do it, but it doesn’t help a lot, it doesn’t do a lot.” 

Woodmansey wasn’t the performance’s first detractor—most notably, Bowie’s son, Duncan Jones, appeared to diss it on Twitter, prompting Rodgers to speak up in defense. 

Woodmansey is promoting his new memoir, Spiders From Mars: My Life With David Bowie.

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