It's been months since Lady Gaga's tribute to David Bowie at the Grammys, but the performance still isn't sitting well in the minds of some of the late legend's former bandmates.
In a recent interview with NME, Mick "Woody" Woodmansey, the former drummer for Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, explained that he and producer Tony Visconti turned down an offer to perform the Bowie tribute with Lady Gaga.
"We were on tour at the time. They asked Tony and myself would we do it, and we looked at it and it was going to be like 14 or 15 songs in the space of four minutes, and we just went 'No, fuck off. That's stupid. That's not going to represent anything good about him,'" Woodmansey told NME. "It's nice that many want to do that, it's a great thing, but quality wise, there hasn't been many [that represent his work properly]."
"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," he added.
Woodmansey wasn't the only one close to Bowie to criticized Gaga's tribute: David Bowie's son, Duncan Jones, called the performance "overexcited," "irrational," and "mentally confused."
After spending the past few years on a Bowie tribute tour (which Bowie himself approved), Woodmansey is now touring to promote his memoir, My Life with Bowie, Spider from Mars. The book, which looks back on what it was like to work beside Bowie as he cultivated his Ziggy Stardust persona and developed into a glam-rock sensation, will be released on 3 January .
