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Artist News Awards
David Bowie drummer brands Lady Gaga’s tribute “stupid” and “tacky”
By Andy Malt | Published on Tuesday 1 November 2016
Former David Bowie drummer Mick ‘Woody’ Woodmansey has branded Lady Gaga’s David Bowie tribute/Intel advert at this year’s Grammy Awards as “stupid” and “tacky”. He also says that he and Toni Visconti were asked to get involved with the performance, but told organisers to “fuck off”.
Woodmansey played in Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars band from 1970-73, and in recent years has toured with Bowie producer Visconti with tribute show ‘The Man Who Sold The World’.
Speaking to the NME, he said: “They asked Tony and myself would we do it, and we looked at it and it was going to be like fourteen or fifteen 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'”.
“If there’s a genuine heartfelt thing that you wanna do out of respect, then you’d probably pull it off”, he continued. “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”.
Don’t feel down though, Gaga. Mick doesn’t think much of most of the Bowie tributes that have been made since his death. “I haven’t seen many things that do represent it properly”, he says. “It’s nice that many want to do that, it’s a great thing, but quality wise, there hasn’t been many”.
Logging his disdain for the Gaga/Grammy tribute in a more timely fashion, Bowie’s son Duncan Jones tweeted at the time: “‘Overexcited or irrational, typically as a result of infatuation or excessive enthusiasm; mentally confused’. Damn it! What IS that word?!”
The word is ‘gaga’, to save you googling it. And Lady Gaga didn’t appreciate it. Also speaking to the NME earlier this month, she said of Jones’s criticism: “It did hurt. But what are you going to do? It’s his father, you know. Whatever he was feeling in that moment I have compassion and love for him. But yes, of course it hurt. I still have to trust and believe in myself as a Bowie fan. I’m not his family, and the thing is, that’s his father. His father is not David Bowie, his father is David Jones”.
