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David Bowie’s former drummer has slammed Lady Gaga’s tribute to the late musician at the GRAMMY Awards, saying that it didn’t “represent anything good about him.”
Lady Gaga performed a medley of Bowie’s most popular songs at the 2016 GRAMMYs, which came under no small amount of criticism from fans of the legendary artist. Mick ‘Woody’ Woodmansey, who was a drummer for The Spiders From Mars during Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust era, ranks himself among those who disliked Gaga’s rendition of classics such as ‘Space Oddity’ and ‘Heroes’.
Revealing that both he and long-time Bowie producer Tony Visconti turned down the opportunity to appear alongside Gaga, Woodmansey told NME: “We were actually asked to do that, 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.
He added: “I haven’t seen many things that do represent it properly. It’s nice that many want to do that, it’s a great thing, but quality wise, there hasn’t been many.”
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Woodmansey also shared his thoughts on the performance itself. He continued: “”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.”
The performance was roundly criticised by those watching the GRAMMYs, with Bowie’s son Duncan Jones branding it “irrational and mentally confused”. During the course of the tribute, an image of Lady Gaga’s face bearing the familiar Aladdin Sane lightning bolt appeared on a giant screen, with a CGI spider crawling along her face. From there she embarked upon an erratic mash-up of most of Bowie’s most beloved hits, with the hyperactive medley only lasting for around 6 minutes.
You can watch the performance below:
By contrast, the David Bowie tribute that took place during this year’s BRIT Awards attracted a very positive reception, with Bowie’s former band running through a retrospective of his music before Lorde delivered an excellent rendition of ‘Life on Mars’. You can watch that performance below:
