“We just went ‘no, fuck off, that’s stupid, that’s not going to represent anything good about him.’”

David Bowie’s former drummer Mick “Woody” Woodmansey criticized the Grammys’ Lady Gaga-led tribute to the late singer in an interview with NME explaining he and Tony Visconti were approached to participate, but turned it down.

“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 explained.

Woodmansey played in Bowie’s band from 1970 to 1973, a period that included albums such as Hunky Dory and Ziggy Stardust, many songs from which appeared in Gaga’s tribute alongside Nile Rodgers. He said the tribute “tacky” and later questioned the intention of the performance.

“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 said. “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.”

Duncan Jones, David Bowie’s son, previously criticized the performance as well, using a textbook definition of the word “gaga” to describe it as “overexcited or irrational, typically as a result of infatuation or excessive enthusiasm; mentally confused.”