David Bowie's former drummer slams Lady Gaga's Grammys tribute

Lady Gaga’s tribute to the late David Bowie at the Grammy Awards had previously seen the ire of Bowie’s son Duncan Jones, and now, Bowie’s former drummer Mick “Woody” Woodmansey is chiming in, too.

In a new interview with NME, Woodmansey expressed his disdain toward Gaga’s tribute, which she performed with frequent Bowie collaborator Nile Rodgers. Woodmansey played with Bowie in the early ’70s as the drummer for Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. He also revealed that he and producer Tony Visconti were offered the opportunity to take part in the performance, but turned it down because of the pacing.

“It was going to be like 14 or 15 songs in the space of four minutes, and we just went, ‘No, f— off, that’s stupid, that’s not going to represent anything good about him,” Woodmansey told NME.

While Gaga’s performance didn’t quite reach 15 songs, she did manage to squeeze a whopping 10 Bowie classics into her six-minute set in a move that prompted Bowie’s son Jones to tweet, “overexcited or irrational, typically as a result of infatuation or excessive enthusiasm; mentally confused.’ Damn it! What IS that word!?” — otherwise known as the definition of “gaga.”

Woodmansey shared Jones’ sentiment, telling NME, “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.”

While Gaga has yet to respond to Woodmansey’s criticisms, she did tell NME following Jones’ tweet that his words hurt her, but she understood where he was coming from.

“I’m sure that was difficult [for him] to watch and of course, I called many people on David’s team before I even begun doing that project,” she said. “It’s unfortunate, what can I say? But God bless him, you know?”

Bowie died in January following a private battle with liver cancer. Bowie Legacy, a compilation of his greatest hits, is due out Nov. 11.