Friday at the Glastonbury Festival, 2009, 6.30pm. It is not, let’s be clear, a glamorous time or place. The field is a skidpan of flattened grass and crushed plastic. The weather is lukewarm. The sky is chrome-coloured. It’s fair to say that no one is really expecting the best Glastonbury performance of a decade to go off right now.
Lady Gaga might have already clocked up two No 1 singles —Just Dance and Poker Face — but American girls with No 1 pop singles count for very little at a rock festival in the middle of Somerset. It’s usually your sweaty guitar icons — Bruce Springsteen, Radiohead — who galvanise a crowd. Or a stall selling particularly good pies.
But as Gaga arrives on stage, preceded by a storm front of dry ice and dancers in black, studded PVC kilts, the crowd begins the chant: “Gaga! Gaga! Gaga! Gaga!”
“I am Lady Gaga!” her voice booms from behind a wall of glitterball riot shields. “And you deserve — the future!
It’s quite a statement. But then, in the event, it’s quite an act. Over the next 40 minutes Lady Gaga handles five costume changes, ten backing dancers, an admission of bisexuality, two No 1 singles and a come-on — “Do you fancy me, Glastonbury? Because I fancy you” — to an entire festival, all conducted with an attitude pitched somewhere between Marilyn Monroe and a Valkyrie. At one point in the set, arching back like a ballerina, Gaga triggers some manner of “tit pyrotechnics” button and shoots fireworks out of her breasts.
Later she performs a bluesy version of Poker Face while standing on one leg, in 5in heels, playing the high notes with her foot and, later on, her face. Despite this uncompromising position it sounds really, really beautiful. Gaga has been playing the piano since she was 4. It shows.
During the set, it should be noted, the audience practically doubles in size, with people pouring off the hillsides and down into the arena. When she finally leaves the stage the roar is tremendous.
In the18 years I’ve been going to the festival I have never seen an act arrive there so magnificently or so confidently impose its own agenda — sex, neurosis, fetish, heels, clubbing, fashion — on such an ostensibly unpromising setting. Just to remind you — there is a field of cows some 800 yards to our right. The principal exports of this location are hay and cheese. And yet Gaga is making Glastonbury feel like a club in New York at 3am. You can practically hear the sirens outside and taste the amyl nitrate. I start to worry about the possibility of getting a cab back over the bridge, to Brooklyn.
When the Glastonbury promoters booked Gaga four months earlier she would just have been some up-and-coming, hotly tipped thing on the New York gay scene. By the end of the year, Gaga had sold more than 8 million albums, 35 million singles, been nominated for six Grammys and three Brits and been the first artist to have four No 1 singles taken off her debut album. At her New Year Party in Miami tables sold for $20,000 (£12,000) a pop. She’s been compared to Madonna so many times that she and Madonna ended up doing a skit together on Saturday Night Live: Gaga’s opening line was “Madonna? I’m totally hotter than you.” Madonna has said: “I see myself in her.”
By last week, Gaga had made it to that bastion of Middle America,The Oprah Winfrey Show, and spent her time cheerfully explaining the kind of arguments she has with her creative team: “If I want to [pretend to] bleed to death on national television, I will.”
Of course, this is pop music: who can say how it will all ultimately pan out? This time next year Gaga could have gone nuts, shaved off all her hair and be attacking a car with a furled umbrella, like Britney Spears. But as things stand The Wall Street Journal nailed it when it said: “Gaga ... really understands spectacle, fashion, shock, choreography — all the things Madonna and Michael Jackson were masters of in the 1980s.”
“I don’t want to sound presumptuous, but I’ve made it my goal to revolutionise pop music,” she said, when asked about her plans. When Simon Cowell was asked what he’s looking for this year, he said, simply: “The next Lady Gaga.”
Of course, the irony is that the next Lady Gaga would eat Cowell for breakfast and then cough up his gorilla flat-top like a hairball. When the current Gaga tour reaches the UK next month I am very much hoping that this event will be part of the show.
Do you know why I love Lady Gaga? That is aside from that, fairly regularly during 2009, I would find myself endangering the goodwill of my osteopath by vaulting on to the dancefloor every time I heard one of her songs? (There are, after all, few greater clarion-calls to woozily busting some moves than a woman who looks like a transvestite singing, “I love this record, baby/ But I can’t see straight any more/ Just dance,” over a cavalcade of glam-rock synths.)
It’s because in the 21st century what women need — second only to some watertight equal-pay legislation and, possibly, slightly wider parking spaces — is other women who are involved in popular culture but don’t give a toss what anyone else thinks of them. I don’t mean the faux-attitude of, say, the Pussycat Dolls or Fearne Cotton, who manifestly do care what people think, what with their carefully shot publicity material, alluring, non-scary outfits and auras of constantly available, non-threatening, mainstream sexuality. These women are little more liberated than cigarette girls in 1950s nightclubs.No. I mean women who are right out there, doing what the hell they want, and who would clearly greet any attempt to criticise their appearance or attitude with wildly disbelieving laughter. Women who are unafraid to express aspects of themselves that seem alarming, unpalatable, uncontrollable or just plain horsescaringly bizarre. We need more rolemodels such as this. After all, it’s hard to oppress a generation of women who, under the influences of their new heroes, are intent on dressing like hermaphrodite robots with fireworks coming out of their breasts.
Gaga is that very best of things: a selfinvented creature. Consider what she actually is: diminutive, dark-haired Italian-American Stefani Germanotta, born into one of the poshest bits of New York. For a while, her schoolmate was the heiress Paris Hilton.
“I felt like a freak,” she said. “Everyone was blonde. I was dark and theatreobsessed. I remember seeing a picture of Boy George and thinking: ‘I feel like that’.”
By the the time she was 14 Gaga was auditioning for residencies in nightclubs, accompanied by her mother. “My parents were supportive of everything I did.”
Dropping out of school at 17, she spent the next five years immersing herself in some manner of high-school diploma in the counter-culture: deejaying in gay clubs and working as a go-go dancer (“I stripped in black leather to Guns N’ Roses”). Her heroes were David Bowie, Andy Warhol, Freddie Mercury, Madonna. She got a quote from Rilke’s Letters to a Young Artist tattoed up her arm: “Confess to yourself in the deepest hour of the night whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.”
Having picked up the nickname Lady Gaga from her love of Queen’s Radio Ga Ga, by the time she came to the attention of record company talent scouts her influences had her dismissed as “too theatre”. But when she auditioned for plays, casting directors found her “too pop”. Obviously that was the entire point, but Gaga was limited to writing album tracks for Britney Spears and the Pussycat Dolls until Just Dance, written when Gaga was 21 in “ten minutes” as a “happy song”. She made her own costume for the video. It included a bra covered with tiny mirrors, to look like a glitterball.
The song was No 1 around the world by the time she was 22. By the age of 23 Gaga was making videos such as the one for Bad Romance, in which she hatches out of a white plastic egg, gets waterboarded by supermodels, has her pupils dilate to take up half her face and wears a cape made of a living polar bear. Meanwhile the song pounds away with a nagging euphoria, like Erasure trying to convince Depeche Mode to come out for a night on the beers.
The video ends, as Wikipedia puts it in one of my favourite entries, “with Gaga lying beside a smouldering skeleton on top of a destroyed bed. She smokes a cigarette, while her pyrotechnic bra activates.”
Gaga now operates within her own collective, the Haus of Gaga. They are into design, fashion, construction and production. So when Gaga has the idea — as she did for her appearance on The X Factor — of performing in a 14ft-long bathtub, then playing a solo on a piano hidden in a basin, it can be turned around in 48 hours.
Two days after The X Factor Gaga performed in front of the Queen at the Royal Variety Performance, sitting at a 16ft-high piano with spindly, etiolated legs, inspired by Dalí’s spider-legged elephants in Space Elephant. Yeeeeah. Essentially, she travels with a pop version of the A-Team, able to burst out of any shed in a hastily constructed disco tank, firing remixes and headdresses shaped like the Pompidou Centre at will. To put all this into perspective, when Madonna was 23 she was still working in Dunkin’ Donuts in New York.
As soon as Just Dance went to No 1, in January 2009, Gaga began a notable second-string career of “being an incident”. She has that admirably retro notion that a pop star should look like something that has just escaped from some manner of space zoo and is stalking the streets, looking for humans to mate with and/or eat.
Monday would have her papped on the pavement dressed in a flesh-coloured leotard, tights and with a 2ft-wide bow made of hair balanced on her head. On Tuesday she would be tottering to the shops in 5in heels and a dress made out of 50 Kermit heads as a protest against fur, “which I hate”. Wednesday, and she’d be out at an awards ceremony in a red lace veil that covered her entire face, looking like someone who’d decided, despite all the evidence, to invent a “sexy Friday night burqa”.
She cultivated a “pet” teacup and saucer, flowered and bone-china, and took them to nightclubs with her, as well as for her appearance on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross. If Ross was thrown by the teacup — which he was — he was even more thrown by her explanation of how, when she worked as a stripper, she kept a tiny fog machine in her handbag, “so I could fog myself”.At the same time a rumour went around that Gaga was, in fact, either a drag-queen or an hermaphrodite, all fuelled by her pop rival Christina Aguilera’s bitchy comment: “Lady Gaga? I don’t even know if it’s a man or a woman.” Subsequently the British and American tabloids periodically play a game called “Spot Lady Gaga’s Putative Penis”, in which blurry shots of her on stage in short skirts appear with a huge circle around the crotch and headlines reading “Lady Gaga????”
Even this week, Barbara Walters, the grande dame of TV interrogation, felt she needed to asked Gaga if she was male or female. Gaga, bless her, graciously acknowledged the rumours but refused to confirm her sex: possibly under the lifelong influence of the lyrics to David Bowie’s Rebel Rebel (“You’ve got the world in a whirl/ Cos they’re not sure if you’re a boy or a girl”).
“Lady Gaga, I have to say you surprise me,” Walters concluded in her Katharine-Hepburn-of-chat manner. “I didn’t expect to meet such a serious, articulate young woman. You’re not at all what I expected. You’re much, much more.”
Lady Gaga’s Monster Ball tour begins at the MEN Arena, Manchester, on Feb 18
(Credit to gagadaily.com for the pictures.)
