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Lady GaGa is loath to give her real name, insisting friends and family refer to her only by her stage name (“When I make love, they say GaGa”), but some digging reveals she was born Stefani Joanne Germanotta on the Upper West Side (“I am New York, I’m a hustler, I ate dust since I was 15 and I kept going even when I was told no”).

She attended the private Catholic school Convent of the Sacred Heart, whose alumni include the Hilton sisters and Caroline Kennedy. Contrary to popular belief, the song Beautiful, Dirty, Rich isn’t about her former classmate Paris Hilton. “I never saw those girls for more than 10 seconds down the hallways.” Yet it seems the school has had some part in her transformation from fitted blazers to Balenciaga shoes: “I was the arty girl, the theatre chick. I dressed differently and I came from a different social class from the other girls. I was more of an average schoolgirl with a cork.”

That cork eventually popped when she graduated from NYU, where she had studied art. Her entrepreneur father was, unsurprisingly, shocked when his daughter ran off to the Lower East Side to dabble in drugs and appear in burlesque shows at dive bars with drag queens and go-go dancers. “He couldn’t look at me for a few months,” she admits of her early experimentations. “I was in leather thongs, so it was hard for him — he just didn’t understand. But my parents saw me getting better, and now my father cries when he sees me perform.”

The drugs disappeared around the same time as her act began to take serious shape. “I had a scary experience one night and thought I might die,” GaGa remembers. “I woke up, but it helped me become the person I am. I see things in quite a fragmented, psychotic manner, which I think is because of that. But I decided it was more important to become a centred, critical thinker. That was more powerful than the drug itself.”

Refining her act in downtown Manhattan, she signed to Def Jam at the age of 19, but was dropped shortly after. “It just wasn’t for them,” she says nonchalantly. She was spotted a couple of years later by the music executive Vincent Herbert and signed to Interscope in January 2008. Impressed by her ear for melody and knack for spotting a great hook, various acts — Akon’s Konvict label, as well as Fergie, the Pussycat Dolls, Britney and New Kids on the Block — have hired her as a songwriter.

Now, though, her music is surpassing those she provided hits for. With plenty of hype surrounding GaGa, only time will tell whether she will take over planet pop — or fizzle without trace. Either way, there’s no doubt she is currently the genre’s most interesting proposition. “If people think GaGa is over the top and decadent now, I’m afraid for them, they have no idea what’s to come,” she laughs, contemplating her future. “I eat, sleep, breathe and bleed every inch of my work. I’d absolutely die if I couldn’t be an artist.”

The single Just Dance is out digitally on December 29 and physically on January 5.

The album The Fame is out on January 19.

Lady GaGa tours the UK with the Pussycat Dolls from January 18

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