Lady Gaga is only 70 minutes late, which I suppose (sigh) is quite good by
pop-star standards. This gives me ample time to case the pavements round the
May Fair hotel for the packs of paparazzi who are supposed to follow her
everywhere she goes — but there are disappointingly none.
Her young English PR, Adrian, tells me that she is busy putting on her
make-up, to which I respond rather forcefully that she really need not
bother because I won’t notice whether she’s wearing 10 layers of slap or
none. But according to Adrian, she won’t ever leave her room without full
make-up. He takes me up to the penthouse suite where the interview will take
place. All very Kelly Hoppen, black-and-gold upholstery, lacquer tables,
buddhas, white orchids, bamboo, the usual. “Have a look at the bathroom!”
Adrian says excitedly. It has a freestanding granite tub exactly like a
sarcophagus. “And the master bedroom!” Circular white bed, ginormous
flatscreen, more white orchids. Yes, the decor is impressive, but the
waiting is long.
Eventually she appears, a frail little body tottering along on absurdly high
platform heels, in fishnet tights, a rather skewwhiff Marilyn Monroe wig,
and a short, black silk wrap, which keeps falling open to reveal her
somewhat undernourished breasts. I preferred the photos of her at
Glastonbury with flames shooting out of her bra. Her skin is pale, almost
milk-white, but she has thick black hairs on her arms and a hodgepodge of
tattoos (a ban-the-bomb sign, some lines of poetry), which spoils the
porcelain effect. But she is very polite. She takes her sunglasses off as
soon as we start talking, revealing lovely, big hazel eyes, and — best of
all — produces two ashtrays, some cigs and a lighter, and tells me that,
though she doesn’t smoke on performance days, she can today.
If you google Lady Gaga the first thing you see is a related search asking “Is
Lady Gaga a hermaphrodite?” Naturally this question has been weighing on my
mind and I have spent an unseemly amount of time studying close-ups of her
crotch on YouTube. Jonathan Ross raised the question when she came on his
show and received the immortal reply “I do have a really big donkey dick,”
which certainly shut him up. Her early career seems to have been dogged by
rumours that she was a man in drag, and Christina Aguilera said
dismissively: “I don’t know if it is a man or a woman.” But why should she
be a man, or even a hermaphrodite? She does have a deep voice but she is
quite clearly a woman. The whole hermaphrodite story has the feel of a
rather desperate publicity ploy.
One of the problems with — and for — Lady Gaga is that the music industry and
publicity machine don’t quite know what to make of her. She writes these
catchy, feel-good electro-pop tunes that go down a storm in clubs, but then
talks a load of impenetrable art bollocks in interviews. Her heroes are the
utterly predictable Andy Warhol, David Bowie, Madonna, Grace Jones, and of
course she claims to be a “performance artist” rather than a singer. Don’t
they all? She complains that just because she is blonde, people treat her
like an airhead, but she has to dye her hair, she explains, because
otherwise she gets mistaken for Amy Winehouse, and I can see that — yes —
with her long face and big schnozz there is a distinct resemblance.
She is a 23-year-old New York singer-songwriter, née Stefani Joanne
Germanotta, daughter of an Italian-American internet entrepreneur. She went
to the same Convent of the Sacred Heart school in Manhattan as Paris and
Nicky Hilton (though she didn’t know them), and says she got “an incredible
education”. She started at the Tisch School of the Arts at 17 but dropped
out after a year when her singing career took off. She began singing at
open-mic nights from when she was 14 — her mother accompanied her — and was
contracted to write songs for Britney Spears and the Pussycat Dolls by the
time she was 20. Eventually she was signed by Interscope and released her
first album, The Fame, in 2007. It has sold 4m copies worldwide and spawned
two No 1 singles — Just Dance and Poker Face.
Now it is being re-released with eight new tracks (including a duet with
Beyoncé) as a two-disc set called The Fame Monster. She is currently on a
tour called the Monster Ball, and coming to the UK in February and March,
playing the O2 Arena on February 26 and 27. Whether or not she will prove to
be “the next Madonna”, as frequently promised, she is more than happy with
the idea: “I love and appreciate Madonna comparisons. I know her and I think
she’s wonderful. And I love pop music done the right way.” Her ambitions are
actually limitless: “I don’t wanna be one song. I wanna be the next 25 years
of pop music.”
She is here in London to work on the visuals for her new show with the
photographer Nick Knight and is wildly excited. “I love Nick Knight’s work,
I’m such a fan — he’s like God. I was in America,
shooting another video, and the whole Haus of Gaga [her retinue] was, like,
sitting round talking about video, and I was saying I hate just hiring these
hack photographers — it’s meaningless. So they said, ‘Who do you want?’
I said, ‘Well, Nick Knight is God.’ And they all go, ‘Yes, Nick Knight is God.
Why don’t we just give God a call?’ So we called him and he was up for it —
he knew my work and liked it, or I hope he liked it. I don’t know much about
the enigma of Nick Knight, but I know I love his work.”
“What are visuals?” I ask casually, and then regret it as she
spends the next half-hour showing me designs for sets and costumes on her
manager’s computer. Every time she hits the wrong button, we revert to a
screensaver of the manager’s dog. Gaga insists on explaining the concept of
her show, which is on the wildly original theme of evolution. “It’s part pop
show, part performance art, part fashion installation. It came about because
as an artist, as a writer, as a woman, I feel I’ve evolved so much.”
So far so predictable, but then she goes on: “My evolution is from the
beginning of time, so I start as a cell [she shows me a costume like a
geodesic dome], and then I become a vertebrate, and then I become a full
animal, and there’s the birth of the economy, and trade and war, and then
it’s the Apocalypse. Because we as a society are taught politically and
religiously that the Apocalypse is coming, it’s on its way. But what I’m
saying with my show is, ‘We’re there right now: this is
the Apocalypse.’ The fact that we’re surrounded by cement and we’ve already
killed everything means the Apocalypse has happened.
So the idea for me is to give a sense of repose and solace to my fans, that
we’re here, we did it already, and now it’s about accepting where we are and
looking more joyfully into the future. And then the Apocalypse is over and
the stage becomes very minimal and all that’s left is me with a piano, in
the middle of the destruction.”
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