Excerpts from the Times article,
Come Party With Lady Gaga:
Since I saw Gaga play Poker Face at Glastonbury Festival last year, I have been a properly, hawkishly devoted admirer.
Halfway through a 45-minute set that had five costumes changes, Gaga came on stage in a dress made entirely of see-through plastic bubbles, accompanied by her matching, see-through plastic bubble piano. You have to respect a woman who can match her outfit to her instrument. Although the single Poker Face is a punching, spasmodic, Euro-house stormer, Gaga took to her piano and started to play it as cathouse blues – all inverted chords and rolling fifths, with falling, heartbroken semitones on the left hand; wailing out like Bessie Smith sitting on the doorstep at 4am.
It was already incredible before she did the second half of the song standing on her piano stool, on one leg – like a tiny, transvestite ballerina.
Since then, I have followed Gaga’s career like boys follow sports teams. As a cultural icon, she does an incredible service for women: after all, it will be hard to oppress a generation who’ve been brought up on pop stars with fire coming out of their tits.
So yes, I am a Gaga supporter. I’m Team Gaga. She’s my girl. My pop Arsenal; my dance Red Sox; my fashion England.
At Heathrow, as I go through the rigmarole of booking the next available flight – which will get me to Berlin two hours after my appointed slot – I know what awaits me at the other end. Angry Americans. Very angry Americans from her management team.
It’s incredible I was ever granted access at all – and now, unbelievably, I’ve stood her up.
Two things strike you about her immediately. First, that she really isn’t dressed casually. The second thing you notice is that she is being lovely. Absolutely lovely. Both literally and figuratively; what’s under the veil and the cloak is a diminutive, well brought up, New York Catholic girl from a wealthy middle-class family, with twinkly brown eyes and a minxy sense of humour.
“So glad you finally made it!” she says, giving a huge, warm hug. “What a terrible day you’re having! Thank you so much for coming!” Holding her for a moment, she feels – through the taffeta atmosphere of billowing McQueen – borderline Kylie-tiny, but warm, and robust. Like a slender, teenage cheerleader. This is some surprise, give the aforementioned presumption that she’s cracking up.
On her health:
“My schedule is such that I don’t get very much time to eat,” Gaga says, holding her teacup daintily. I don’t think the teacup is her infamous “pet teacup” that she took everywhere with her earlier in the year – including nightclubs. Perhaps it’s too famous to be merely drunk from now. Maybe it has its own dressing room.
“But I certainly don’t have an eating problem,” she continues. “A little MDMA [Ecstasy] once in a while never killed anybody, but I really don’t do drugs. I don’t touch cocaine any more. I don’t smoke. Well, maybe a single cigarette – with whisky – while I’m working, because it just frees my mind a little bit. But I care about my voice. The thrill of my voice being healthy on stage is really special. I take care of myself.”
But still these rumours persist – of collapses and neuroses. You are, after all, a 24-year-old woman coping with enormous fame, and media pressure, on your own. You are currently the one, crucial, irreplaceable element of a 161-date world tour. How do you keep depressive, or panicked, thoughts at bay?
“Prescription medicine,” she says, cheerfully. “I can’t control my thoughts at all. I’m tortured. But I like that,” she laughs, cheerfully. “Lorca says it’s good to be tortured. The thoughts are unstoppable – but so is the music. It comes to me constantly.
But it has to be said, for a 24-year-old, death is a recurrent theme in her performances. The thematic arc for the Fame Monster tour was “the apocalypse”. On the current Monster Ball tour, Gaga is eventually eaten by a gigantic angler fish – a creature she was terrified of as a child – only to be reborn as an angel. Her MTV Awards performance of Paparazzi, back in September, had her being crushed by a falling chandelier – amazing – before bleeding to death while singing.
“What’s the nearest you’ve ever come to death?” I ask her. “Do you have any recurring illnesses?”
She goes oddly still for a moment, and then says, “I have heart palpitations and… things, but it’s OK. It’s just from fatigue and other things,” she shrugs, before saying, with great care, “I’m very connected to my aunt, Joanne, who died of lupus. It’s a very personal thing. I don’t want my fans to be worried about me.”
Her eyes are very wide.
“Lupus. That’s genetic, isn’t it?” I ask.
“Yes.”
“And have you been tested?”
Again, the eyes are very wide and steady. “Yes.” Pause. “But I don’t want anyone to be worried.”
“When was the last time you called the emergency services?” I ask.
“The other day,” Gaga says, still talking very carefully. “In Tokyo. I was having trouble breathing. I had a little oxygen, then I went on stage. I was OK. But like I say, I don’t want anyone to worry.”
Lupus is a connective tissue disease, where the immune system attacks the body. It can be fatal – although, as medicine advances, fatalities are becoming rarer. What it more commonly does is cause heart palpitations, shortness of breath, joint pain and anaemia, before spasmodically but recurrently driving a truck through your energy levels, so that you are often too fatigued to accomplish even the simplest of tasks.
Suddenly, all the “Gaga cracking up” stories revolve 180 degrees, and turn into something completely different.
And now, on to fame:
“What’s the best thing you’ve spent your money on so far?” I ask, in a far more cheerful mood.
“I bought my parents a car,” Gaga replies. She has often spoken of how close she is to her parents – particularly her father, whom she appears to borderline worship. Presumably, she sees herself in him – a self-made man, he started as a rock’n’roll bar musician, before making his fortune as an internet entrepreneur. By the time Gaga was 13, the family were rich enough to send her to the same school as heiress Paris Hilton.
“You see, I don’t really spend money and I don’t really like fame,” Gaga says. “I spend my money on my shows – but I don’t like buying things. I don’t buy diamonds, because I don’t know where they came from. I’ll spend it on fashion.” She hugs the McQueen cloak close.
“I miss Lee every time I get dressed,” she says, sadly. “But you know what I spend most of my money on? Disappearing. I hate the paparazzi. Because the truth is – no matter what people tell you – you can control it. If you put as much money into your security as you put into your cars or your diamonds or your jewellery, you can just… disappear. People who say they can’t get away are lying. They must just like the… big flashes.”
On her next album:
Although she “can’t talk about it yet”, she is clearly excited about the next album. She keeps trying to tell me things about it, then claps her hands over her mouth, going, “I can’t!"
“But everyone’s going to f***ing know about it when it comes out,” she says, excitedly. “You know when people say, ‘If you could say one sentence about who you are, what your life is?’ It’s that. For the whole album. Because I recently had this… miracle-like experience, where I feel much more connected to God.”
You were raised a Catholic – so when you say “God”, do you mean the Catholic God, or a different, perhaps more spiritual sense of God?
“More spiritual,” Gaga says, looking like she’s biting her tongue. “I don’t want to say much, because I want it to stay hidden until it comes out – but I will say that religion is very confusing for everyone, and particularly me, because there’s really no religion that doesn’t hate or condemn a certain kind of people, and I totally believe in all love and forgiveness, and excluding no one.”
Partying with Gaga:
“It’s, like, a sex party,” Gaga explains. “You know – like in Eyes Wide Shut? All I can say is, I am not responsible for what happens next. And wear a condom.”
This is Gaga off-duty. Although the booth becomes by way of a shrine to her – between now and 4am, fully two-thirds of the club come over to pay obeisance to her: drag queens and tom girls and superfreaks, all acknowledging the current definitive pop-cultural salon keeper – Gaga alternates between being wholly gracious and welcoming to them, and getting absolutely off her cake. With the thrill of like recognising like, I realise she’s a total lightweight – giggly after two Scotches, dancing in the booth after three, and wholly on the prowl after four.
“Are you straight?” she asks some hot, American boy we’ve been talking to at one point, in the manner of someone who needs to make plans for the rest of the evening based on the reply. When he says, regretfully, ‘No,’ her attention seems to, amusingly, wander.
Bisexual herself, while her musical education might have been classical, her cultural education was homosexual, and comes to a head in the video for her forthcoming single, Alejandro.
Sprawled across the banquette, in a mood of eager excitement, Gaga shows me stills from the video shoot on her BlackBerry.
She’s dressed as Joan of Arc, with a ferocious Purdey haircut. To be honest, I can’t see much more than that, because she’s a bit pissed and her thumbs keep getting in the way.
3am. I am pretty wasted. I am kneeling on the banquette, with Gaga lying by my knees.
I have just come up with the theory that, if you have one of your heroes lying tipsily next to you, you should tell them all the pretentious pop-culture theories you have come up with about them. So I slurringly tell her that the difference between her and, say, Madonna, is that you don’t penetrate Gaga. Her songs and videos are – while sexual – about dysfunction and neuroses and alienation and self-discovery. They’re not, in any sense, a come-on. Despite having worn very little clothing for most of her career, Gaga is not a prick tease.
“Yeah! It’s not what straight men masturbate over when they’re at home watching pornography,” she confirms. “It’s not for them. It’s for… us.” And she gestures around the club.
Finally, confirmation on the penis rumors:
A minute later, Gaga springs up, and beckons for me to follow her. Weaving her way down a series of corridors, we eventually end in – the VIP toilet.
“You’re wearing a jumpsuit,” Gaga says, with feminine solidarity. “You can’t get out of one of those in the normal toilets.”
As I start to arduously unzip, Gaga sits on the toilet with a cheerful, “I’m just going to pee through my fishnets!”, and offloads some of those whiskies.
For the first year of her career, massive internet rumours claimed that Gaga was, in fact, a man – a rumour so strong that Oprah had to question her about it, when Gaga appeared on her show.
Perhaps uniquely among all the journalists in the world, I can now factually confirm that Lady Gaga does not have a penis. That rumour can, conclusively, die.
Halfway through a 45-minute set that had five costumes changes, Gaga came on stage in a dress made entirely of see-through plastic bubbles, accompanied by her matching, see-through plastic bubble piano. You have to respect a woman who can match her outfit to her instrument. Although the single Poker Face is a punching, spasmodic, Euro-house stormer, Gaga took to her piano and started to play it as cathouse blues – all inverted chords and rolling fifths, with falling, heartbroken semitones on the left hand; wailing out like Bessie Smith sitting on the doorstep at 4am.
“But everyone’s going to f***ing know about it when it comes out,” she says, excitedly. “You know when people say, ‘If you could say one sentence about who you are, what your life is?’ It’s that. For the whole album. Because I recently had this… miracle-like experience, where I feel much more connected to God.”
.bmp)
