After Lady Gaga's concert at Twickenham last night, I asked some of the Little Monsters scurrying back to the station the name of the last song she had sung. The song she sang right after declaring that she had to bring the evening to an early end. The song she sang an hour after screaming that she would "sing her pussy off" and no one could stop her. Someone stopped her and no one could name it. (See Update in the penultimate paragraph.)
If someone had stopped her approximately an hour earlier, you would have felt shortchanged from such a brief evening but at least left on a high, perhaps after "Just Dance" or "Telephone" and a few of her odd postmodern Zodiac of costumes (yellow rubber nun-condom, white leather beekeeper, ram). Instead, the second hour proved an extended exercise in tedium and bathos.
If you're going to have a conceit - and Gaga is nothing if not conceited - you need to follow it through
The wheels really came off of Gaga's piano-motorcycle soon after the let's-meet-the-audience section, in which Little Monsters in the pit at the front chucked their billets doux at her and she talked about how much she loved us all. She sat at her piano and began a preamble to her song "Hair", about reinvention, before interrupting it to talk about how a record company suit had told her the Born This Way album was aimed at too small a niche (which tonight disproved).
Then began the tribute to Princess Diana. Words poured out about the Queen and victimisation, Amy Winehouse and songwriting, would we accept the song in the spirit in which it was given, she loved the UK, Princess Diana had always inspired her and her mother. I confess, I laughed. A lot. The ensuing song appeared to depend entirely on a pun between Di and die. After Diana, John Lennon and "Imagine". Then Freddie Mercury. It was like Desert Island Discs for the maudlin.
Had it started promisingly? Not really. After her perfume advert was shown a couple of times, the black stage curtain collapsed to reveal a massive castle, with turrets, battlements, walkways, crenellations, parapets et al. Unlike on her Monster Ball tour, which had had several elaborate scene changes and a vague plot, the castle sat there, large and expensive, for Gaga to move around without purpose. If you're going to have a conceit - and Gaga is nothing if not conceited - you need to follow it through.
Whereas at the Monster Ball Lady Gaga was riding high on popular and critical kudos, her pointed defensiveness last night set a sour tone: she talked about how this many people had come to see a "flop" album and noted how everyone knew the words to her earlier hits, of which there were annoyingly few.
She had every reason to be defensive: the songs from Born This Way were weak. Relying on the song-structure she perfected with "Bad Romance" (which we did get as a high point) or - to put it kindly - drawing on Eighties tunes and artists, they were uninspiring, inarticulately sung and generic. A pumping "Judas" served to point out the listlessness of the others. She was planning to end properly, some suggested, with "Marry the Night", which is another good 'un (if also derivative), but the man with his hand on the plug denied us this.
Update: I did leave before the encore of "Marry the Night" and "Edge of Glory", but it was not because I was eager to scurry home, as has been suggested in the comments: it was because Gaga said the show had to be cut short and I took that to mean when she finished, she finished. It doesn't change the substance of my review, however.
It made no difference to the majority of Little Monsters, who worshipped their cult-goddess. But as an ex-cultist myself, I felt disappointed: Gaga's moment has gone, snapped up by the musically forward, less portentous, more fun-loving and infinitely more tuneful Rihanna. Perhaps Gaga was sent to earth to redeem us, as she likes to think - but her ascension is now overdue.
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