Adam Ant, Michael Jackson, Pete Doherty… The more distinctive a pop star’s look, the more their fans try to imitate it. On Tuesday night, the Brixton Academy in London was a riot of platinum blonde wigs, monstrous fake eyelashes and sunglasses with lenses the size of saucers. One man stripped down to his pants. A security guard threw him out. A little harsh, given that the man wasn’t wearing much less than the singer he’d come to see.
Lady Gaga is the most striking new pop star of 2009 to date. The 23-year-old New Yorker, born Stefani Germanotta — no, she was never going to make it with a name like that — has already had two vivacious No1 singles (Just Dance and Pokerface) and a No1 album (The Fame). Her most obvious influence is Madonna. She writes tunes children can hum, and words only adults should hear (“I wanna take a ride on your disco stick”). Also like her heroine, she switches costumes every couple of songs. Tuesday’s included a glittering silver leotard with small pointy wings, which was a success, provided her goal was to look like a bat with frostbite.
But she began in what is becoming her most familiar get-up: essentially, a tinfoil tutu with foot-high isosceles triangles jammed to her right breast. “Hello, LAAAN-DIIIN!” she bawled. A good start, bearing in mind that at the weekend she reportedly addressed a festival crowd in Scotland in the same way.
The early songs — Paparazzi, LoveGame, The Fame — fizzed with pizzazz. Then again, her work does tend to feature layers of pre-recorded backing vocals, so it wasn’t always obvious which bits she was doing live, aside from the regular yells of “LAAAN-DIIIN!” and “Now SCREAM!” Later, though, with a solo piano rendition of Brown Eyes, she showed that her voice, when not distorted by studio gimmickry, can be robust and unaffected.
However absurd Lady Gaga seems (and her lyrics don’t help: “I’m bluffin’ with my muffin” indeed), she’s never less than entertaining. Her dancing, for example. She has two signature moves: one in which she fights off a gang of invisible muggers, and one in which she tries to sprint the wrong way down a wind tunnel. What makes this so endearing is that however outlandish her movements, her facial expression is always completely serious.
Something she lacks, at this stage, is enough music to fill an hour comfortably, so towards the end she was reduced to thudding her way through a drawn-out, pseudo-bluesy piano version of Pokerface — before performing the song again, in its conventional disco-pop form.
Lady Gaga is pretty good now. When she has as many songs as she has outfits, she should be terrific.
