Heralded by pounding techno, Lady Gaga emerges from a trapdoor wearing a white wig and furry brown wings. One blue pustular jewel adorns her leotard, like a mono-breast filled with a dubious cocktail. The first song of the UK leg of her artRAVE Ball is an energetic version of Artpop, the title track of her last album. The white-and-neon colour scheme of the space-cave set suggests that the designers have been downing a fair few blue drinks themselves.
She is reassuringly strange, Gaga, with her splendid wings that recall Jim Henson, as though held over from her Muppets special, aired last year in the US. Later, for Paparazzi, she will appear as a hybrid of a dalmatian and a squid.
As the night goes on, though, she also becomes strangely reassuring, an artist changed, perhaps, by her tribulations: last year’s painful hip surgery, and the high-profile loss of her social media guru-cum-manager. Much of tonight’s non-singing time is filled with self-actualising talk about putting your pain into your art. Where once Gaga was all about shock and awe, this artRAVE is more about motivational pop, with plenty of “aww”s.
There have been a fair few iterations of Gaga in the six years since the infamous New York singer first debuted. Originally she was a high-concept clubber, and that Gaga – Just Dance, Poker Face – still sounds great tonight. We see a lot more of Mama Monster in this first sold-out night of two, however. Holding court on a second stage out in the crowd, at a keyboard embedded in giant crystals, Mama Monster counsels parents to ask their kids how they feel when they come home from school. This is where she sings Dope, a blowsy, old-fashioned number about overcoming her love of Jameson’s. She is, she says, “not sober, but not a mess” either.
Later, Gaga reads aloud a letter from Jason, a young gay man emboldened to come out thanks to her musical ministrations. Gaga brings Jason and his boyfriend onstage and serenades them with a ballad version of Born This Way, the title track from her 2011 album.
This tour marks the first outing for a new Gaga, however: one on the back foot. Last year was the first time Stefani Germanotta’s six-year stranglehold on 21st-century pop relented. An impression of invincibility has been a big part of the Gaga brand over the last 2.5 records – The Fame (2008), The Fame Monster EP (2009) and Born This Way. All sold multiple millions of copies.
Artpop performed less well, partly due to the glut of high-quality competitors – Katy Perry, Miley Cyrus and, by the time Christmas rolled round, Beyoncé, whose fifth “visual” album moved the arty chartpop conversation along considerably. This time last year, people were talking about an artflop. At the end of last year it had sold 2.3m copies worldwide, considerably less than previous albums, but no reason to hang up one’s meat dress.
Another reason might have been the absence of producer RedOne, involved with all of Gaga’s previous hits. His touch survives on Gypsy, which Gaga plays as an encore tonight, dedicating it to one of her team and his fiancée. Writing in Slate, celebrated indie arranger Owen Pallett noticed that musically, Gaga’s songs had started to go off-brand. The hits were stylistically rigorous minor-key juggernauts. The newer songs aren’t.
Tonight there are still glimpses of that scary, sweary, imperial phase Lady Gaga who makes claw hands and freezes at the end of songs as her fans’ scream redouble. But there is not quite enough of her. For Bad Romance, Gaga’s deathless masterpiece, she is dressed not as an alien diva, but like Pollyanna on acid.
She calls herself “motherfucker number six” after introducing her band as “motherfuckers” one, two, three, four and five. One is a man locked inside a circular keyboard; her drummer plays thundering fills in every conceivable gap. Even though Gaga straddles one particularly muscular dancer often, she allies herself repeatedly with the guitarists, donning an acoustic Flying V guitar for Venus, and strapping on a key-tar shaped like a seahorse for Just Dance.
More than on her previous tours, this one emphasises Gaga’s musical chops, her creative process and her personal demons. She sings one track from her recent album of jazz duets with Tony Bennett, Sonny Bono’s Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down). Although this most recent Gaga outing hasn’t really taken off in the UK, the album is No 1 in the States.
We could probably do with more jazz. Although solidly entertaining, this artRAVE Ball feels closer to standard arena pop than it does to Gaga’s previous Balls, in which hydraulics and high concepts kept the synapses pinging. The latex’n’lasers section, where Gaga sings Sexx Dreams, finds no new take on the dry-humping of chaises-longues. At no point does she give birth to herself, like some parthenogenic goddess. More’s the pity.
