A year ago, wearing little more than shades and a smile, Lady Gaga told Neil McCormick she would be a star. Forty million record sales later, she’s won three gongs at the Brit Awards 2010 and is setting out on a world tour – and she owes it all to Bach. Enjoy the full interview after the jump!
On a cold, wet night in January last year, I was introduced to Lady Gaga in a dark alley behind the London nightclub Heaven. She was sporting a monstrous blonde wig, huge sunglasses and not a great deal more. Her flimsy mac flipped open to reveal black boots, high cut knickers, and a silver breastplate. “It’s as close as I can get to naked in public these days,” she drawled, conspiratorially. Yet there were no paparazzi around to capture this moment. Why would there be? She wasn’t famous yet. “I dress like this every day,” she airily insisted. “It’s not for the red carpet, it’s my life.”
Lady Gaga is the pop star the world was waiting for. Ignoring all the doom-laden predictions of the end of the music industry and the death of the superstar, she has staged a full-frontal assault on global consciousness with the fierceness of a disco valkyrie, fire erupting from both barrels of her conical metal bra. With a blonde ambition and media awareness to rival her idol Madonna, last year former New York art student, and burlesque stripper Joanne Stefani Germanotta made an album entitled The Fame and it made her famous. Since her emergence at the tail end of 2008, she has sold around eight million albums and 35 million singles, notching up three number ones in Britain and the United States. On Tuesday, she appears at The Brits (in all likelihood to collect the award for the Best International Female solo artist) before her sold-out Monster Ball tour arrives in British and European arenas.
But when I met her all this was yet to come. With only one hit single in the US, the addictive Just Dance, few in Britain knew who she was. She was touring as support to lingerie girl band Pussycat Dolls and fitting in some solo club appearances. The Daily Telegraph was her first British newspaper interview. I had become intrigued because flamboyant and synthetic pop was on the rise again and Gaga struck me as the most interesting of a new wave of strong female pop characters.
Her album seemed to tie in with the times, bombastically plastic and yet knowingly superficial. Still, I didn’t know quite what to expect and was amused to find her so much in character hours before her show. She spoke about Andy Warhol, Madonna, and Grace Jones as if they were not just her influences, but almost her intimate confederates. “I have always been an artist,” she insisted. “And I’ve always been famous, you just didn’t know it yet.”
When you have been around the music business as long as I have, you tend to be skeptical of young artists with nothing to declare but their genius. But I was very taken with Gaga: she was utterly preposterous yet obviously smart, focused and talented. Everything she was about to become was already apparent, even on a shoestring budget. At Heaven, she was traveling with a manager, sound operator, and two dancers, and had spent the morning making her own absurdly long fake eyelashes, which she briefly removed her sunglasses to flutter at me. Just 12 months later, she has a live band, 10 backing dancers and her own travelling collective, The Haus of Gaga, who work with her on design, fashion, construction and production, so that she can turn around her fanciful ideas (like performing on The X Factor in a giant bathtub) in 48 hours.
We conducted the interview in a people carrier parked behind the club, the only place we could get some privacy. And even though we were sitting practically nose to nose in the dark, she never removed her sunglasses. “It’s just like a high school date,” she cooed, with mock seduction. But even her flirtatiousness was purposeful. She was a woman with an agenda. “You’ll never ever sit down with an artist in their twenties who is as focused or as passionate as me. Not a chance.”
Germanotta was born in New York to affluent Italian-American parents (her father, Joseph, is an internet entrepreneur) and attended the same private Catholic school as the Hilton sisters, Paris and Nicky, who made a big impression on her. “I am fascinated with the blonde woman as seductress,” she explained (Gaga is naturally brunette). “There’s a way that these women position themselves in front of the cameras. There’s a real art to fame.”
She played classical piano from a very early age and attended New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she told me she did a “crazy thesis, like 80 pages on Spencer Tunick [who creates nude installations] and Damien Hirst, great pop artists”. She spoke about this as if it was “research” for her own future, some idea of herself that was percolating with music and art and sex and celebrity. “I was classically trained as a pianist and that innately teaches you how to write a pop song, because when you learn Bach inversions, it has the same sort of modulations between the chords. It’s all about tension and release. But I want to do something that speaks to everyone. To me, there is nothing more powerful than one song that you can put on in a room anywhere in the world and somebody gets up and dances. If you put a classical piece on, everyone’s not gonna mobilize. It’s gotta be something that resonates on a visceral level.”
Her first forays into performance were on the underground burlesque scene, much to her parents’ dismay. “My father couldn’t look at me for months,” she admitted. She did a heavy metal and disco strip act with her friend, Lady Starlight. “I was onstage in a thong, with a fringe hanging over my ass thinking that had covered it, lighting hairsprays on fire, go-go dancing to Black Sabbath and singing songs about oral sex. The kids would scream and cheer and then we’d all go grab a beer. It represented freedom to me. I went to a Catholic school but it was on the New York underground that I found myself.”
Gaga signed to hip-hop label Def Jam in 2005, aged 19, but was dropped after three months, an experience that made her rethink her act. When she was picked up by Interscope Records, she was ready to listen to advice about reaching a wider audience. “I was wearing motorcycle jackets and high-cut sequinned panties. I looked like David Lee Roth’s Eighties girlfriend. They were like: ‘Your hair needs to be softer, you look like a stripper.’ I said: ‘Is this the only major label on planet Earth that is asking a female pop artist to put more clothes on?’ They wanted me to be myself but in a way that people would listen and I appreciate that. I grew a keener eye for it. I became good at channeling my ideas through a pop lens. It’s not dumbing down, it’s challenging me as an artist to say it better.”
On a purely surface level, there is not much to separate Lady Gaga’s catchy, highly processed pop from anything else in the mainstream marketplace. Lyrics like “We like boys in cars/Buy us drinks in bars” (Boys, Boys, Boys) hardly offer insight into the modern psyche. But with Gaga, it really is the whole package that makes you think twice about what she represents. “For me, the work doesn’t end with the song, it’s the fashion, the performance and then the trajectory of the energy as it bounces off all of the irises of the fans in the audience and comes back to me.”
I watched her soundcheck in an otherwise empty club, putting two lithe, semi-naked, black male dancers through their paces, fine-tuning a highly sexualised routine even as she checked her backing track, microphone and monitors. She had video backdrop of a short film, in which she appeared in pudding bowl blonde wig and black Ray Bans as Candy Warhol, blankly muttering epigrammatic art slogans. “I look at what I do as a shock installation pop performance piece,” she told me. “I put on a show, orchestrate it to pop music and I test people, I push them to experience and witness things that aren’t comfortable.”
For an international sex symbol, Gaga is not particularly pretty. She certainly knows how to pose, to pull her neck so that it looks like she might actually have a chin and turn her head so that you can’t quite see how prominent her nose is. The ever-present sunglasses and wigs cover most of her face anyway. And while she is certainly aerobically fit, she is actually quite small and robust, with big, quarterback thighs. But like Madonna, she has charisma and drive, the kind of will to make others see her as she sees herself. “What I wanna impress upon people is that you can become whoever you wanna be. Music is the place where I’m allowed to be as strange as I am.”
Lady Gaga’s rise has been rapid, inexorable and global. It has built not just through a succession of hit singles but through headline-catching videos and televised performances. She wowed rock fans at Glastonbury, scandalized the Royal Variety Show and knocked The X Factor audience for six with Bad Romance, a song with a self-glorifying hook line (“Gaga, ooh la la”) that makes explicit her edgy, outsider appeal: “I want you ugly, I want your disease”. She is a self-invented, self-composing, self-choreographed pop missile on a mission to explode preconceptions.
“People are supposed to argue about whether what I’m doing is valid. That’s exactly the point. It’s not valid, but it is! I think I have the right pH balance, concept to pop to sex,” she said. “I made a great record. It’s not that deep. You and I can sit here and talk about art all day but most of my fans are not gonna care about the artistic level of my work, ’cause they are just gonna be bopping around to that killer beat.” She reckoned it would take “another four singles” before audiences realized she was not just another pop bimbo.
In which case, the 23-year-old is already ahead of schedule. “I always wanted to be a star,” she said. “It’s in the marrow of my bones, how I feel about music and art. I sacrifice, bleed and am sleepless for my craft in a shameless and loving way.”
When I asked her if, as a student of fame, she didn’t fear its effects a little, she just laughed. “You are assuming, rightfully so, that I would care about the same freedoms that other people care about, but I don’t. I don’t care about going to the grocery store. And I don’t care about going to a nightclub and getting drunk and getting photographed, ’cause I don’t do that. I’m home working. I think people need to put things in perspective. I get to make art and fashion and music for a living. If I have to give up grocery shopping, poor me!”
Source: Telegraph
