Older, wiser but still fabulous - Lady Gaga, Arena Birmingham, review
In 1987, David Bowie staged the most ambitious failure in touring pop history. At the time, the Glass Spider Tour was dismissed as preposterous and pretentious, one man’s ego expensively recreated on stage. A couple of decades later and those eight footprints have imprinted on arena tours the world over.
Gaga, Bowie’s closest millennial heir, has long aped the spectacle of his Spider. There was her 2009 Monster Ball tour with its animatronic sea monster that drove her to bankruptcy. Three years later, she shuffled a stadium-filling castle across the globe. While concept-driven concert tours are par for the course of today’s stars, Gaga’s have always been more extraordinary than the standard confetti-cannon fodder.
The Joanne World Tour, though, is a more minimalist affair. Delayed by several months after Gaga suffered another bout of the chronic pain condition fibromyalgia, the first night of its UK leg was an eccentric jaunt through her back catalogue that demonstrated how far she’s come over the past decade, with Gaga wearing little more than strategically placed triangles, tassles and glitter.
Her past hits were presented as she made them, as if to demonstrate how far Gaga has outgrown them. The hammering synths and sequinned shoulder pads of her early hits (Just Dance, Poker Face) felt strangely dated. The frenetic desperation of Applause, from Artpop - an album conceived in crisis - was conveyed mainly by the Leigh Bowery-inspired costumes worn by her dancers. No motorbike-unicorns here, just Gaga’s unfailingly spectacular voice.
The audience were kept rapt by bridges that floated between her tiltled stages (she is the latest in a string of stars including Lorde, Kanye West and Katy Perry to use one) while Gaga risked her elaborate pin-curls with a series of headbangs and shoulder-shimmies. The familiarity of her alien dance routines can only be seen as a mark of her success.
While other pop stars ask for audience participation, Gaga demands it. “It’s only polite to stand at a party and dance!” she bellowed, with the perfervid fury of an Evangelical preacher. She delivered the message she always has, one that has defined her career: that people, regardless of their gender, race or sexuality, are equal and welcome to love. The crowd, many sporting pink stetsons, offered their hands, held in heart-shapes, in worship.
The hats were a tribute to the cover of Gaga’s latest album, Joanne, released last year and inspired by the late aunt she never knew. It is a shame that the title track, for which Gaga accompanied herself on guitar, erred on overwrought; it is a beautiful song.
Instead, it was an older hit that lingered. Edge of Glory - written, this time, for Gaga’s grandfather - was performed against an arena of iPhone torches and the wisdom that if you feel lonely, there is someone else out there feeling alone, too. Here lay the depth of Gaga’s appeal: not gimmicks or dramatic reinventions, but that she stays the same beneath them all. Delightfully weird, undeniably authentic, Gaga remains a rare beast in pop.
