Paul Lester - Lady Gaga: Looking for Fame

Copyright 2010 Omnibus Press
This edition 2010 Omnibus Press
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ISBN: 978-0-85712-466-1

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Ive always lived, in New York, this very art-centric, glamorous life.

Lady Gaga

I t is March 5, 2010 and Lady Gaga is teetering towards the TV presenter in fancy designer shoes with impossibly high transparent plastic heels. She is also wearing a tight, shiny black leather trouser suit with giant flares that contrasts starkly with her long platinum blonde hair/wig, which is tinged yellow down one side and pink down the other.

It would be a fairly remarkable get-up even without the black-telephone hat that she has on her head. Even Jonathan Ross, the normally unflappable host whose British TV show Gaga is appearing on for the second time in under a year, is taken aback, despite the fact that the last time he had the pop superstar on his couch, she was wearing a radically unusual red dress made entirely out of Post-it notes. Ross wonders aloud whether the hat-telephone a simulation antique affair with a removable handset presumably worn to tie in with the release of Telephone, the second UK single from her album The Fame Monster actually works.

Hello? she demonstrates by talking into the receiver. Hi, Jonathan? she continues, as though shes sitting cosily at home and having a regular, intimate conversation with a good friend at long distance, rather than, say, with a chat-show host in front of a BBC audience and millions of television viewers. She lets the handset dangle by its cord as the interview resumes, then picks it up and holds it as though for security. Gaga looks a bit anxious and uncomfortable as she listens to a comment from Ross about her incredible year and parries a question about whether she was regarded at first by people as an oddity.

I guess so, yes, she concedes, a tad surprised to be criticised, albeit mildly, on national TV in a country that has taken to her arguably more instantly than any other, the USA included. She seems pleased when Ross then notes the change in perception towards her, from astonished amusement to adoration, since her emergence onto the worlds stage mere months earlier. Now, he says of previously sceptical onlookers, they love what you do.

Thank you, she says, fluttering her huge false eyelashes. Thank you so much. She pauses, adding: I really love my fans. There are cheers from the BBC audience.

Ross then asks Lady Gaga, in an interview that is sandwiched between performances of her ballad Brown Eyes and latest single, Telephone, featuring Beyonc (obviously minus the popular R&B artist), if she is concerned that the performance-art aspect of what she does, the risqu couture and shock-and-awe costumes, might somehow overshadow the music?

Ive always lived, in New York, this very art-centric, glamorous life, she explains with the faintest trace of a wry smile. Its important to me to always be that for my fans. She admits that she doesnt want to be one of those celebrities who are photographed in their civvies, taking out the trash. That kind of myth-debunking revelation by paparazzi is, she declares grandly, destroying show business.

There is, she proclaims, absolutely no way I would give up my wigs and hats for anything. The producers of Friday Night With Jonathan Ross proceed to beam onscreen the famous kooky image of Gaga at the 2009 Accessories Council Excellence (ACE) Awards, where she was presented with a Stylemaker Award by arch fashionista Marc Jacobs.

That night, her incredible outfit, designed by her own personal fashion team known as the Haus Of Gaga, comprised a black button-down shirt that seemed to be covered in chalk dust, over which she wore a bullet bra yes, the bra was over the shirt. The shirt itself was tucked into shiny high-waist silver hot pants, while the star stood there tottering on vertiginous mint-green shoes. Most outrageous of all was her headwear: a Marie Antoinette-style bouffant and a black lace veil that covered most of her face.

As soon as the image of Gaga appears on the screen, Ross audience responds with whoops and hollers. Youre inspiring tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of other people to be a bit bolder, a bit brasher and more adventurous, the presenter states, admiringly, a far cry from his attitude during her appearance on his show the year before when, after goading her with the rumours surrounding her sexuality and alleged transgender characteristics, she was moved to reveal that she had a really big donkey dick.

To shouts of support and enthusiastic clapping, Gaga tells Ross, no stranger to controversy himself following his highly publicised victimisation in 2008, alongside comedian Russell Brand, of actor Andrew (Manuel from Fawlty Towers) Sachs: I dont dress for the sake of being overdramatic or overexuberant. She goes on to explain that, for her, fashion is about being whoever you want to be.

Ross then announces that Lady Gagas dbut album, The Fame, and its associated follow-up The Fame Monster, have just been accorded diamond status, signifying 10 million sales worldwide. I didnt even know you could go diamond! he admits to wild applause, before trying to diminish the triumph by joking that many of her fans buy her CDs simply to turn them into hats.

Ignoring him, Gaga says that she feels so blessed especially, she adds, in the age of piracy. The rest of her visit to Ross brown leather sofa is spent deftly fielding enquiries about her love life and her supposed lack of friends in the music industry. She refuses to talk not just about her love life but even to open up when quizzed about her hero David Bowie, her feelings towards whom she describes as sacred.

She does, however, discuss what happened when she, the newly crowned Queen of Pop, met the Queen of England following her eccentric Royal Variety Performance in December 2009. There, she was sat on top of a 13-foot-high piano and squeezed into a bizarre scarlet latex version of an Elizabethan dress, complete with chin-hugging ruff, 20-foot train and matching red panda eye make-up. Her Majesty was, apparently, highly amused.

Finally, Ross spends a good minute or so of his allotted nine minutes teasing Gaga about her stylish apparel and devotion to fashion. She must occasionally, he suggests, go out au naturel, minus her striking maquillage