Gagantuan

It's been several years since I walked into a packed concert arena. I'm older now, and possibly wiser, but the impact of the screams, the heat of the humans and the headiness of the adrenaline is still arresting. Breathless and flushed from dancing about like loons in a weird greenscreened white pod for the O2 promotional video we'd just recorded of ourselves in the foyer, Grania and I took our seats and fumbled about trying to fit our plastic cups full of wine and back-up tiny bottles of more wine into our limited cup holders. The fifty year old man on Grania's left was bursting to talk to us.
"Have you seen her before?" he asked. We shook our heads.
"I saw this tour in Birmingham," he said. "You're not going to believe it. It's amazing."
"Are you her biggest fan?" I asked.
"No but I love her. Two of her dancers follow me on Twitter."
Grania shuffled imperceptibly closer to me. The lights went down. The volume of the screams made my ears do that weird vibrating thing that I think is probably not good. A screen came down. Lights went on it. In more than a nod to MJ, Gaga was silhouetted and massive. And so it began.

I've seen some good performances in my time: Michael Jackson, Madonna, Prince, Elton John, the Stones, The Prodigy, Justin Timberlake, Eminem, U2, Blur, Rufus Wainwright - like 'em or not, they all know how to put on a show. At 24 years old, Gaga has comfortably taken her place among those seasoned pros. She is one of those unbearable people who manages to be clever, funny, innovative, self-aware, courageous, talented and really good at dancing without making you want to maim them. Anyone else with that many amazing irons in life's fire and I'd be dreaming up graphic ways of shoving them off their pedestal for good, but with Gaga, I'm fine for her to stay up there and preen. She's a real one-off and not only did her show fill me with admiration, it also made me think that anyone with a passing interest in current culture should go see her live.

She's fucking weird, there's no doubt about that. Throughout the night, she wore a selection of extraordinary outfits - shoebox-sized shoulder pads, a Where The Wild Things Are-inspired costume that made her look like a big tree trunk, a futuristic silicone dress with white pants and plasters on her nips, a glitter catsuit for Poker Face, a black cleavage-revealing bodice which she accentuated with liberal smearings of fake blood, a little girl green frilly number that clashed brilliantly with her American mustard-coloured hair, all vulnerable on the big black stage while the Fame Monster roared and gurned in the background. Gaga is gaga for monsters. Her fans are Little Monsters, and they're encouraged to be as invidual and extraordinary as possible. "Do not, for God's sake, leave here loving me more," she panted. "Leave here loving YOURSELVES more." She has a fairly scary shouting voice, hints of Miss Hannigan. Her fans screamed on demand. "I'm like Tinkerbell," she cooed later, lying back on the stage. "If you don't clap, I'll die. Do you want me TO DIE?" We clapped.


Her self confidence is infectious. It's impossible feel vulnerable when one of the most famous women on the planet is standing in front of you and twenty thousand others, wearing a black leather studded bikini and strutting around stage, happy to let her thighs and buttocks wobble in full view of everyone, her arid hair tangled around her microphone. It'd be inevitable if a fair amount of what she says on stage is scripted, but there's no doubt that she makes an impact - even if her truisms do seem heart-threateningly cheesy in the stark winter light of Friday. "I didn't used to be brave. I didn't used to be this way. I used to be a geek," she said. "But your support has made me brave. You make me brave." We screamed.

Much of her act is spontaneous, though. Every time she ventured down onto the catwalk extension in front of the main stage, she was showered with gifts from her most loyal Little Monsters, and she took a generous amount of time to notice each item and appreciate it. "Does this say 'Born This Way'?" she asked, picking up a desperately proferred T-shirt. Without hesitation or concern for her stage outfit, she pulled it on over her leotard and performed the next section of the show wearing the cropped vest. Can't see Cheryl Cole doing that. Another person gave her a Penguin Classics edition of Warhol's diaries. "Oh, you've highlighted!" she said, charmed. She flicked through the pages briefly and read aloud to us from a passage about beauty:

"When you're in Sweden and you see beautiful person after beautiful person after beautiful person and you finally don't even turn around to look because you know the next person you see will be just as beautiful as the one you didn't bother to turn around to look at — in a place like that you can get so bored that when you see a person who's not beautiful, they look very beautiful to you because they break the beautiful monotony."

Then she nattered about the beauty that comes from variety for a minute or so, not lecturing us, not sounding patronising or naive, just being honest and confident and aware of her position of power and determined to use it for all our benefits. A plush Santa toy landed at her feet. "I do love Christmas," she said, "but for those of you who are lonely or angry, this is for you." She tried to rip off his head with her teeth but St. Nick clung on, until she impaled him with the stiletto heel of her white patent ankle boot, tore him apart and plucked out his kapok.

The only irritant of the evening came from two rows behind us, where there was a ledge surrounded by a barricade. One of the girls on the ledge was making an extraordinary amount of noise, mostly in the "Wooooooooo! I LOVE YOU GAGA!" genre, constantly during the 'Please cheer now' sections and, more vexingly, fairly regularly in the 'Please don't cheer here, she's talking and we want to hear what she's saying' moments. She also sang along, fairly tunelessly but word perfectly, throughout every song, which was fine when it was a deafening upbeat hit but slightly more annoying when it was fully audible over the one slow number, Speechless. "Shut up!" yelled someone further down our row, to no effect. I turned around to see who was making this noise. There was a definite possibility that the ledge area was reserved for wheelchair users but it was hard to see in the dark. "Is she disabled?" I asked Grania. "WOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" shouted the girl. "I don't know," said Grania, who turned around and tried to climb over the row behind to take a closer look but ended up almost kissing the man behind her and returned, shocked. "I LOVE YOUUUUUUUU!" wailed the girl. "There's no excuse for this level of noise," I said. "Not even muscular dystrophy." I turned and said, "Please can you shut up?" Another man joined in, "Yeah! I paid for tickets to hear Lady Gaga, not you." The reaction was not ideal: the girl's companion was guppying, gobsmacked in a my-friend-is-disabled-I-cannot-belive-you're-saying-this fashion, but thankfully the volume from their quarters diminished before a very un-PC fight broke out.

That decidedly unbeautiful moment kindly broke up the monotony of the rest of the evening's perfection, so for that I'm grateful. As soon as Bad Romance faded away, we wished the fifty year old uberfan farewell, bought our commemorative T-shirts and ran back to North Greenwich pier to get the final westbound Thames Clipper back to Waterloo. Freezing, we stood on the outside deck giggling and taking thousands of terribly blurred photos. Then we hugged lots and went our separate ways. Music doesn't make the world go round, but love is all you need.