Love her, hate her or worship at her bizarre pop altar in her presence, it's impossible to maintain a poker face where Lady GaGa is concerned, writes RÓISÍN INGLEat the O2
COKE CANS as curlers. Nurses outfits you’d never find in St Vincent’s.
More glitter than in the entire series of Strictly Come Dancing. Lady GaGa brought her Monster's Ball to the O2 in Dublin last night. Love her, hate her or worship at her bizarre pop altar in her presence, it's impossible to maintain a poker face.
Sure, she has mild tourettes. She doesn’t understand subtlety. She doesn’t really like wearing clothes, or any that the average person might recognise. But the woman is a popstar, a juggernaut, a force of nature unlike any other around at the moment. Her fans, her little monsters as she calls them, lap up every moment like it’s a new no-holds-barred religion.
The crotch-grabbing dancers, the posh sex shop costumes, the bonkers theatrics aren’t there for her to hide behind.
Sitting alone (in her rubber underwear naturally) at a piano she’s as powerful a performer as you’ll get to see or hear. Her comic side is never far away either.
In a paen to her favourite whiskey Jameson she swears she’s not promoting drunkenness but “sometimes at the end of the night a bottle of whiskey is the only thing that won’t say no”. And wrapping a bandana around a hat she says that she is not actually a “fashion genius, just very crafty”.
She stormed through all the hits, from Just Danceto Bad Romance, lobbing expletives at the crowd like they were bouquets.
They were all ages, some too young, some you might have thought too old to appreciate her, but this is her universal lure. The Welfords came from Co Galway en famille, thirty-something girls Nicola and Claire, their younger sister Emma and their Mother Maria. “She is just a total original, she is so unique and the only problem now is that everyone is copying her and making the unique kind of ordinary. But she will reinvent herself and that’s the beauty of her,” said Claire, the one with coke can curlers in her hair.
Last night was a complete and utter antidote to recession blues. Her message is clear. It doesn’t matter who you are or how much money you have in your pocket you are a superstar. “You were born that way baby”.
And the crowd can’t hear her say it enough. Gavin and his boyfriend Shane try to explain what she means to them, this souped up Freddie Mercury in leather and feathers.
“She helped me be honest about who I am,” says Gavin.
“She has so much power and influence and she uses it for good, she wants everyone to be open and not to be afraid,” says Shane.
Erin Brennan from Longford says GaGa helped her through the most difficult time of her life when recently she lost 80 per cent of her hearing.
“She wants us to accept everything about ourselves that we hate,” she says.
“In her eyes we are all ugly together. That’s the message. To love our inner demons. That’s why we are all her little monsters”.