Lady Gaga’s eighth world tour, The Mayhem Ball, does not lack ambition. It lasts two hours and features 30 songs. It comes divided into five acts, each with a deeply portentous title that glows from the big screens in blood-red gothic script: Of Velvet and Vice; The Beautiful Nightmare That Knows Her Name; Every Chessboard Has Two Queens. It arrives preceded by a lengthy film in which next to nothing happens: resplendent in a ruff and leg of mutton sleeves, Lady Gaga looks pensive and occasionally writes on a scroll with an absolutely enormous feathered quill, while opera booms in the background.
Perhaps she’s paying tribute once more to her avowed influence Andy Warhol, in this case his notorious always-leave-them-wanting-less approach to cinema. When it becomes apparent that looking pensive and writing on a scroll with a big quill is about the size of it, the audience become a little restive: something that sounds remarkably like a slow handclap erupts. When she finally rolls her scroll up and pensively walks off screen, the cheer is deafening. The real Lady Gaga is wheeled out on stage atop a giant scarlet crinoline dress that has something of the look of those crocheted dolls that the decorous but aesthetically challenged used to hide their toilet rolls under. The devoted crowd – the most devoted of the lot wearing matching T-shirts demanding “Justice for Artpop”, the coolly received 2013 album that temporarily derailed her career – go berserk.
