Lady GaGa is the 22-year-old New York recording artist currently enjoying the No 1 spot in the UK singles chart with Just Dance, an homage to overindulgence and the restorative effects of dancing. The song is her opening gambit from her debut album, Fame, a ceaselessly hedonistic, sexually charged rumination on modern pop culture which sounds at some intervals like Ace of Base and at others like the soundtrack to a weekend in Vegas, but mostly bears something of a close resemblance to the music of Pink and Christina Aguilera and Gwen Stefani - a blur of pop and dance and pelvic thrusting that simultaneously makes a grope in the direction of female empowerment.
Having successfully subdued the charts, GaGa is now touring with the Pussycat Dolls, delivering shows that combine pop music with risque costuming, choreography and home-made video. "I just shot these art films called 'crevettes'," she says huskily. "That's what I call them. It means shrimps, in French," she adds helpfully. "And shrimps are small, but decadent and tasty, which is how I think my films should be." The crucial thing about Lady GaGa is that she sees herself as not just another pop muppet, but as a living, breathing work of art. As well as writing songs for herself and for others (including Britney Spears and the aforementioned Pussycat Dolls) and producing her crevettes, she has her own fashion house and an entourage she likens to Warhol's Factory, and insists that not only are her songs inextricably linked to their performance and to her life in general, but also that she is doing something tangibly different from anything ever done before. "It's got a real, genuine, like, soul of innovation," is how she defines her music.
Born Joanne Stefani Germanotta, she was raised in Manhattan, and even in childhood she was a performer and a proponent of a DIY aesthetic. "I was in the Three Billy Goats Gruff when I was in kindergarten," she recalls in her lazy Italian-American drawl. "I was the big billy goat. I decided to make my billy-goat horns out of tinfoil and a hanger." She attended the same school as Paris Hilton, the Covent of the Sacred Heart. "I went to a lovely school and I got an incredible education," she says. "And I actually think that my education is what really sets me apart, 'cos I'm very smart." She taps her head. "I don't know that my schooling was conducive to wild ideas and creativity, but it gave me discipline, drive. They taught me how to think. I really know how to think." She searches for an example. "If I decide to make a coat red in the show, it's not just red," she explains. "I think: is it communist red? Is it cherry cordial? Is it ruby red? Or is it apple red? Or the big red balloon red? I mean there's like so many fucking different kinds of red. And so you have to say, well, what are we trying to say in this scene? Is it a happy red? Or a sad red? Is it a lace red? Or a leather red? Or a wool red? It's like there are so many components to making a show and making art, and my school taught me how to think that way."
The success of Just Dance has been a long time coming. "We've been trying to get it played in the US since March," she says. Many of the American radio stations recoiled, concerned both by the song's content and, she insists, by its musical innovation. "I mean it just doesn't sound like Katie Perry's I Kissed a Girl - which is a beautiful, lovely, amazing hit record and it sounds like a radio hit," she says. "My song doesn't sound like a radio hit. I mean it does, but it doesn't. Now here in the UK it might, because electro-pop is not this stinky underground thing, it's a real genre. But in America electro-pop is dirty underground music." There are other mainstream artists, she concedes, who have brought dance music into the records, "But I am taking it to another level. I mean my records are borderline dance records. They've got a real electro-rock heart and soul, and the vibe of the sentiment is pop, but there's a lot of people that were like, 'This is a dance record.'"
To convince the American public of the brilliance of her music, Lady GaGa's tactic was simple: "I played show after show after show and murdered every single one of them," she recalls. "In the arena I'd look at everybody and go: 'Some of you know this song and me, and some of you don't.'" She says the words in a tone that hovers somewhere between seductive and threatening. "'But you're sure as hell gonna know who the hell I am before I leave this arena tonight.' And then I would sing my record. And it's just relentless and fearless and I'm gonna fucking make my mark this year, right now. I just really, really have been the kind of person's that unstoppable, and I've never let anything get in my way."
It is the relentlessness of Lady GaGa that is most striking: the songs that squeal for attention, the outfits that beg to be noticed. Up close, the songs are in truth exceedingly familiar, and the outfits predictably outre but the sheer spectacle of her suggests otherwise.
She has grazes on her knees, and all up her arms run broad, orange smudges of fake tan; they look like wounds sustained in the battle for pop supremacy. And on she fights: "I guess success is only as big or small as you see it," she says. "I thought I was quite successful two years ago, and I think I'm quite successful now, but I've got a long way to go. It's funny, I was sitting in the car and my manager's reading me off all the stats and the things that are happening, and he's like, 'This is great GaGa!' And I'm like, 'I know, but for some reason I feel like we've accomplished nothing and we've got so far to go.' And he's like, 'You're on the same page as me.' You know what I mean?" She blinks. "Because I don't wanna be one song. I wanna be the next 25 years of pop music. But it's really hard to measure that kind of ambition. That kind of blonde ambition," - here she tugs her bleached locks to underline the point - "is looked at with a raised brow, because most artists don't have longevity today, especially in fun music that's about underwear and pornography and money."
She has her role models of course. "Madonna. Britney's been around for a long time. Grace Jones is unstoppable. David Bowie was around for years and years. The Beatles. I strive to be a female Warhol. I want to make films and music, do photography and paint one day, maybe. Make fashion. Make big museum art installations. I would be a bit more mixed-media than him probably - combining mixed media and imagery and doing more of a kind of a weird pop-art piece."
She is, she explains, always thinking about the imagery. "I always have a vision - when I'm writing a song I'm always thinking about the clothes, and the way I'm going to sing." She shifts in her chair to demonstrate. "Russian roulette," she sings, and crosses her legs. "How I move, that kind of stuff is written into the song. It's not just a song and I'm not just gonna stand on stage and sing." This approach to performance has ruffled many, including her own father. The first time he saw her on stage she was wearing "a leopard-thong-fringed bikini with a sequinned high-waisted belt and granny panties, and it was so wrong it was amazing." Her father stayed for the entire show. "And he told me I did a great job. But he was shocked. And alarmed. My mother told me he broke down and told her he thought I was crazy. Really crazy. Later that week my family said, 'It was just really hard to watch that show and we think you've lost your mind and we don't know what to do.'"
She was at that time quite heavily into drugs, though surprised that her father was aware of this fact. "Because I thought I was slick as fuck," she explains. "But he was like, 'You're fucking up, kid.' So I stopped. I didn't stop completely, but I stopped for a while completely. And I would never fall into the hole that I did at that time." How deep was the hole exactly? "I kind of feel you're in or you're out with that shit, any hole is deep," she says. "I was just being nostalgic and creative and thought that I was Edie Sedgwick and making music." She stifles a yawn. "I dunno, I wouldn't necessarily encourage anyone to do it, but I do think that when you struggle, that's when your art gets great."
For all the proclamations of innovation, there is something quaintly old-fashioned about GaGa. Discussing the lyrical content of her song Boys Boys Boys - "I like you a lot lot/ Think you're really hot hot," it runs before its chorus: "We like boys in cars/ Boys boys boys/ Buy us drinks in bars" - she explains that she sees it as a response to Mötley Crüe's hit Girls, Girls, Girls. "I wrote that song to impress a guy," she says. "Yeah, that's the kind of way I think of boys. I dunno, maybe I'm just a different kind of girl but the first love of my life used to drive me around in an El Camino." She lets her voice smoulder: "It's watermelon-green with a black hood, and he has long jet-black hair and he looks like half Neil Young, half Nikki Sixx when they were young, and the way that he talks about his car . . ." she takes a deep, sultry breath, "and the way that he stalls the gas when he's turning the corner . . . that's my guy. I like guys like that, guys that listen to AC/DC and drink beers and buy me drinks just to show me off at the bar by the jukebox with their friends. That's kind of like an old hot groupie chick." Very few women sing about boys and cars in that way, I say. "I don't think a lot of female pop stars embrace womanhood in that domestic, American way," she notes. "And me singing about gasoline and car and beers and bars is very American." It's very Springsteen American. "I lurrrrrve Springsteen," she purrs. "Grew up listening to Springsteen. And it's like that sort of by-the-boardwalk mentality. Girls either don't know about it or they think no one can relate to it or they think it's cooler to act like men and cheat on their boyfriends and yunno." She flaps her hands. "They're 'I don't want plastic surgery! Fuck plastic surgery! And fuck cooking you dinner! I'm gonna fucking order in!' And I'm not like that - I used to make my boyfriend dinner in my stilettos, with my underwear on. And he used to be like, 'Baby, you're so sexy!' And I'd be like. 'Have some meatballs.'"
Since GaGa arrived in the UK, barely a day has passed without an appearance in the tabloids. She is snapped buying fish and chips in a fluorescent leotard, leaving her hotel in diamante knickers and bare legs. Hers seems a very modern breed of courted notoriety, one borne of an era characterised by gossip mags and crowds of paparazzi poised to shove cameras up one's skirt, in which baring flesh and singing about sex seems a failsafe way to attract a following. It was therefore not surprising that she should choose to call her album Fame. "I think there's different kinds of fame," she says. "I think there's 'fame', which is plastic and you can buy it on the street, and paparazzi and money and being rich, and then there's 'the fame', which is when no one knows who you are but everybody wants to know who you are. That's what this whole record's about, this record beckons for everybody on the planet to stop being either jealous or obsessive about what they don't have and start acting like they do."
And how does one act like you do? "It's carrying yourself down the street like, 'I'm beautiful and dirty rich but I've got no money,'" she says. "Fame is not pretending to be rich, it's carrying yourself in a way that exudes confidence and passion for music or art or fishing or whatever the hell it is that you're passionate about, and projecting yourself in a way that people say, 'Who the fuck is that?' It has nothing to do with money. I can wear a $2 pair of pants and a T-shirt and a pair of sunglasses for two bucks on the street, but I can make it look like I'm Paris Hilton. You gotta have the fame, you gotta exude that thing. You gotta make people care, you gotta know and believe how important you are. You gotta have conviction in your ideas."
And does she have days when she doesn't want people to see her? She pauses for a long time. "That's a very dangerous question," she says eventually. She shakes her head. "I'm very grateful. I appreciate any attention to the music. And as long as it's on the music, and not who I'm fucking, I'll be OK." But if she does achieve her goal of dominating the next 25 years of pop music the fame is unlikely to dwell only on the music. Is she prepared for that? "I don't think I could ever be prepared for fame," she says. "I don't think that you can prepare for it or get used to it. I've felt famous my whole life, but this is a whole other level of famous
