Lady Gaga’s show was to begin at 7.30 prompt, we were told. No opening act. And at 7.30 something did happen: the big screen over the stage started showing a film of Ms Gaga, clad in scarlet finery, writing on a scroll with a peacock-feather quill, while the PA played opera’s greatest hits. For more than an hour the film ran, an impassive Gaga doing nothing but writing. An hour. It was nearly as dull as a Paul Thomas Anderson film, and it’s a miracle it took 45 minutes for the handclaps to start ringing around the arena.
Was she about to do a Madonna – who had to keep cutting short her O2 shows because she was about to break their curfew? In the end, no. Gaga just managed to end in time, but it was tight. And she won back her crowd. Not that they needed much winning back; as soon as she appeared everything was forgiven.
Gaga’s a curious figure: for all the apparent transgression and edginess, she seems less like an outlier than a successor to Cher. She has the same double career as a singer and actor, and the same desire to belt out blousy power ballads while her audience want her to play pulsing electronic pop. Hence her new album Mayhem being hailed as a ‘return to form’ – which in this case means ‘sounds more like her first record than anything else she’s done for ages’.
One of the recurring themes of Mayhem – and of a fair bit of Gaga’s work – is that it’s awfully hard being famous. It probably is, I’m sure. But when you get a two-and-a-half-hour conceptual show in five acts that appears to be a gothic fantasy about how being a pop star turns you into two people who end up torturing each other, I got the strong urge to ask whether the singer had ever considered working at Argos instead.
During the second ‘act’ – entitled ‘And she fell into a gothic dream’ – Gaga performed ‘Perfect Celebrity’ from a sandpit, singing to a skeleton, while some of her dancers writhed like the undead alongside her. ‘You love to hate me/ I’m the perfect celebrity,’ she sang, which struck me as simply not true: her fame has been remarkably free of the media snark that so many young women have suffered.
One of the oddities, in fact, was that the show repeatedly referenced one celebrity whom the world did love to hate. So much of the choreography, and the shapes the dancers took, appeared to come straight from Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ video that it became a bit unnerving – like being transported back in time more than 40 years. The night was never boring, and it was always spectacular, but it was unrelenting, and it never had the playfulness of, say, Sabrina Carpenter’s shows this summer. It was more like Gabor Mate set to club beats.
For all the apparent transgression and edginess, Gaga seems less like an outlier than a successor to Cher
I feel as though I have seen the Beths a whole bunch of times – always in the early afternoon on the semi-deserted main stage of a small festival. And hearing a band like the Beths in the early afternoon on a semi-deserted festival main-stage, when all their intimacy and quiet power inevitably leaches away, is the worst way to encounter them. The result? I’ve never paid them much attention.
At the Roundhouse, they were brilliant. There is nothing in the least remarkable about the Beths: they are an indie rock band who play slightly fuzzy and very melodic guitar music. But they make you realise how inadequate most other bands of that description are. Every element of what the Beths do feels right: the songs, the playing, the arrangements. Even the levels they set the fuzz pedals at for the guitars were perfect: Elizabeth Stokes’s voice sat on a bed of sound that was warm and strong without being overpowering.
They’re part of a 45-year tradition of wonderful New Zealand guitar pop, sitting proudly in the lineage of Split Enz, the Chills and the Clean. In these songs – unlike in Gaga’s – emotions are not wrung out for their drama, but scaled down to a more everyday level. And in the main set’s closer, ‘Expert in a Dying Field’, the Beths had both the perfect singalong anthem and a wry, clever metaphor, one that explored relationships in a far truer way than any of the theatrics at the O2.
There is nothing revolutionary about the Beths. They do very simple things, but with an attention to detail that is a joy.
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