Gaga drops her poker face down the local
Moulded by thigh-high boots, bring-out-the-gimp gloves and transparent top, our latest dance sensation is surprisingly sedate off stage.
Sitting in her room in the Radisson SAS Hotel in Little Island, Cork, Lady Gaga told the Irish Examiner she was delighted to be playing the Marquee.
“I was previously in Ireland, in Dublin, and this is my first time in Cork, but I’m really loving it here, I love the people, it’s been one of my favourite places to visit,” she said graciously, tossing her blonde bob.
Not your average client in most Irish locals, she raised a few unplucked eyebrows in the Rising Tide pub in Glounthane village, Cork, on Tuesday night when she dropped by with a couple of mates for a couple of whiskeys.
“It was great, it was nice to have a relaxing evening with my friends and some whiskey. Everyone was so nice.
“It was kinda like ‘Lady Gaga’s here, let’s buy her a drink’, it was cool.
“I’ve got young people travelling with me that I do all my creative musical and visual work with and we rarely party, so it was nice to have a nice evening out in Cork and not be bothered by anyone. And everybody was so friendly and we were hanging out with all the locals, it was great,” the New Yorker said.
Her appearance kickstarted a text frenzy and before long, half the village had packed out the pub.
“Y’know I was gonna play a couple of tunes, but suddenly, it got very packed,” the 23-year-old singer/songwriter said.
Performing in the local may have fazed her, but not an audience of 5,000, the attendance at last night’s gig in the Marquee.
“I can’t believe it’s so many people, 5,000 is a lot of people. I mean I played 100,000 last week but that was a festival – this is headlining – every ticket that was sold is for me, I appreciate that, I recognise that,” she said.
Lady Gaga’s act – an explosive combination of song, raunchy dance moves and glittering theatrics – is, according to herself, performance art.
“I don’t really want to portray any kind of image of myself necessarily other than a life of love and art and freedom. I don’t find my videos to be particularly raunchy: to me it’s art, it’s beautiful, it’s self-expression, it’s performance art.”
She comes from a family where performance is a given: her mother was in theatre and her father played guitar with Bruce Springsteen cover bands.
Her 17-year-old sister is into fashion design and they exchange tips.
Her name was inspired by the Queen song Radio Gaga and her friends adapted it for her. “It started out as Gaga, and then it became Lady Gaga, that was my burlesque name and then I started to use my burlesque name as my music performance name and it stuck.”
A younger Lady Gaga performed burlesque in lower East side clubs in New York in her less well-known days. She says her meteoric rise to fame is not just down to changing her hair colour.
“It’s kind of a joke, I got signed as a brunette, I just changed my hair colour, because where I lived in New York, all the girls had that dark brown mullet at some point.
“I was getting sick of looking like everyone else and Amy Winehouse had just come out and I used to wear real thick black eyeliner and my hair was real bouffant-y, so I just decided to try something new.”
