Moranthology (11 page)

“What's the nearest you've ever come to death?” I ask her. “Do you have any recurring illnesses?”

She goes oddly still for a moment, and then says, “I have heart palpitations, and . . . things.”

“Recently?”

“Yes, but it's okay. It's just from fatigue and . . . other things,” she shrugs, before saying, very carefully, “I'm very connected to my aunt, Joanne, who died of lupus. It's a very personal thing. I don't want . . . my fans to be worried about me.”

Her eyes are very wide.

“Lupus. That's genetic, isn't it?” I ask.

“Yes.”

“And have you been tested?”

Again, the eyes are very wide and steady. “Yes.” Pause. “But I don't want anyone to be worried.”

“When was the last time you called the emergency services?” I ask.

“The other day,” Gaga says, still talking very carefully. “In Tokyo. I was having trouble breathing. I had a little oxygen, then I went on stage. I was okay. But like I say—I don't want anyone to worry.”

It's a very odd moment. Gaga is staring at me calmly, but intently. Lupus is a connective tissue disease, where the immune system attacks the body. It can be fatal—although, as medicine advances, fatalities are becoming rarer. What it more commonly does is cause heart palpitations, shortness of breath, joint pain, and anemia, before spasmodically but recurrently driving a truck through your energy levels, so that you are often too fatigued to accomplish even the simplest of tasks.

Suddenly, all the “Gaga cracking up” stories revolve round 180 degrees, and turn into something completely different. After all, the woman before me seems about as far removed from someone on the verge of a fame-induced nervous breakdown as is possible to imagine. She's being warm, candid, smart, amusing and supremely confident in her talent. She's basically like some hot, giggly pop-nerd.

But if she were regularly running into physical difficulties because she has lupus—being delayed on stage, cancelling gigs, having to call the emergency services—you can see how a world press, desperate for stories about her, ignorant of any other possibility, would add these things up into a wholly different picture.

Gaga is certainly very affected by her aunt's death: the date of her death, in 1976, is interwoven into her Rilke tattoo on her arm. When I ask her if she ever “dresses down,” she says the only thing remotely “dress down-y” she has is a pair of pink, cotton shorts—embroidered with flowers—that once belonged to her aunt.

“They're nearly forty years old,” she says. “But I wear them when I want her to . . . protect me.”

The story that I thought I would find when I met Gaga—dark, otherworldly, borderline autistic diva-genius failing under the pressure of fame—just dissolves, like newsprint in the rain.

All that's left is a mardy pop sex threat—the woman who put out three, Abba-level classic singles in one year, at the age of twenty-three, while wearing a lobster on her head. As Ali G. says at times like this, “Booyakasha.”

“What's the best thing you've spent your money on so far?” I ask, in a far more cheerful mood.

“I bought my parents a car,” Gaga replies. She has often spoken of how close she is to her parents—particularly her father, whom she appears to borderline worship. Presumably, she sees herself in him—a self-made man, he started as a rock 'n' roll bar musician, before making his fortune as an internet entrepreneur. By the time Gaga was thirteen, the family was rich enough to send her to the same school as heiress Paris Hilton.

Gaga is not faking her current outsiderness—even then, when she was still just Stefani Germanotta, she was the goth girl with dyed black hair, obsessed with Judy Garland, Led Zeppelin and David Bowie, and wearing her skirts really high.

“It's a Rolls Royce,” she continues, sipping on her tea, daintily. She has lifted the veil now: she looks as casual as it is possible to in a wig and couture. “It's black. My dad's very Italian, so I wanted to get him a real Godfather car. I had it delivered on their anniversary.”

When Gaga rang her father and told him to “Go outside!”, he refused. “He thought I'd got him a dancing gorillagram,” she giggled.

The car had a huge bow on it, and the message “A car to last like a love like yours.” At first, Gaga's parents thought they had it just for the day, to drive round in. When she told them it was theirs to keep, her father shouted “You're crazy!” and burst into tears.

“You see, I don't really spend money, and I don't really like fame,” Gaga says. “I spend my money on my shows—but I don't like buying
things.
I don't buy diamonds, because I don't know where they came from. I'll spend it on fashion.” She hugs the McQueen cloak close.

“I miss Lee every time I get dressed,” she says, sadly. “But you know what I spend most of my money on? Disappearing. I hate the paparazzi. Because the truth is—no matter what people tell you—you can control it. If you put as much money into your security as you put into your cars or your diamonds or your jewellery, you can just . . . disappear. People who say they can't get away are lying. They must just like the . . . big flashes.”

The conversation turns to the music industry. Gaga has an endearingly schoolmarmish belief that most acts are “lazy.”

“I hate big acts that just throw an album out against the wall, like ‘BUY IT! FUCK YOU!' It's mean to fans. You should go out and tour it to your fans in India, Japan, the UK. I don't believe in how the music industry is today. I believe in how it was in 1982.”

She explains she doesn't mind people downloading her music for free, “because you know how much you can earn off touring, right? Big artists can make anywhere from $40m for one cycle of two years touring. Giant artists make upwards of $100m. Make music—then tour. It's just the way it is today.”

While on this huge, technically complex, sell-out world tour, Gaga has written and recorded the majority of her next album: “I don't understand bands who say they'll tour for one year—then record the next!” she exclaims at one point, going Thatcher again. “I make music every DAY!”

Although she “can't talk about it yet,” she is clearly excited about the next album. She keeps trying to tell me things about it, then claps her hands over her mouth, going, “I can't!”

“But everyone's going to fucking know about it when it comes out,” she says, excitedly. “You know when people say ‘If you could say one sentence about who you are, what you life is?' It's that.
For the whole album
. Because I recently had this . . . miracle-like experience, where I feel much more connected to God.”

You were raised a Catholic—so when you say “God,” do you mean the Catholic God, or a more spiritual sense of “God?”

“More spiritual,” Gaga says, looking like she's biting her tongue. “I don't want to say much, because I want it to stay hidden until it comes out—but I will say that religion is very confusing for everyone, and particularly me, because there's really no religion that doesn't hate or condemn a certain kind of people, and I totally believe in all love and forgiveness, and excluding no one.”

“Would you play for the Pope, if he asked you?”

“Yeah,” Gaga says. There's a pause. Perhaps she considers her current stage show, and the section where her male dancers grab their gigantic, fake white penises, and bounce them off their palms to
Boys Boys Boys
.

“Well. I'd do an acoustic show for the Pope,” she amends.

A
stonishingly, given how late I was, Gaga has given me a full hour of interview time. I later find out that she turned down doing a video acceptance speech for the World Music Awards in order to fit me in. I feel I've done amazingly well, considering how badly the day started. Then Gaga puts her cup down, and turns to me.

“You should come out with us tonight,” she says, warmly. “Actually, I've never had a journalist come out with me, so you'd be the first. It's going to be fun. It's like an old sex club, in Berlin. Come party with Gaga!”

I
t is midnight. Gaga came off stage half an hour ago. Dressed, once again, in knickers, bra, fishnets and her black taffeta McQueen, she has been standing in freezing, driving rain outside the 02 World, signing autographs for fans.

Her fans are infamously, incredibly devoted—as she is to them. She calls them her “Little Monsters.” They draw pictures of her, get tattoos like hers, weep when she touches them. Her den-mother championing of “all the freaks”—fat girls, gay boys, lesbian girls, Goths, nerds. Everyone who gets picked on at school—allied to her global pop juggernaut, makes her relationship with her fans intense. When you watch her with them, you see that culturally, what she's doing is . . . providing a space for them. Giving them somewhere to meet.

Then, her security guy gives the signal, and we are all bundled into people-carriers with blacked-out windows, and whizzed across Berlin.

Paps in cars try to follow us, but it seems what Gaga said earlier was true: if you spend enough money on security, they can't follow you. She simply has two burly men stand in front of their cars, impeding them, until we have vanished.

“It's, like, a sex party,” Gaga explains. “You know—like in
Eyes Wide Shut?
All I can say is, I am not responsible for what happens next. And wear a condom.”

As we take the alleyway to the sex club, security men appear and close off the alleyway with giant, blacked-out gates.

The club—The Laboratory—is an industrial, maze-like building. To get to the dance floor, you have to pass a series of tiny, cell-like booths, decked out with a selection of beds, bathtubs, hoists and chains.

“For fucking,” a German member of our entourage explains—both helpfully, and somewhat unnecessarily.

Despite the undoubted and extreme novelty of such a venue, Adrian—Gaga's British press officer—and I give away our nationalities instantly when we comment, excitedly, “Oh my God! You can SMOKE in here!” It seems a far more thrilling prospect than . . . some bumming.

It's a small entourage—Gaga, me, Adrian, her make-up artist, her security guy, and maybe two others. We walk onto the small dance floor, in a club filled with drag queens, lesbians dressed as sailors, boys in tight t-shirts, girls in black leather. The music is pounding. There is a gigantic harness hanging over the bar.

“For fucking,” the same German says again, helpfully.

Gaga is heading up our group. Even, like, Keane would slope off to a VIP booth at this point, and wait for people to bring them drinks.

Instead—cloak billowing, and very much looking like one of the Skeksis in
The Dark Crystal
—Gaga marches up to the bar, leans on it in a practiced bar-fly manner. With a bellowed, “What does everyone want to drink?” she gets the round in.

It reminds me of what was possibly the best moment of this year in Gaga world: the tabloids running a shot of Gaga—dressed only in fishnets, a bra and leather cap—sitting in a pub in Blackpool, with a pint of Stella and a plate of chips.

“I really love a dingy, pissy bar,” Gaga says. “I'm really old-school that way.”

We go into an alcove with a wipe-clean banquette—“For the fucking!” the German says, again—and set up camp. Gaga takes off her McQueen cloak, and chucks into a corner. She's now just in bra, fishnet and knickers, with sequins around her eyes.

“Do you know what that girl at the bar said to me?” she says, sipping her Scotch, and taking a single drag off a fag before handing it back. “She said, ‘You're a feminist. People think it means “man-hating,” but it doesn't.' Isn't that funny?”

Earlier in the day, conversation had turned to whether Gaga would describe herself as feminist or not. As the very best conversations about feminism often will, it had segued from robust declarations of emancipation and sisterhood (“I am a feminist because I believe in women's rights, and protecting who we are, down to the core.”) to musing on who she fancied (“In the video to ‘Telephone
,
' the girl I kiss, Heather, lives as a man. And as someone who does like women, something about a more masculine woman makes me feel more . . . feminine. When we kissed, I got that fuzzy butterfly feeling.”)

We had concluded that it was odd most women “shy away” from declaring themselves feminists, because “It really doesn't mean ‘man-hating.' ”

“And now she's just said the same thing to me! AND she's hot!” Gaga beams. She points to the girl—who looks like an androgynous, cupid-mouthed, Jean-Paul Gaultier cabin boy. “Gorgeous,” Gaga sighs.

This is Gaga off-duty. Although the booth becomes by way of a shrine to her—between now and 4
AM
, fully two-thirds of the club come over to pay obeisance to her: drag queens and tom-girls and superfreaks, all acknowledging the current definitive pop cultural salon keeper—Gaga alternates being wholly gracious and welcoming to them, and getting absolutely off her cake. With the thrill of like recognizing like, I realize she's a total lightweight—giggly after two Scotches, dancing in the booth after three, and wholly on the prowl after four.

“Are you straight?” she asks some hot, American boy we've been talking to at one point, in the manner of someone who needs to make plans for the rest of the evening based on the reply. When he says, regretfully, “No,” her attention seems to, amusingly, wander.

But that's just for sex. Gaga's devotion to, and promotion of, every aspect of gay culture is legendary. Bisexual herself, while her musical education might once have been classical, her cultural education was homosexual, and comes to a head in the video to her forthcoming single, “Alejandro.”

Sprawled across the banquette, in a mood of eager excitement, Gaga shows me stills from the video shoot on her BlackBerry. She's dressed up as Joan of Arc, with a ferocious Purdey haircut. To be honest I can't see much more than that, because she's a bit pissed, and her thumbs keep getting in the way.