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.
The enormous crinoline dress is pulled back to reveal a huge cage with dancers in it, in which Lady Gaga is subsequently locked. It sets the tone for the evening, in that it’s both exceptionally striking and completely ridiculous. If her most recent album, Mayhem, seemed like an act of consolidation – a full-blooded return to the electronic dance-pop with which she made her name, after a decade in which she had dabbled in country, jazz and soft-rock film soundtracks to varying degrees of success – the accompanying tour feels like a bold and hugely successful reaffirmation of Stefani Germanotta as pop’s most unrepentant oddball. As if she saw those photos of Chappell Roan wearing a pig’s nose and an escoffion as a challenge: hold my drink, I need to source some costumes that make my backing dancers look like 17th-century bubonic plague doctors, only sexy.
You could, if you wanted, ponder what on earth is supposed to be going on up there amid the Lewis Carroll and Greek mythology inspired imagery, what with the plague doctors pretending to perform an operation, a surfeit of jerky zombie-style dancing and the loose plot line about Lady Gaga being locked in a battle with Mother Mayhem (also played by Lady Gaga). It may conceivably be something to do with warring impulses that lurk within people’s personalities – Dionysian and Apollonian, if you want to drag Nietzsche along to the O2 and get him waving his hands along to Alejandro – but you wouldn’t bet your house on it.
You might also mourn the passing of the blood-spattered sense of imminent chaos that attended her early arena tours, the whiff of the Lower East Side performance art clubs that still clung to her shows a decade ago: there’s no longer any room for it among the slick choreographed routines and special effects. But you couldn’t fail to be entertained, albeit in a slightly punch-drunk way. The songs are very loosely arranged into each of the acts by genre: big ballads, the squillion-selling Shallow, Die With a Smile and Edge of Glory among them, shoring up the finale; the Euro-influenced bangers packed upfront, which gives the opening a particularly unremitting quality.
And there’s always something eye-popping to look at, the entire show having apparently been devised by people who thought the real issue with Gaga’s performances to date is that they were insufficiently camp and OTT: a special effect that turns the audience members captured on the screens into glowing-eyed zombies, a section in which Lady Gaga appears, half-buried in a sandbox, performing Perfect Celebrity while alternately fondling and pretending to strangle a plastic skeleton.
None of it makes any sense whatsoever, but you soon stop worrying about meaning and give yourself over to its lurid sense of spectacle. Better not to wonder why Lady Gaga is singing Paparazzi on a pair of chrome crutches, in a crash helmet and a dress with an enormous train that eventually drags her backwards across the stage while she shouts “No! Please! No!” in mock-distress, and simply enjoy the fact that she is.