Lady Gaga and the Revamp

Pop megastar Lady Gaga is back with a genre-hopping album to surprise even the most ardent fans – and it’s all thanks to spiritual guidance from her deceased aunt. Dan Stubbs hears how ‘Joanne’ helped heal long-held family rifts and brought Gaga back from the brink.

- Dan Stubbs

On September 9, Lady Gaga hopped onto the stage at London’s Moth Club, a sweaty Hackney venue with gold-painted walls and a shimmering Quality-Street-wrapper stage curtain. Wearing a grey jersey crop top and silver shorts, she debuted ‘Perfect Illusion’, the rocky new single from her new album ‘Joanne’, which is out today. On it, Gaga does country, rock, disco, pop and all points in between. There’s a duet with Florence Welch that sounds like Elton John’s ‘Bennie And The Jets’, a love song dedicated to John Wayne and a weirdo pop track with Beck in which all the lyrics seem to be thin euphemisms for masturbation. On the cover: Lady Gaga in side profile, hardly any make-up. It’s a face that should be recognisable but somehow isn’t.

For the people crammed into Moth Club it must have felt like an alien encounter – seeing a true, untouchable superstar in the flesh in a club that looks like Del Boy Trotter’s boudoir. But that’s key to the ‘Joanne’ experience. While it’s an album that heads in many directions, all of them are populist and accessible – fodder for the jukebox in a your local dive bar, or to soundtrack your hot dogs during next year’s Super Bowl half-time show. Gaga’s back and she wants to go for a beer with you. Except, she insists, it’s not that cynical.

“None of the records I make are ever a deliberate construction – they’re always an expression of who I am at the time and where I am in my life,” she says, on the phone from an “undisclosed location” in the desert. “My intention was to, you know, connect with people that would not normally connect with someone like me.”

Interesting phrase, because what, exactly, is Lady Gaga like?