Lady Gaga – The Roundhouse, London 01/09/13

What happens to a superstar when you take them away from the thing that keeps them a superstar? Lady Gaga’s appearance at the opening night of the iTunes Festival presented a fine chance to investigate. Whilst the annual event’s continually stellar line ups always offer the chance to see some splendid music, the ticketing policy – whereby the crowd is largely selected on a random, competition winner basis – can often lead to artists performing not solely to ardent fans, but instead to a curious array of lucky die-hards, slightly intrigued anybodys, and, perhaps worst of all, chin-stroking journalists.

Finding myself in the latter two of those three camps, I approached The Roundhouse in an open frame of mind, and old clothing (Gaga’s pre-gig tweets warned that we might get covered in “live art”, which sadly didn’t happen). Speaking to folks who’d seen her before, I was warned to expect nothing, and everything. But the one thing I couldn’t have predicted was the gig being what it was; bizarrely, but decidedly, flat. Maybe it was jetlag, maybe it was that the setlist was formed entirely of new songs, or the fact that it seemed that so much of the crowd were for once not treating her like a goddess before she’d sang a note, but tonight, Lady Gaga didn’t seem like a superstar. She seemed like Stefani Germanotta, a singer, there to be judged on the merit of her songs.

And there’s the problem; of the eight songs we’re treated to from the forthcoming ARTPOP – in amongst one or two certified bangers – a fair few suffer serious failures in connection, and one or two are just downright bizarre. It sounds silly to say the most memorable thing about opener ‘Aura’ is the cage she ascends towards the venue’s roof whilst imprisoned inside, as that would probably be the most memorable thing about a performance of the greatest song ever, but nobody is shocked by the silly stuff with Gaga – the remarkable thing about this as music is just how unremarkable it sounds.

Whilst she makes a big deal on stage about how this whole concept record – for that’s what it is – has allowed her to make the kind of music she’s always wanted to make, to escape “the little pop box” she’d been kept in, it sounds suspiciously like the kind of pop music everyone’s making at the minute. ‘Jewels & Drugs’ for example features rappers Too $hort and Twista bouncing on to the stage for guest verses and one of those EDM/Dubstep breakdown… things. It sounds passable, but it sure doesn’t sound like progress – these are boxes being ticked, not being escaped from.

There are good bits, of course. The infectious ‘Manicure’ finds her at the top of her pure pop game, the exceedingly playful smut of ‘Sex Dreams’ (“Last night, damn, you were in my sex dreams, doing really freaky things”) is a bit much even by Prince’s standards, and the closing ‘Applause’ brings the night’s only real dancefloor moment, announcing itself already as one of her best singles. Of course the whole spectacle of a Lady Gaga gig is also always going to be something of a treat for the eyes. Ninjas, paint guns, evil scientist pig dancers – that’s not a sentence I write every day, nor do I want to – but it’s certainly creative. It’s never in doubt that she’s a serious artist, even when her art is at its most ridiculous but as a concept, ARTPOP is a weak one – as unconvincing as the idea that she’s the first person to ever think of bringing art and pop together. There was I thinking pop was art, and that Gaga was already at the forefront of that. But hey, what do I know.

She remains at her most thrilling when out on a limb. The story that precedes ‘Swine’ (this being ‘Swinefest’, a title for the night that explains why the hardcore down the front are all wearing snouts and throwing soft toy pigs at her) is a truly harrowing one of abuse suffered by its author, the song itself developing from an arresting piano ballad in to an all out dance brawl with paint and Gaga’s lyrical vitriol flying everywhere. I’m not sure it’s a good song (I think it might even be a bad one), but it’s impossible to look away from, and certainly unique to her – something this album seems like it could do with a lot more of.

‘I Wanna Be With You’ however perhaps defines the problem here. Though it features Gaga humbly dressed, without her wig, behind a keyboard that she plays beautifully and is a wonderful vehicle for her remarkably powerful voice, it’s an unsettlingly saccharine and unnecessarily overblown number that does her a total no favours. An address directly to her hardcore fans (“I won’t be right without you / And I might break without you”), it’s meant as a declaration of her love for the “Little Monsters”, but instead it sounds like a plea, an admittance that she needs them. The fans themselves seem split. A friendly man in a blue dress and wig who I meet afterwards bemoans the lack of “pop” music in the set, before becoming even more deflated. “I’ve seen her ten times”, he tells me, showing me his ARTPOP tattoo – remember this is a record he’d never even heard – “but let’s be honest, that was a bit… shit, wasn’t it?”

I might not go that far, but then again, I’ve clearly not got as much invested in the idea of Lady Gaga as he. What I can say is that if this whole ARTPOP thing is to work, on this evidence at least, we’ll need to change our idea of what this woman’s about – and not in the way she perhaps wants. No, not in a progressive, envelope pushing way at all. Instead, in the coming years, perhaps Stefani Germanotta – and indeed her fans – might have to get used to the idea of Lady Gaga being a bit, well, normal.