So we all just have to travel to Australia for concerts now?
Lady Gaga has joined the long list of artists refusing to tour here. This time, it’s different…
She was a gothic zombie one minute, a deranged princess the next, and a satanic sorceress right after that. At one point, she lay in a sandpit and writhed around with skeletons. At another, she stumbled around the stage using metallic crutches that looked like props from a Mad Max movie. Lady Gaga’s headlining performance at Coachella was decadent, devilish and demonic, a pop-art spectacle that somehow joined the dots between demented French opera, peak Marilyn Manson, Gojira's sick Olympics set and every Tim Burton film ever made.
As an advertisement for her upcoming world tour, dubbed The Mayhem Ball, “Gagachella” set the bar about as high as it can go. Some say Lady Gaga’s five-act Friday night freak out is now ranked second only to Beyoncé’s Beychella. “It was transcendent,” wrote a critic from The Guardian, who called it “a thrilling all-timer of a performance”. I agree. I watched it completely enthralled. My daughter, 11, barely knows who Lady Gaga is yet refused to go to bed until she’d seen it all. She promised us mayhem; she delivered.
I, like many others, am now desperate to see Lady Gaga’s world tour with my own eyes. So, two tickets please. Take my money. Take all of it. The problem? As was widely reported last week, Lady Gaga isn’t bringing her Mayhem Ball world tour to Aotearoa. Instead, she’s skipping us to perform in stadiums in Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney across December. Tickets go on sale this week, and with large gaps between those dates, it seems highly likely she’ll add more even shows that aren’t in Aotearoa.
