FEATURE:
Don’t Call Tonight
Why Wasn’t Lady Gaga Afforded a U.K. Headline Slot for This Year’s Festivals?
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I know I have written about this…
PHOTO CREDIT: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Coachella
a few times before, but looking at the festival line-ups this year and there do seem to be these gaps and talking points. One of the biggest artists in the world, Lady Gaga, was overlooked for this year’s Glastonbury. When asked in a recent interview what it would take for her to accept a Glastonbury invite, she said it would be a matter of a phone call. I have been debating why she has been overlooked. Granted, her sets are quite big and extravagant. Phenomenally engaging, dramatic and theatrical at times, maybe there would be quite a sizeable budget involved. There does seem to be an age issue when it comes to booking women as festival headliners. The likes of Reading & Leeds and Glastonbury very rarely book a female headliner over the age of forty. Lady Gaga is forty next year and, even though Glastonbury has booked maybe one female headliners over the age of thirty (maybe two), I think Lady Gaga would be have been the oldest of the Pyramid Stage. I did wonder why Kylie Minogue was not booked this year. I guess there are reasons why an artist like Lady Gaga might not have been considered for Glastonbury, Reading & Leeds or another big festival. However, like Charli xcx, is producing the best music of her career. One cannot accuse all major U.K. festivals or being ageist when it comes to women. I know that Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage is broad and has welcomed some legends through the years, there does seem to be this block when it comes to women. Why are icons like Lady Gaga not considered?
When it comes to a headline act, I admire festivals that book women regardless of age. However, there does seem to be this tendency for the major U.K. festivals to put women over the age of thirty/forty on lesser stages. If you take age out of the equation, is it just a case of cost? Lady Gaga having these huge shows that would blow a budget?! In terms of creating spectacle and delivering one of the best headline sets ever, there are few as good as she is. It is a bit baffling. Consider this review from her recent headline slot at Coachella:
“Did she ever. Gaga, more than any other contemporary pop star, has approached pop as transmogrification, live performance like a hunter – the piercing gaze, transparent hunger and annihilating focus of an apex predator. And with Gagachella, as her fans have already termed a thesis statement of a set, she goes in for the kill. You knew from the minute she appeared in full deranged queen regalia, the head of a multi-story hoop skirt that opened to reveal a birdcage prison of backup dancers, that the vision was nigh. The nearly two-hour performance, covering 22 songs from her dance pop catalogue, joins Beyoncé’s postponed Homecoming in the pantheon of groundbreaking Coachella headliner sets – a fully realized vision of a pop master, a testament to years of hard-earned experience at the highest level, and a banger dance party with production and delivery in a league above her peers.
At 38, Gaga reigns as a monarch in pop music, a fact she wielded to stupefying effect on Friday evening to a crowd that extended far beyond any eye could see. “Welcome to my house,” she intoned before opener Bloody Mary – understatement of the month, as her house was the sprawling skeleton of a neoclassical opera house, her domain an arresting realm of elaborate make-believe. For the purpose of Mayhem, the new album that returns to her original principles of pounding volume, dirty synths, high theatrics and irresistible hooks, Gaga conjures an entire fantasy of witches and queens, a typically twisted, self-referential fairytale of literal dark and light told in five acts.
Gagachella was notably not a full career retrospective – no tracks from Artpop, Joanne or Chromatica, with just A Star Is Born’s Shallow as the lone representative of Gaga’s decade-long pivot away from gritty, sticky music that makes you want to move. Yet it still felt comprehensive, all-encompassing, by seamlessly braiding her foundational texts – The Fame, Born This Way – with her latest one. Mayhem is easily Gaga’s best album since Artpop, both a return to form and a hard-won study of warring personas contained in one self, pop music with sharp teeth and beastly desire. Ever the visionary and literalist, she rendered her internal strife as a court battle between a domineering queen in black and an innocent in white, with full wig changes from black bob to blond ringlets necessitating long, pulsating transitions that lavished attention on her army of backup dancers and, frankly, metal instrumentalists.
Gagachella, too, marks a return to form – from the outset of her career, Gaga has treated pop music as possession, her spasmodic dance style like an exorcism, more refreshingly loose and instinctual than her peers. The Mother Monster’s visions – a chess battle to the death (Poker Face), rage at fame sung to a skeleton (Perfect Celebrity), new Gaga strangled by 2009 VMAs Gaga in a zombie-filled grave (Disease, the concert high point that left me agape) – possessed Coachella with an unstoppable need to dance, primal screams of the gagged.
Gaga’s voice, honed with time, was more dextrous and luminous than ever, and though she didn’t miss a note, the performance was as much a feat of acting as singing – Gaga the possessed, the haughty, the hunted, the strangled, the Oscar nominee. Her performances often have the feeling of life-or-death stakes; even a track as sinuously groovy as Killah gets the embodiment of a demonic fever, accompanied by French producer Gesaffelstein entombed in black, the oil-slicked phantom of Gaga’s twisted opera.
PHOTO CREDIT: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Coachella
But in the spirit of duality, she also broke character just enough – to salute her fans, her fiance, her spiritual belief of interconnectedness. “The truth is we’re all one. It’s all just one big fucking thing,” she said before the triumphant victory lap of Born This Way. “I love you so much.” The mayhem carried through a transcendent finale of Bad Romance staged, naturally, as a Frankenstein-esque revivification with plague masks, Gaga’s face at the conclusion shifting between performance snarl and personal joy. With both, she led not one but two extended curtain calls with the full cast and crew – unusual for a music festival, but fitting for an all-timer night of pop theater in the desert”.
The festival season is close at hand. It will be with us soon. It has been a bit disappointing that some incredible women making the best music of their careers have been either booked on smaller stages or not booked at all. Not to say that age is the main factor. However, it is something that holds weight. I realise that booking a major artist can be costly and festivals do not really have a massive budget to spend. Think what an artist like Lady Gaga could deliver at a U.K. festival. I don’t think it was a case of her being a risk. That she might not be in top form and it would have been a mistake. After a triumphant Coachella set, it would have been nice to cap that off with one or two big U.K. headline slots. One wonders whether she will be considered next year. When it comes to this year, a lack of Lady Gaga seems like…
A major oversight.