Lady Grinning Soul...

A text from Lady Gaga:

Bob, srry 2 hear u r indisposed. I m making a new record. R u still able 2 produce?

Ciao gorge,

Gaga

Listen lady - I may be living in assisted accommodation and require a nubile young rubber-clad wet nurse to get me started, but I can still produce alright. In fact, last week's ended up halfway up me chest! And there was enough there to father a sub-continent, believe me.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan of the Lady. She's certainly got a daintily manicured fingernail on the pulse of the modern psyche, that's fo sho. I could never stand it either when I got a call in the middle of jive talking my way across the Studio 54 floor - and you could hardly call the phones back then mobile, I can tell you. My first one needed its own road crew. You had to be careful too, walking about with a 6 foot high communication device pinned to your ear if Mick and Bianco were there. Take your eye off the ball for a second there and you'd end up trampled under the hooves of a white Arab charger. Must have cost a fortune in straw that thing. Cost me a tidy sum at Ladbrokes, I know that.

But there's a bitter sweetness for me when I think about the Lady's phenomenal success. I suppose part of it is that I see so much of myself there. I suppose seeing Gaga staging her spectacular shows, being swallowed up by eager hordes of papparrazzi, the whole planet waiting with bated breathe for a glimpse of your new look reminds me of another nervous young lad in gauzy female attire, perilously high heels and a wig made from loft insulation material.

Of course that's about where the similarity ends. Gaga's appealing to a much younger audience than I ever could have. In my day, children weren't allowed to stay up long enough to watch Top of the Pops until they were 12. Nowadays, they're having their second baby by the time they're 11. You can trot out any old badly programmed, tuneless Euro-thump racket and the 6 and under Market will lap it up. Then there are all the accessories: cobble together a pair of spectacles from a used ashtray and a bit of gaffa tape, stick a Gucci label on the side and you're laughing all the way to the Multinational Investment Corporation. He's got a canny business head on his petite shoulders has Gaga, I'll give him that.

Whereas in the old days, you had to be a bit more sophisticated. Mime, German Expressionist Theatre, Kabuki, automatic writing - these were just a few of the influences that went completely over the heads of most of my audience. Mine too, if truth be told. Especially that Kabuki. I thought it was a rice wine for the first 6 months. No surprise really that Fine Fare never seemed to be able to get hold of a bottle...

L.U.V. on ya,

Bob



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