Lady Gaga’s new album, Mayhem, is out today, and marks a return to her electro-pop roots. As part of the promo tour, Gaga stopped off in a New York City bar to talk to Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, and she revealed that track 4 on the record - Perfect Celebrity - is inspired by a specific song by The Cure.
Discussing Perfect Celebrity, which Gaga says is one of the angriest songs she’s ever written, the star says that she’s “calling out and making a mockery of this thing that I went after.”
“I thought about the ‘90s, too, when I made that record - there’s a lot of ‘90s energy in that song,” she continued, noting that it was an era in which a lot of “amazing artists” were lost due to the pressures of fame.
“I mean the ‘90s is how I fell in love with music as a teenager,” she continued. “In the studio, we all kind of shared that in common, as well as a love of that time.”
Gaga describes Perfect Celebrity as “sort of an electro-grunge song” and says that “it was also inspired by The Cure and this song Never Enough that I used to play in my apartment like a million times before I walked into this bar. So that was sort of the electro influence that came into it.”
Released as a single in 1990, Never Enough had a whiff of the ‘baggy’ sound that was being popularised by the likes of The Stone Roses and The Happy Mondays. It was a hit in the UK and received plenty of radio play in the US.
It turns out, too, that Perfect Celebrity - and by extension that Cure influence - almost changed the direction of the whole album.
“After I made that song then I was like ‘we need to change all the production,’” Gaga recalls. “I wanted to change everything. I was like ‘we have to change everything,’ and then I went back and I said ‘no, we shouldn't change everything,’ because if I was to simply decide I was going to now make an entire electro-grunge album it would be just to like try to ‘saint’ myself as randomly cool in the middle of my project, and I actually thought that was boring, and not at all what Mayhem is all about.”
You can embrace the chaos of Mayhem, Lady Gaga’s sixth solo studio album, now.
