Patron saint of misfits invites Barcelona to her ball

Back in 1990 Madonna kicked off her famous Blonde Ambition Tour in Barcelona's Olympic Stadium, gabbling in Spanish learned from film director Pedro Almodóvar: "I'm alone. Where are all the guys with dicks?" Twenty years later and just a few meters from the same spot, Lady Gaga also showed up in scandalously potty-mouthed style with her Monster Ball Tour. "You've already heard that I have a fat Italian dick," she spat, after simulating a group masturbation session performing hit LoveGame. "Come on, now take out yours. I've heard you have pretty big ones."

The show served up by the artist known as the patron saint of misfits at Barcelona's Palau Sant Jordi on Tuesday night - which will also visit Lisbon on Friday and Madrid on Sunday - cost overone million euros and included 15 costume changes to promote her universal message of celebrating difference. She performed it in front of 18,000 fans - dressed in glasses made from cigarettes and space-age jackets - who have spent the last two years subscribing to the joke she continues to stage. "I hate the truth," she spat out again by way of clarification. "I prefer a huge dose of shit rather than the truth!" The outburst preceded the performance of Teeth, in which she ended up soaked in blood.

In Gaga's Warholian delirium all the extremes of fame culture converge

"We are nothing without our image. When you are alone, I will be too"

Though she has challenged the laws of microcelebrity and the niche culture of Web 2.0, Gaga is a primitive woman at heart: during the course of the concert she crawled around, shouted, spat, sweated, groped her dancers, slogged her guts out in every number and, between panting, threw in a little self-help speech. "I don't care who you are, where you come from or how much money you have," she cried out after caressing a dancer's groin. "Tonight you can be whoever you want. Love yourself."

The night had kicked off in futurist style with Gaga in silhouette behind a screen, shoulders the size of a quarterback's, alternating between Betty Boop and Nosferatu poses. It was an ambivalence that characterized the whole two-hour show. In Gaga's Warholian delirium all the extremes of fame culture converge. The New Yorker wanted to be sexy and sinister, feminine and ambitious, vivacious and grotesque, frivolous and cerebral, pop and expressionist, glamorous and scatological. In the intimate moments at the piano (glam ballad Speechless and the mid-tempo You and I), she shamelessly chased caricature and grotesquery, sometimes playing the keyboard with her heels. The more hyperbolic numbers, such as Alejandro, were offset with readings from manifestos: "We are nothing without our image. When you are alone, I will be too. That is what fame consists of," she recited on a prerecorded track. And that it is also what the outrageous complicity she encourages in her faithful consists of: like a guru, Gaga addresses each of her fans as if they were famous like her, intimate friends who understand and share the heaven and hell she goes through.

The "pop-electro opera" of The Monster Ball narrates the journey of a gang of degenerates to a party along a glitter-lined road - something like if Freaks director Tod Browning had made The Wizard of Oz in the 1980s. It offers an apocalyptic vision of New York with broken-down Rolls-Royces, Metro carriages, a Tim Burton-style Central Park and an enormous Jabba the Hutt that you want to thump. This is the fame monster, the manifestation of her demons. To escape it, she appealed to the public for the only possible solution: "It wants to rape me! Have you got cameras! Photograph it!"

Big tracks Poker Face, Paparazzi and Bad Romance captivated the crowd at the end of the party. And wearing an impossible suit around which enormous metallic hoops orbited - like a Vitruvian Man redesigned by Arthur C. Clarke - she said good bye with a special effect. But at 24, Gaga is anything but an illusion. A shrill vocalist, spasmodic dancer, inspired composer of million-dollar choruses and skilled manager of the unhealthy obsession that, once in a while, she says she feels for her fans - "my little monsters," as she calls them - the star made it clear she was here to stay. "Thank you for knowing my lyrics, I never mime," she said.

She grabbed a rainbow flag from the crowd and wore it like a veil. She got emotional when some fans surprised her with a bunch of red, heart-shaped balloons, demanding she perform an unreleased track from her next album (she said no, but her reaction was convincing). In the age of Twitter, the illusion of accessibility that so many pop stars want to generate is only credible from the most absolute self-conviction.

In fact there was just one thing Gaga didn't understand - the rejection from the Catalan crowd she got when she covered herself with a Spanish flag.

Perhaps someone will explain it to her in Madrid on Sunday.