This is not a review. It cannot be a review. A review is meant to sum up a gig succinctly and accurately, and I can do neither. The more she gives of herself, the more the clothes come off and the singles shoot to an automatic number one, the more mystique she seems to command.

   To see her live is to take leave of your reality, pitch up in the Monster Ball and prepare yourself for an onslaught of images, music, films, narrative, glitter, blood, giant monsters, underground bars, neon signs, forests, subway trains, fountains, harps, burning pianos, and thousands of clawed hands moving in unison.

   There are moments where you feel, rather melodramatically, that you’re partaking in some sort of revolution, something that has too much energy for the arena to contain and will surely spill out onto the streets at any second to sweep the country, the sea, the world, and everything will fall to Gaga’s twisted beautiful fantasies.

   On the other hand, especially during her two-song stint at the burning piano, there are moments where you feel like this is a gig performed directly to you. “This is for everyone who has ever hurt you, when you’ve been hurt so, so bad…” she shouted during Brown Eyes, and for a moment she’s feeling that pain for you. Lady Gaga is a walking dichotomy, revelling in the superficial while remaining completely sincere. When she says “When you’re lonely, I’m lonely too,” you believe her.

   For those who got too caught up in the sentimentality, the twenty-foot tentacled fish with glowing razor teeth that took over the stage during Paparazzi, quickly broke the reverie. Gaga, dressed in a futuristic green dress of 3D diamonds, writhed on the floor screaming, “Eat me, motherfucker!” while the crowd stared, transfixed.

   “Do you think I’m sexy?” Gaga asked after powering through Boys Boys Boys, the song during which her troupe of semi-clad dancers were at their most distracting, thrusting and massaging exaggerated cod-pieces. “I wasn’t cool at school, so I abuse it a little…” Gaga continued, running her hands up and down her toned silhouette. “Do you think I’m sexy?”

   Sexy almost seems too trite to describe the visceral sexuality that dominates the show. Her every move oozes sex but, unlike the majority of women in the pop charts, she doesn’t use it to hide a lack of talent, which is as overt and flamboyant as any of her (many) outfits.

   While the worldwide anthems of Just Dance, Poker Face and Bad Romance make it impossible to resist dancing in the most embarrassing and crazed way, the way usually reserved for family wedding receptions, it’s the album tracks such as Fame, Teeth, Monster, and the little-known Vanity, that provided unexpected highlights. Vanity was delightfully reminiscent of Moulin Rouge gone wrong, with the can-can lines and theatrical celebration of hedonism.

   But in front of an audience Gaga can’t hide behind lyrics like “All we care about is runway models, Cadillacs and liquor bottles”.

   “You set me free,” she said while at her piano, showing off her classically trained background. “If it wasn’t for all of you I wouldn’t have travelled around the world fifty times. I love my fans.” And she does love her fans, her little monsters that could be seen queuing over three streets to get inside.

   It’s fitting that one of her major influences is Freddie Mercury. This was a night that felt like Woodstock, like Live Aid, like a gig that would be looked back on for decades to come, but then, I suspect, every one of her gigs feel like this. Never before while watching someone onstage have I been compelled to worry, with a gut feeling of sadness, that some people might not get to witness talent like this in their lifetimes, that the world would be that little bit less colourful without her and her music in it.

   On emerging, sweating and walking on aching feet, from the venue after Bad Romance, I feel like days have passed, weeks even. Gaga’s Monster Ball was less like a set of songs and more like a trip to Narnia, during which you not only forget your watch but that anything outside of the venue even exists. Seeing roads and buildings again only makes you yearn to re-enter her world.

   That day Telephone became her sixth consecutive US number one. Maybe that is her mission, to drag this world, dancing and screaming, into hers?

   There was a pink sky over Cardiff when I caught my 6:30am train out the next morning.

   Of course there was.

John and Edward Grimes.

   No, really.

   You may think that I’ve finally lost my mind and turned to hallucinogenic drugs to get myself through life but, really, I haven’t. I’m being 100% serious. Or as serious as you can be when talking about these identical quiffed Irish invaders of the UK Charts.

   I’ll put it concisely: I adore Jedward, and this is my case as to why.

   After much moaning, raised eyebrows, sighs, and restrained cynicism, I agreed to take my little sister and cousin to see X Factor Live. It was, in my eyes, nothing more than a poor reason to miss Manchester United winning the Carling Cup Final and a blemish to my rock ’n’ roll credentials. I was prepared to listen to nothing but The Skids for a week as penance to reclaim my kudos.

   If anyone had told me that the endearingly tuneless twins John and Edward would steal the show I’d have dismissed them as someone who needed to quickly see the inside of a padded cell. But, putting aside my hatred of X Factor and its stranglehold on the music industry as we know it, they did.

   John and Edward, I realised, represent more of a two-fingered salute to X Factor than Rage Against The Machine’s Christmas Number One did. They are the contraband box of ecstasy pills in The Priory, the sly injection of chaos that turns a peaceful protest into a full-on riot. They sing passably, by no means well, but became bigger than the show that made them with nothing more than reckless optimism and a euphoric hyperactivity both onstage and off. Through a combination of national pride and public frustration with the generic manure that reality TV propels into our consciousness year after year, they have become stars. Not just pop stars doomed to live forever with the smoking brand of X Factor across their foreheads, but actual stars.

   To see them onstage is to have a seven-inch psychotic smile on your face and aching ribs for hours afterwards, because what you’re seeing isn’t a shopwork mannequin, it is two eighteen-year-old boys doing whatever the hell they want. From Under Pressure to Rock DJ to Ghostbusters, cavorting with water pistols and inflatable ghosts, one twin dancing slightly out of time with the other, talking in faux American accents, and dressed like the love-children of James Bond and Nicky Wire, they are undeniably joyous to witness.

   ”Have fun - that’s our plan at all times,” John recently said to Q Magazine. “When you look at some artists you can see there’s something missing when you look into their eye. They’re trudging through a performance. We’re thinking, Who’s let us on this stage? It’s just amaaaaazing. We’ll never lose the feeling that we’re the luckiest guys ever for being allowed near a stage.”

   Also, in a true rock ‘n’ roll initiation, they have Noel Gallagher’s mobile number and implied endorsement. “He’s been really supportive so we got his number and we’ve been texting him,” said Edward in the same interview. Now that is an exchange I would have paid money to see.

   They are rock ‘n’ roll. Those who complain that they can’t sing are missing the point. A non-believer friend remarked on their cover of Queen and David Bowie’s Under Pressure (that has shot to Number One in Ireland and Number Two in the UK) with a cold, “I bet Freddie Mercury is turning in his grave.”

   I’m not so sure. They may not have enough power between them to match even one of Freddie’s magnificent vocal chords, however they must represent everything positive that he once sang about. They are, in every sense, the champions. Hell, they are the Bohemian fucking Rhapsody.

   Freddie Mercury would not be turning in his grave to see these fellas doing what they so obviously love to do. He’d be dancing.