When I grow up I want to be Marina Hyde. An effortlessly cool writer for The Guardian with sport, politics and Lost In Showbiz columns, she is invariably right about everything. One of her recent articles asked if we could now officially claim Tim Burton as one of ours, an honorary Brit who rejects the homogeny of Hollywood in favour of the twisted and bizarre. As a worshipper at her altar I would usually agree with anything she says; if she so wished she could probably make me reconsider my views on genocide and maybe even cricket. However, this time I’m not so sure.

   Set just over a decade after the events of the original book, Alice is now 19 and faced with an unwanted marriage proposal at a social gathering arranged by her mother. Running away from the question and the congregation, Alice falls into a rabbit hole and into the world of her recurring childhood dreams, a world that has been taken over by the evil Red Queen and her Jabberwocky. Alice’s mission is to slay the beast, reclaim the kingdom on behalf of the White Queen and face up to the possibility that the dreams of her childhood weren’t actually dreams at all.

   With the strange and oftentimes sinister characters ready-made in the narrative this seemed too big an opportunity for Burton to waste, and yet somehow, shockingly, he has. It is never a good sign when I come away from a film and think of more innovative things to do with the screenplay than the director has. The script, for example, contained the sort of linguistic riddles that an intellectual five-year-old could see through. The “remember who you are” conundrum began and ended with The Lion King for me, while other gems such as “Am I mad?” “Yes, but all the best people are” exchanges couldn’t even masquerade as deep and made me inwardly cringe.

   Other key moments in the film like the epic chessboard battle between the White Queen, the Red Queen and their assorted knights fell far short of what they could have been. A seemingly obvious suggestion would be to limit the pieces’ movement to what would be expected on a real chessboard; Queens able to move freely, knights only able to jump diagonally, pawns comically static etc. Tim, CAN YOU HEAR ME???

   The closest the plot came to creepy was the loss of the Bandersnatch’s eye and that was more reminiscent of cheaply animated Tarantino than the intelligent eeriness of Burton’s previous films. The lack of depth may also explain why the ending lasted all of two minutes, finishing with the sort of emblematic posturing that Pirates Of The Caribbean did with much more style.

   For once, and maybe the first time, Burton looked constrained by the PG certificate, or audience expectation, or box office numbers. It looked like Hollywood, sounded like Hollywood and felt like Hollywood.

   The redeeming point of the film was, predictably, Johnny Depp, who has always looked more in his element playing the insane than he does the serious. The Mad Hatter, with his occasional-Scottish accent and mild Tourettes, commanded both intrigue and an almost irrational amount of sympathy, far surpassing how much I cared about the welfare of the main character. Michael Sheen, cast as the White Rabbit, would have also been a highlight if he had been given the benefit of a bigger part, and Mia Wasikowska, while extremely beautiful and competent within her part as Alice, was innocuous due to the unforgiving blandness of her script.

   Despite all of this I do think I enjoyed the film, though all I have talked about since seeing it are Johnny Depp’s character and how much I envy Mia Wasikowska’s hair. I think that other people would enjoy it too, but only if you were to disregard the name of the director. If you go expecting a Tim Burton film I would prepare to be disappointed.

   I don’t know what’s more sad, that last sentence or that he’s given me a reason to disagree with Marina Hyde.

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.

There will be a review here soon, of Lady Gaga at the Cardiff CIA, maybe even in the next day or so if I’m on form. It puts into perspective how hard writing can be, how limiting your own language is, when you can’t find any word to describe how mindblowing, how spectacular, how iconic, and how inhuman in her performing perfection Lady Gaga really is. There are no words, just a pang of genuine sadness that I’ll probably never witness another gig like that again, worry that someone who burns so strongly and so brightly can’t persist at her momentum, nostalgia that would be more fitting for Woodstock or Live Aid, and bewilderment, wonder at how something could fall to earth with such talent.

   The Madonna comparisons are shown up to be lazy and uninformed. Her influences such as David Bowie and Freddie Mercury are far more fitting. Lady Gaga, in every sense, is the Spider From Mars. She is Lady Stardust. She is the spirit of hundreds and thousands of people clapping in time to Radio Gaga in 1985.

   There will be a review here, but consider this a pre-review, a reaction, a desperate need to expel the effects of last night onto a page without regards for cohesion or order.

   There will be words. Later. But I may have to invent new ones.

Let’s get this straight. I am vehemently against new bands and prone to reading NME articles in WH Smith with a look of superior disgust on my face before walking home to a soundtrack of Oasis and David Bowie.

   However, once in a while, I stumble across someone who genuinely excites me, who can induce a strange Tourettes-like state whereby I recount the artist/band’s name plus a rambling stream of trivia at people I barely know.

   “Don’t you think Tom Clarke from The Enemy sounds like the love-child of Johnny Lydon and a young Paul Weller?”

   “That’s very nice, miss, but the newspaper is a pound…”

   You get the idea.

   So, Delphic. My first impression of them wasn’t the best, as the second support act before Kasabian at Myspace’s celebratory gig in Heaven, London. Their roadies took a monstrous hour and a half to set up their equipment, pushing Kasabian towards a 23:00 start that would cause me to miss my train. It wasn’t the band’s fault, but I was determined not to enjoy them. They could have come onstage dressed as Cuban revolutionaries on the shoulders of Joe Strummer and I still would have glared at them, silently, arms crossed across the barrier, and muttering about Kasabian all set. In much the same way that I wilfully ignore any band hyped by NME, I chose not to hear them.

   Fast-forward three months and a friend offered me a ticket to a gig of theirs not twenty minutes down the road. Pressured by her enthusiasm and the reasonable price I agreed and, with somewhat less enthusiasm, bought the album, Acolyte.

   It starts with Clarion Call. This opener, like the album itself, starts deceptively quiet before building into something so preposterously epic for a debut that it will have you jamming your head into the speakers, screaming, “More! Moooooore, I say!”

   There are echoes of New Order but no imitation, just pure electro-pop brilliance. Disregard the fact that one of the keyboard players looks like Gary Neville finding his true calling and focus on songs like This Momentary, that are almost hypnotic in their quality. Their vocalist and guitarist has a voice of appealing fragility, but capable of unexpected power, especially in Doubt and Submission.

   Doubt also demonstrates the simple intelligence of the lyrics. Without any of the clichés or laddish posturing that a lot of new bands succumb to, Doubt is a sincere and gentle attack of electro-beats and guitar.

   The real gem of the album however is the single, Halcyon. Halcyon is the sort of song with a chorus so catchy, so flawless, so painfully gorgeous, that I could be tempted to withdraw from society completely and sit, alone, ipod plugged into the wall with it on repeat for the rest of my life, rocking backwards and forwards with my hands over the earphones, salivating like a modern-day Gollum. When I heard Halcyon for the first time I forgot that other music existed for about three days, and it was only due to a technical fault and an accidental switch to Alabama 3 that I remembered, for the sake of my sanity and social appearance, that I would have to listen to other songs once in a while.

   Acolyte has managed to temporarily drag my cynical heart out of the 70s and, were it not for the narrow-minded attitude of Western civilisation, I would elope with one of its tracks and fulfil its every sexual need.

   I haven’t been to their gig yet, but I’m sure I’ll dance like a lunatic.

   Buy it. For the love of God, buy it.

“Apparently Ed O’Brien called me a wanker!” Nicky Wire explodes before the Manics’ glorious decade-spanning set draws to a close. “Fuck off back to boarding school you c***!” Almost twenty years into his career and he hasn’t lost his taste for an ill-advised fight, or an ill-advised amount of makeup. Less smokey-eyed and more deranged racoon, but still as full of anarchistic enthusiasm as he was at the beginning.

It feels like the beginning, in this venue that is the size of a glorified living room. It even starts at the beginning with the opening chords of rarely played Strip It Down from the band’s very first EP. One suspects that some of the venue mistook it for a new song. The next few were more recognisable though, Motorcycle Emptiness, Kevin Carter, Tsunami, From Despair To Where, interspersed with gems such as 2001’s gritty rock anthem Found That Soul, and lest we forget the first number one of this Millennium, Masses Against The Classes. James Dean Bradfield’s voice, that can fill 70,000 capacity stadiums, seems almost too big for the space. It’s a wonder there was any makeup left on the faces of the front row, so visceral was the attack of sound.

The only respite is provided by James’ brief acoustic interlude. A heart-rending rendition of another B-Side, Donkeys, and the familiar singalong that is The Everlasting gives just enough time for the front row to ease their bruised ribs, and for Nicky to change into something more comfortable. “Welsh tartan!” he exclaims on his return to the stage sporting a pink leopard-print mini skirt that an Essex hen night would be proud of. I jest. “You’ve still got the legs, Wire,” was James’ remark and I can only agree. 41 years old and he can still give female fans an inferiority complex. However as James begins to snarl into the mic again, You Love Us has never seemed more apt.   

The Manics, despite Nicky’s occasional pontificating about his politics degree (something that ironically can be attributed to absent member Richey Edwards, who Nicky has cited as being responsible for most of his essays…) and the band’s own fierce self-deprecation that has seen them throw commercial success back in the UK public’s face many times, have always been nothing if not 4real. While other bands merely hinted at, or sang about, revolution, the Manics endeavoured to create one. In a way, maybe they have. As well as an output of nine studio albums, one B-Sides collection, one Greatest Hits, and a scattering of EPs, the Manics can also count themselves responsible for the bookshelves and DVD collections of fans up and down the country and across the seas. JG Ballard, Sylvia Plath, Bret Easton Ellis, and Jack Lemmon sit alongside Public Enemy, Shirley Maclaine and the ever-present kohl-eyed spirit of Richey Edwards.

Never has a gig gone by without a tribute to their lost friend and tonight was no exception. No encore after A Design For Life, but of course they will be back. Back to the beginning and, hopefully, nowhere near the end. 

Seeing Kasabian’s name in lights outside the venue seemed wonderfully 1950s, but the French attitude towards queueing for gigs is very modern in comparison. Running appears to be actively encouraged, even in the case of stairs (or later in the tour a courtyard layered with a sheet of ice). I agree with this method of entry; it’s like natural selection. Those tough enough to withstand the front will get there, leaving a trail of sprawled bodies dressed as half-arsed imitations of Liam Gallagher behind them.

Speaking of bodies, before I move onto the irrefutable greatness of Kasabian, the impromtu support act, Parisian three-piece The Control Band, warrant a mention. Part funk-rock and part lap dance, the devastatingly sexual semi-clad singer had the venue and Kasabian’s crew beside themselves with excitement. How there wasn’t a major delay, with most of the crew and guitar techies (hell, even the driver had a reason to be onstage…) crowded around the lighting desk half-heartedly trying to appear as if they were working, I don’t know. They don’t have support bands like that in Britain…

Then “Aah, Julie Julie!” and the gig began in earnest. It became apparent very quickly, with the quick-fire delivery of Underdog, Where Did All The Love Go? and Swarfiga, that European crowds take a far more laid-back stance. I don’t think I was even touched by the second row all gig, let alone pushed. There was much jumping, helped by a childishly fun bouncy floor, but it was a self-contained, rather than aggressive, lairiness.

Tommy Meighan was on typical antagonistic form, swaggering about the stage like a world leader addressing his nation on cocaine. Guitarist Serge Pizzorno adopted his ‘head down and don’t look at me’ pose, broken only by a spate of uncharacteristically enthusiastic dancing during album track Take Aim and new single Vlad The Impaler. This stage of opposing personas, with Tommy and Serge flanked by the painfully cool impassiveness of Jay Mehler and the nervous head-bobbing of bassist Chris Edwards, cumulated with Tommy returning to the stage wearing the new World Cup 2010 England strip to a chorus of boos in their encore.

While the set meandered through more diverse songs of the past and present, from ID to Processed Beats, from Empire to Thick As Thieves, the encore was an unashamed singalong. Fire, with an extra chorus for good measure, followed by Vlad The Impaler, a song so laden with stomping attitude that it seems likely to explode away from the band as a seperate entity at any second, followed by the effortlessly catchy “la la la’s” of LSF.

The madness is spreading. “Paris you’re a fucking empire!” Tommy sneered, hands aloft. Paris was their empire. With such intelligent songs backed-up with such self-assured delivery, I imagine anywhere could be Kasabian’s empire.