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.