Lady Gaga at the O2 Dublin

What’s with all the concept gigs floating around these days? What makes so many rock and pop acts think there has to be a concept woven into and around their shows?

Is it to make their sometimes mediocre, sometimes exciting songs interesting by association? Or is it just that banging out one song after another in order to create some kind of momentum, which in turn helps to create a rising level of fever pitch, is so old-fashioned that merely thinking about it turns the hair grey? This appropriation of theatrical mores is all over pop like a nasty rash.

Nothing is stripped down except the clothes, and the songs often play second fiddle. In the case of Lady Gaga (known to her Italian-American parents as Stefani Joanne Angelina Germonotta), we have even more intriguing questions to ponder: is she serious when says that she prefers dishonesty to truth – despite the fact that a quote from the poet Rainer Maria Rilke is tattooed on her left arm? That she hates money – despite the fact that she is a multi-million-selling artist, with sideline fashion ranges, and has recently been announced as a creative director and inventor of specialty products for Polaroid? That she's essentially a cult artist – despite selling out arenas worldwide? And can she really expect to be taken seriously when her show – sectioned into four "acts" – is little more than a Cirque du Freakproduction directed by Kenneth Anger?

If Lady Gaga was all about the songs, then things would be fine; although she has, to date, a limited back catalogue (one album, The Fame, and one mini-album, The Fame Monster), she is undoubtedly one helluva a pop star: she can write cracking pop tunes such as Just Dance, Boys Boys Boys, Speechless, Bad Romance, Paparazziand Poker Face(all performed here), and she can sing them without apparent effort and no little class.

It all becomes slightly unstuck when the risible "concept" of the show, via the persona of the star, raises its head: Lady Gaga rolls out linking sequences of trite spoken inserts that resemble badly scripted out-takes from The Wizard of Oz.

Factor in flame-throwing brassieres, a pantomime monster, simulated masturbation (male and female ­ Lady Gaga is an equal opportunities gender-bender), drag queens, fag hags, gimps, pimps and art-shock images of blood and vomit, and you have an intermittently entertaining show from a very smart pop star that is clearly setting herself up as a force to be reckoned with. That she’ll do it isn’t in doubt.

Ditch the pretentious art-project stuff and nonsense, however, and she’ll really be on to a winner.