At the Brit Awards later this month, there will be a new one-off category for the best performance ever at the ceremony, with Kylie, the Spice Girls and Take That in the running. It seems strange to introduce the award when Lady Gaga will make every one of those performances — even Take That's Beatle Medley of 1994 — look like a Scout hut talent night.

Woman of many parts: Lady Gaga's outfits have never been backwards in coming forward

The alien New Yorker, real name Stefani Germanotta, is nominated three times and her performance on the night will be the show's focal point. Since each of Gaga's performances is unique, never to be repeated, it seems fair to assume that literally anything could happen, apart from one of the following: playing a double-ended piano covered in mannequin arms opposite Elton John (as she did at this week's Grammys); shooting fireworks from her metal bra (Canada's MuchMusicVideo Awards); stabbing and then hanging herself (MTV Video Music Awards); or playing a giant piano on Dali-esque spindly legs dressed as a red rubber dominatrix version of Elizabeth I (Royal Variety Performance).

Outrageous: Gaga prides herself on her unusual clothes

That Gaga is allowed in the same room as Elizabeth II, or even the X Factor audience (who saw her perform her recent number one Bad Romance standing on a lavatory seat dressed as a Transformer) is a minor miracle. She's terrifying, frankly. She never smiles, just bares her teeth. If you came too close, she'd bite your arm off and wear it as a hat.

In the recent BBC4 documentary on Brian Eno, David Bowie appeared, in the video for Boys Keep Swinging, in three equally unsettling kinds of drag. Gaga possesses that same kind of menacing sexuality. “What are you?” the audience asks. The outlandishness takes her music well beyond the everyday pop convention: the attractive singing the addictive. There's a danger there that's sorely missing from the record company puppets. “I almost want to trick people into hanging with something that is really cool with a pop song,” she says. “It's almost like the spoonful of sugar and I'm the medicine.”

If she is medicine, the public has opened wide. Her debut album, The Fame, has sold more than eight million copies worldwide. She has had three number one singles in the UK — only Susan Boyle sold more records here last year.

Boyle's parallel success demonstrates the opposite school of thought in pop, one that has dominated in recent years with the rise of Britain's Got Talent and the X Factor. Anyone can do it, apparently. It could be you.

No, it couldn't. It takes a rare kind of lunatic to come up with the kind of eye-popping scenarios that she dispenses. Who else could cope with a different hairstyle hourly? Or going to work dressed as a gyroscope? If you wish, you can go to YouTube and look up old videos of The Stefani Germanotta Band playing unremarkable pop-rock in a tiny Hollywood bar — but that would only spoil one of the greatest illusions in music. She is plainly not one of us and that is why she is brilliant.

The last full concert she performed in London was at Brixton Academy last summer. Now she has graduated to the arenas, where her imagination, and that of her Warhol-esque production team, Haus of Gaga, really has room to roam.

Fresh from dazzling North America, she claims to be planning an entirely new production for her UK tour. “The stage is about four times the size of the one we're on now and conceptually, it's completely different,” she has said. She already talked up her earlier shows as “so perfectly an avant-garde-performance-art-fashion installation, put in a blender and vomited on as a pop show.”
Such dedication to making pop seem magical again! Whatever you say about her, you have to admit she's trying incredibly hard to entertain us. And succeeding beyond anyone's standards.

The Monster Ball Tour, 26/27 Feb, O2 Arena, SE10 ODX (0871 984 0002; www.the02.co.uk)

NEW ON THE NET
Congratulations to electronica diva Imogen Heap for a rare British Grammy win this year, even if it was in the slightly obscure category of “Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical”. You can check the quality of the engineering for yourself by downloading her third solo album, Ellipse, currently cheapest in the Amazon MP3 store at £6.49.

Take your pick of the Haiti benefit recordings in download stores. The Hope for Haiti Now album features Coldplay, Bruce Springsteen, Shakira, U2, Jay-Z and Rihanna. Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder sings Springsteen's My City of Ruins on a charity single, and Simon Cowell's take on REM's Everybody Hurts, starring Mariah Carey, Robbie Williams and Kylie is out on Sunday. And reportedly to come: an American re-recording of We Are The World, new tracks from will.i.am plus Shane MacGowan with Nick Cave and Johnny Depp.

The Oscar nominations are out, and the Best Song category shows a preference for old-fashioned showtunes. Randy Newman's New Orleans soul in Disney's The Princess And The Frog gets two nods, Marion Cotillard smoulders through Take it All from musical Nine, and Nora Arnezeder sings Loin de Paname in Paris 36. Personally I'd go for Ryan Bingham's acoustic ballad The Weary Kind, the theme from Crazy Heart. All are available in the iTunes store.