One of the first pop stars to harness the power of the internet, she seemed to exist in a permanent onslaught of TMZ photos and gossip blogs.

Their appetite was voracious. She wore through so many looks and sounds in the space of three years that one critic wrote she was "speed-running Madonna's entire career". And as her fame grew, the headlines became more unhinged. She staged a satanic ritual in a London hotel... She was secretly a hermaphrodite... She planned to saw her own leg off "for fashion".

When she attended the 2010 MTV Awards in a dress made entirely of meat, nobody seemed to get the joke: Gaga was presenting herself as fodder for the tabloids, there to be consumed. On stage, she was an object of worship for her fans, the Little Monsters. But anyone who isn't a megalomaniac knows that that sort of adulation is a distant illusion.

"I'm alone, Brandon. Every night," Gaga told her stylist in the 2017 documentary, Five Foot Two. "I go from everyone touching me all day and talking at me all day to total silence."

Now 38, and happily engaged to tech entrepreneur Michael Polansky, Gaga admits that those years of solitude scared her.