Lady Gaga on being a “headbanging” extra in AC/DC video as a teenager
"They were like, ‘Don’t headbang. We want it to be modern'"
by Poppy Burton · NMELady Gaga has revealed she was a “headbanging” extra in an AC/DC video as a teenager.
On Apple TV’s A Carpool Karaoke Christmas, which dropped in a surprise release last night (December 15), the ‘Disease‘ singer joined Zane Lowe alongside fellow guests Chappell Roan and Dua Lipa to perform festive classics as well as their own hits.
In her segment, Gaga showed a clip of her late grandmother singing ‘Highway to Hell’, and Lowe went on to surprise with an appearance AC/DC’s Brian Johnson, prompting her to recall being an extra in one of their videos when she was a teenager.
“I brought you Brian Johnson for Christmas,” Lowe joked as he let the Geordie singer into the car. “You want to hear something funny?” she said. “I was in [2000’s] ‘Stiff Upper Lip’ video.”
“I was 17 and I was an extra in the back and I was headbanging,” she continued, prompting fans to share screenshots of her brief appearance in the video on social media.
“And they were like, ‘Don’t headbang. We want it to be modern.’ And I was like, ‘No, I can’t. Like, there’s only one move that I can do.'”
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Gaga has often collaborated with rock royalty, having joined The Rolling Stones on ‘Sweet Sounds Of Heaven‘ and teaming up with Metallica at the 2017 Grammys to play ‘Moth Into Flame’ during the prize-giving ceremony, with Lars Ulrich later revealing “she loves metal”.
Elsewhere in the Christmas special, she performed Led Zeppelin’s ‘Black Dog’, and also touched on her more recent duet with Bruno Mars on ‘Die With A Smile‘, which she recorded in-between sessions for her upcoming album, ‘LG7’.
“It was crazy,” she told Lowe. “I went to see him at like 10 o’clock at night. He played me the idea and then we wrote the second verse, then we cut it at 2 in the morning. Bruno had me singing for four hours. He had an exact way that he wanted to hear it and I wanted to give him that.”
As for her forthcoming record, she recently told Rolling Stone that lead single ‘Disease‘ felt like “a way into the chaos of the album, which is kind of exercises in chaos – different sides of who I am as a person”.