'Applause' superstar Lady Gaga has vowed that her impending performance at this year's MTV VMAs will be every bit as huge as her fans expect it to be.

She is due to take the stage at Brooklyn's Barclays Center on August 25 and told BBC Radio 1's Scott Mills that she will be pulling out all the stops for the mini-set:

"We're definitely not scaling it back. It's actually much bigger performance than anything we've ever done and it's much more physically challenging. I'm always going to be as interested in the avant-garde and the grotesque. And I'm always going to be bending pop music in a different way.

Gaga also opened up about her new image (shown below), which is a lot more natural where make-up and styling is concerned, and explained that it was important for her to challenge herself emotionally so overhauled her look:

"But this time, I'm able to take off my make-up now and I'm able to work in different kinds of ways and that was really what I wanted to do. I wanted to put myself in an uncomfortable position."