Four songs into Madonna’s long-awaited Celebration Tour and a technical hitch gives her the chance to chat a little longer than was probably planned.
She tells the crowd about her early days in New York, when she was “hungry, broke and scared” and lacked the support of her father, who wanted her to return home.
“But I didn’t want to go back,” she explains. “Because I am not a quitter!”
You can say that again. Madonna has been many things to many people in her 40-year pop career – as this two-hour, 40-odd song, multiple costume change telling of “the story of my life through music and dance” makes very clear. But through it all, she has always been an absolute trouper.
Most other artists would have baulked at the idea of embarking on a gruelling world tour less than four months after spending time in intensive care with a serious bacterial infection. Many more might have at least considered tempering the ambitious nature of an all-singing, all-dancing show that would be a physical challenge for any of today’s young pop megastars, let alone a 65-year-old pop veteran with a knee brace.
But not Madonna. After postponing the scheduled first leg, the tour kicks off – just 20 minutes late – at London’s O2 Arena, the same venue where she famously fell down the stairs after a cape malfunction at the 2015 BRIT Awards.
Those of us who were close enough to hear the thud as she hit the floor like a prizefighter with a cane that night were astonished when she simply got back on her feet and continued with the show. And tonight she metaphorically climbs off the canvas of that hospital stay to reclaim her pop heavyweight crown, a metaphor helpfully supported by the elaborate boxing set-up used in the lead-up to the show’s second act.
There are few signs that Madonna was rattled by the tense build-up, let alone the lengthy ‘reset’ required after her punky rip through ‘Burning Up’. She may sigh, “This is exactly what you don’t want to happen on your opening night,” but she simply gets her hype man Bob the Drag Queen on stage to crack jokes and reminisce about the days when she traded “blowjobs for showers” in 80s New York.
Tonight, the Madonna show goes on, and after that early hitch, it just doesn’t stop, delivering spectacle after spectacle and show-stopper after show-stopper. With so many stages, sets and costume changes, you could probably see this show half a dozen times and still not see it all (and many of this crowd, who have been on the verge of delirium since the Madonna pop-up store opened in the adjacent shopping centre this morning, seem determined to do just that).
And for once, Madonna – whose relentless commitment to the present and future of her music has always prevented her from playing the fantasy setlist her catalogue seems to cry out for – is here to celebrate her four decades at the top with almost every song a fan, casual or obsessive, could dream of.
Tonight, moreover, she lays claim not only to her own history, but also to her influence on music and the world over the past 40 years. Not for nothing did the set begin with ‘Nothing Really Matters’ and its chorus of ‘It all comes back to me’.
There are nods to her activism – including an impassioned plea for peace between Israel and Palestine and tributes to those we have lost to AIDS – and her trailblazing, via a montage of negative headlines and video footage from across her career. It’s a timely reminder that in an age when anyone with a million streams who gets a new haircut can be hailed as “iconic”, Madonna has truly achieved that status, time and time again.
There are snippets of other people’s music throughout – a snippet of Sam Smith’s ‘Unholy’ here or Prince’s ‘Let’s Go Crazy’ there, plus a surprisingly poignant acoustic cover of Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I Will Survive’. Some of her children make cameos on stage, and even her ex-husbands appear briefly on screen. There are tributes to Sinead O’Connor and, more controversially, Michael Jackson, via a dubious mash-up of ‘Billie Jean’ and ‘Like a Virgin’.
But mostly it’s about Madonna and her songs. Taylor Swift has undoubtedly crystallised the concept of musical ‘eras’ in the public consciousness, but Madonna is no slouch when it comes to giving each phase of her career a distinctive look and sound.
And tonight she moves seamlessly between the different stages of her life, sometimes by changing costumes, sometimes by stepping into a lighted portal that sends her flying over the crowd on her way to another time and place.
From the upbeat early ’80s dance-pop of “Get Into the Groove” and “Holiday”; to the big ballads of “Live to Tell” and “Bad Girl”; to the raunchy “Erotica” (in which Madge is allowed to cheekily, er, interact with her younger self via a lookalike in the iconic “Blonde Ambition” make-up) and “Justify My Love”; to the sheer, irresistible pizzazz of “Vogue”, “Don’t Tell Me”, “La Isla Bonita”, “Ray of Light”, “Hung Up”, “Like a Prayer” and so many others; this show is proof that you can never have too much Madonna.
Admittedly, the lack of a live band does occasionally take some of the punch out of things (most notably on a glitchy ‘Die Another Day’). But on the whole, tonight shows that, just like 40 years ago, Madonna still doesn’t know how to stop, but boy, has she learned how to come back.
“It’s been a crazy year,” she says during a rare pause for breath. “I didn’t think I was going to make it, and neither did my doctors.
But thankfully she did, and by the end all the different iterations of Madonna from across the decades are on stage, the lookalikes hugging each other with glee during “Bitch, I’m Madonna”, while the real one remains centre stage and supremely focused.
Still dancing, still singing, still the one and only Madonna.
