Classic Pop Special Edition Madonna 2017

CLASSIC POP PRESENTS MADONNA SPECIAL EDITION

MADONNA SPECIAL EDITION 132-PAGE COLL

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THE GIRL WHO CHANGED THE FACE OF POP

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WELCOME THE VERY FIRST 7” I EVER BOUGHT WAS MADONNA’S HOLIDAY. WELL, IN TRUTH MY OLDER BROTHER AND I WENT HALVES ON IT WITH OUR POCKET MONEY. NEEDLESS TO SAY WE PLAYED IT TO DEATH, BUT I HAD A LOVELY REALISATION THIS MORNING 05 WHILE TRYING TO FIND IT FOR THIS PHOTO, AND IT WAS t isn’t just vinyl that has THIS: UNLIKE THOSE managed to stay the course. OTHER NOSTALGIC Sorting through that prized stack of singles from my youth, ARTEFACTS OF MY it’s obvious that the overwhelming EARLY YOUTH – BOXY majority of artists have long since TV SETS, WALKMANS, dropped out of earshot. Madonna, on the other hand, is still very BOOMBOXES, much here well over 30 years after VHS PLAYERS, MY my brother and I first timidly set COMMODORE 64 – foot in that record shop. Even the record shop’s gone… VINYL HASN’T DATED It isn’t simply that Madonna ONE IOTA. IT’S GOING Ciccone has managed to last it out: it’s the fact that she’s still FROM STRENGTH TO thriving, still successfully reSTRENGTH; THAT’S A inventing herself time and time TRULY MARVELLOUS again to remain within spitting distance of pop’s frontline. Not THOUGHT. SADLY only that, but she’s also still FOR ME, IT SEEMS MY shining a light on a cast of talent, BROTHER NABBED THAT oftentimes plucked out of the underground, to help her break CHERISHED HOLIDAY 7” any pop boundaries left unbroken. FOR HIMSELF, SO I’VE Yet – as is often the case with HAD TO SETTLE FOR Madonna – it doesn’t end there. BORDERLINE, BUT THAT’S In the Eighties, she was the strong female voice leading the NO BAD THING… charge for personal expression

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took on female rights as well as rallying to open minds and fight censorship. In the Noughties, she gained serious and well-deserved credibility with one of the finest, and coolest, albums of her career. To this day, Madonna remains intent on questioning the ethics of a headline-hungry press that never leave her be. Her new quest? To take on ageism in its many forms and convince all of us – but particularly women – that we’re not just invisible because of a number. She was MTV’s Artist Of The Decade at the close of the Eighties and last year became Billboard’s Woman Of The Year. In this special edition, we celebrate the many factors that have come together to create such an incredible human being, from her music, videos, films and fashion through to her entrepreneurial know-how and unflinching humanitarian work. Enjoy the issue… Rik Flynn Editor

through sexuality, fashion and independence. In the Nineties, the potent erotica of her Sex book unashamedly empowered women still further, while she

T H E

C O N T R I B U T O R S

Mark Lindores grew up during the golden age of pop mags, devouring Smash Hits and Number One. Writing about the artists he used to read about for Classic Pop, Total Film and Mixmag, he is living the dream of his 15-year-old self.

Ian Wade is a freelance writer, sub-editor and PR who achieved a lifetime ambition to write for Smash Hits in 1998 and has since worked for The Quietus, The Guardian, The Sunday Times, BBC Music and Time Out.

Paul Lester has been both Features Editor of Melody Maker and Deputy Editor of Uncut. Since 2007 he has freelanced for The Guardian, The Sunday Times, The Independent, MOJO, Classic Rock and Classic Pop.

John Earls edited Teletext’s music pages Planet Sound throughout the Noughties, he has also done pop for The Sunday People, News Of The World and, currently, NME and the Daily Star. John also lectures in journalism. 3

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Anthem Publishing Suite 6, Piccadilly House, London Road, Bath, BA1 6PL Tel +44 (0)1225 489984 www.classicpopmag.com EDITOR

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84 D E C A D E S EARLY 1980S: STARLIGHT, STAR BRIGHT 8 Wannabe dancer turned punk-rock drummer immersed in the New York underground to global pop supernova – somehow Madonna’s unflinching desire to succeed took her from making ends meet in a low-rent bedsit to the world stage and Live Aid LATE 1980S: CALL MY NAME 26 A new album through which to express her state of newlywed bliss, followed by a very public breakdown, led to Madonna’s pop masterstroke and universal acclaim 1990S: STRIKE A POSE 44 It’s the decade that gave birth – with the help of Jean-Paul Gaultier – to Madonna the

icon, not forgetting a newfound faith and a collaboration bound for the stratosphere 2000S: HEY, MR DJ 64 A new era for the Queen of Pop in which she took her pop sensibilities into the clubs via two hip producers from both sides of the Channel, married a film producer with a penchant for gangsters, snogged her younger rivals, toured the world and made the biggest-selling single of her career… 2010S: BITCH I’M MADONNA 84 A return to the director’s chair for a bigbudget biopic, a clothing line, a chain of gyms, two brand new albums, an all-singing, all-dancing Super Bowl performance watched by more people than anything else in history, and a whole lot of lawsuits…

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102 COLLABORATIONS PRINCE 24 A did-they-didn’t-they romance, their lone musical outing and more: we explore the on-off relationship between two of the biggest stars the world has seen STEPHEN BRAY 42 From Detroit pal and NYC bandmate to songwriting and production duties, Bray played a major role in the story of Madonna WILLIAM ORBIT 62 With Madonna’s spiritual reinvention and Orbit’s techno know-how, this partnership created perhaps her finest moment STUART PRICE 82 Up until meeting Madonna, Price had played and produced his own material in Les

Rythmes Digitales and Zoot Woman, but together – in a London loft – they created a club hit like no other MIRWAIS 100 When Ms Ciccone turned to Gallic electroclash producer Mirwais, the dancefloor most certainly beckoned with one of the star’s most creative No. 1 singles

F E AT U R E S POP ART 6 The performer’s iconic album sleeve art, from her eponymous Eighties debut to her latest offering, 2015’s Rebel Heart MADONNA ON STAGE 102 Artistic, fashion-savvy and expertly choreographed, Madonna’s tours consistently

break records she set herself – no wonder she signed with concert giant Live Nation… MADONNA ON FILM 108 From Golden Globes to box office bombs, Madonna’s films always divide the critics MADONNA ON VIDEO 116 Built to shock and magnetise in equal measure, Madonna is a true master of the medium DRESS YOU UP 122 We explore the mother of re-invention and examine her ever-changing image IN HER OWN WORDS 128 Outspoken and brutally honest – we pick out some of Madonna’s finest quotes CLASSIC POP MOMENTS 130 Billboard’s Woman Of The Year 2016 faces ageism head-on… 5

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The Queen of Pop’s iconic album sleeve art, from her Eighties clubland debut Madonna through to 2015’s provocative Rebel Heart

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S T A R L I G H T , S T A R

B R I G H T MADONNA STARTED THE EIGHTIES PLAYING DRUMS IN AN OBSCURE NEW YORK ROCK BAND. WITHIN FIVE YEARS SHE WOULD BECOME ARGUABLY THE MOST FAMOUS WOMAN ON EARTH. HERE, WE CHART HER IRRESISTIBLE ASCENT FROM MUDD CLUB TO LIVE AID… P A U L

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Madonna the all-American cheerleader, aged 14 in 1972

POP_UP The song Holiday was initially offered to Mary Wilson, a former member of Motown girl-trio The Supremes, but she turned it down

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most of the biggest stars on the planet – Adele, Beyoncé, Rihanna, Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift, Katy Perry – are women. And all of them owe a debt of gratitude to Madonna: for breaking down the door for female artists and showing them that they could rival the boys in the pop star superleague; for proving that a female pop act could be as involved in every aspect of the creative process as any of their counterparts in the so-called “serious” rock arena; for creating an aesthetic universe every bit as fully-realised as David Bowie’s; and for being an inspiration when it comes to musicians going through multiple musical and artistic ch-ch-chchanges. The story of the girl who became the biggest-selling female recording artist of all time, with an estimated $500 million fortune, 300 million album sales worldwide and 273 awards, including Brits, Grammys and a Golden Globe, begins with her birth on 16 August 1958 – two weeks before Michael Jackson, two months after Prince, her only serious competitors in the Eighties and beyond. Madonna Louise Ciccone was the eldest daughter of six children born – in Bay City, Michigan – to Chrysler engineer Tony Ciccone and his wife, Madonna Fortin, respectively of Italian and FrenchCanadian ancestry. Madonna’s mother died of breast cancer in December 1963, aged 30. Just five years old, Madonna was devastated by her death. Her strict disciplinarian father would later employ a succession of housekeepers to look after his children,

one of whom, Joan Gustafson, became his second wife, causing Madonna to rebel. Although Gustafson was reputed to be the very definition of the “wicked stepmother”, her authoritarian approach is said to have influenced the young Madonna, instilling in her a penchant for order. (Indeed, reports in 2016 stated that Madonna’s own children found the singer “too controlling”, from her insistence on a hardcore macrobiotic diet and outlawing of sweets to the banning of TV at home). Despite the domestic issues, Madonna managed to do well, studies-wise, at Rochester Adams High School, and her extracurricular activities didn’t suffer: she was a keen member of the cheerleading squad, and she showed a willingness to experiment in different fields. While still in her early teens she was invited by a fellow student, Wyn Cooper, to appear in a film he was making as a class assignment. It was titled The Egg Movie and recorded on Super 8, and Madonna was apparently open to anything, which perhaps explains why she can be seen eating a raw egg while another is baked on her stomach, which is then eaten by another student. Although it was hardly an unstoppable, rapid ascent – and there were many bumps in the road – certainly her background suggests someone always eager to achieve, and to receive the approbation of her peers. After graduating, in 1976 she gained a dance scholarship to the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance. There, she learned about Martha Graham, the “Picasso of modern

THE STORY OF THE GIRL WHO BECAME THE BIGGEST-SELLING RECORDING ARTIST OF ALL TIME BEGINS WITH HER BIRTH ON 16 AUGUST 1958

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At the age of 20 Madonna modelled many times for New York photographer Michael McDonnell

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A more relaxed pose from the 1978 New York photo sessions

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dance”, and Alvin Ailey, a black choreographer from Texas who combined ballet with African tribal dance. Little wonder Madonna’s hybrid dancing style evinced the varied influences she had absorbed as a keen student of all things terpsichorean. A local ballet teacher, Christopher Flynn, encouraged her to pursue a career in dance. He also sparked her interest in the arts, taking her to concerts, art galleries and gay clubs in Detroit such as Menjo’s, where she would let loose on the dancefloor. Onlookers described her as the centre of attention while Madonna referred to herself as a “gay man trapped in a woman’s body”. Dance had become a means of escape for the harried teenage Madonna who now had seven noisy siblings at home (her father and stepmother had two kids of their own), as well as a respite from the feelings of loss still lingering from the death of her real mother, and a way of gaining recognition from people she admired. But it wasn’t enough. Having glimpsed a way out of Detroit’s stifling suburbia via the gay club scene, Madonna was now impatient to find her way to “the centre of everything”. And so, in 1978, she dropped out halfway through her University of Michigan course and headed for New York. There, penniless, she paid her rent by working variously as a waitress and posing nude for art classes, “staring at people staring at me naked”, as she put it. She also took classes at the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and the Martha Graham School, eventually performing with the Pearl Lang Dance Theater. Before long, however, she would flounce out of the latter, declaring to friends that she was “going to be a rock star”. New York wasn’t all thrills and fulfillable dreams. Yes, it was exciting (she had never before taken a plane or caught a cab), but it was perilous, too: on the way home from a dance rehearsal one night, she was raped at knifepoint by a pair of thugs on a

POP_UP Legendary dancer/choreographer Martha Graham was one of Madonna’s true idols. Enrolling at her school, she would haunt the hallways in the hope of a meeting. When their paths did cross, Madonna was too paralysed to speak

Another New York pose, with lipstick and darker hair

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POP_UP Into The Groove was voted Song Of The 1980s by Billboard readers while Like A Virgin was named No’ 4 on a list of the greatest pop songs, just behind Yesterday, Satisfaction and Smells Like Teen Spirit

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Manhattan rooftop. She was only 19. Still, she was determined not to quit and move back home. “I was defiant,” she said. “Hellbent on surviving. On making it. But it was hard and it was lonely, and I had to dare myself every day to keep going.” Madonna’s first proper musical venture came when she joined a band called The Breakfast Club, with whom she played guitar, drums and sang. Their track Shit On The Ground boasted some of the urgency and attack of British punk group X-Ray Spex, Madonna’s vocals having some of the yelping high-register quality of the latter’s daring frontwoman Poly Styrene, while Shine A Light was more reflective and new wave-ish, Little Boy sounded like The Smiths four years ahead of schedule and Love Express recalled No Doubt before the latter were even a twinkle in Gwen Stefani’s eye. The Breakfast Club later signed to Ze Records – hipper-than-thou early label home of Kid Creole & The Coconuts, Was (Not Was) and Material – and had a US hit with Right On Track, but by then Madonna had long since established herself as a global icon. In 1980, she left The Breakfast Club to focus on songwriting, keen to make the move from behind the drum-kit towards centre stage, just as Karen Carpenter had done 10 years earlier. She travelled to Paris to work as a backup dancer to French disco artist Patrick Hernandez, of 1978 hit Born To Be Alive fame. She appeared in an erotic independent arthouse movie called A Certain Sacrifice, playing the part of Bruna, a Lower East Side resident who lives with three “love slaves” (one male, one female, one transgender). She formed her own band, Emmy (Madonna’s nickname),

with Stephen Bray (later a producer on True Blue and Like A Prayer) from The Breakfast Club on drums. One of their songs, Laugh To Keep Myself From Crying, was a dead ringer for The Pretenders – Madonna was in thrall to pouty punk-era pioneers Chrissie Hynde and Blondie’s Debbie Harry. Much of the material that Madonna wrote around this time was made available, in 1997, on the album Pre-Madonna, a collection of demos produced circa 1980 by Bray. Casting around for an identity to call her own, Madonna was a sort of surrogate new wave girl cum rock chick with a hint of a post-disco pulse to her music – think Pat Benatar if she’d been allowed into Danceteria or the Mudd Club: not quite hip enough to pass muster as a cool Ze-style artist, but certainly in tune with New York’s hothouse miscellany of musics. According to an article in the Independent newspaper written by Madonna author Lucy O’Brien, “To many of the ‘incrowd’ Madonna was outré” – and she didn’t mean it in a good way, but rather in the sense of “a girl from out-of-state who wasn’t totally in the know yet”. She was more gauche than groovy, trying hard to get it right but somehow missing the mark. Too hard: “The arbiters of cool in this demimonde usually found her a little too pushy, too transparently keen to get ahead, to embrace her fully,” as Matthew Lindsay wrote in an article on Madonna’s formative stage for The Quietus. Luckily, local entrepreneur Camille Barbone, of Gotham Management – the only recording studio in the Music Building where Madonna rehearsed – took her under her wing, encouraging her to write songs such as Get Up, High Society and the ska-

MADONNA WAS A SORT OF SURROGATE NEW WAVE GIRL CUM ROCK CHICK WITH A HINT OF POSTDISCO PULSE TO HER MUSIC

G O I N G O V E R G R O U N D MADONNA’S BREAKTHROUGH UK PERFORMANCE In the Seventies, pop TV gold was provided by David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust performing Starman on Top Of The Pops. Then, in the Eighties on the same show, Associates doing Party Fears Two and Frankie Goes To Hollywood assailing us with Relax and Two Tribes, gave us startling, memorable TV pop performances. But even compared to moments like these, Madonna’s own UK telly debut was as legendary as they come. It was Friday teatime on January 27, 1984, when La Ciccone appeared on anarchic weekly show The Tube, via the Haçienda club in Manchester. This was Britain’s first glimpse of Madonna, and it was fantastic – something halfway between what Bananarama once termed (describing their own efforts) “gimpy dancing” and cool New York disco moves as she and her two dancers grooved to Burning Up and Holiday and Madonna mimed to the music. Meanwhile, we could marvel at the star in her classic early incarnation: black cropped vest, black sawn-off leggings, black ra-ra skirt, wavy streaked hair, big crucifix earrings, and naked midriff. It was an odd bill that she was on – at the bottom of, in fact – but perhaps not that weird considering the Haçienda was owned by Manchester label Factory Records. Top slot was occupied by the Factory All Stars, featuring members of Durutti Column, Quando Quango and pioneering funknoir outfit A Certain Ratio. Below them were Broken Glass, who included in their ranks the rapper Kermit, later to join Black Grape. Elsewhere on the bill

there was Marcel King, a Manchester soul singer with a beautiful voice who had been No. 1 in the Seventies as part of Sweet Sensation, and who was seeking a second wave of acclaim via his new single, Reach For Love. Among the interviewees on the programme was Morrissey, who, like Madonna, was poised on the cusp of mega-stardom. Martin Moscrop, guitarist and trumpeter with A Certain Ratio, was there at the Haçienda to observe the goings-on. “You could sense she was going to be big – she was just bossing everyone around,” he later recalled. Greg Wilson, resident DJ in the early days of the Haçienda, witnessed some befuddlement in the crowd. “People didn’t know who Madonna was,” he said. “She was working hard, but the Haçienda crowd wasn’t a dance audience at the time so what she was doing, with two male dancers, wouldn’t have been what they were into.” The 21-year-old Norman Cook, aeons before he became Fatboy Slim, even before becoming the bass player in The Housemartins, was also in the audience that evening. He recalled seeing “this tiny little American girl, looking pretty foxy” and Kermit and company chatting to her: “Who are you?” – “I’m Madonna.” Said Cook: “She was really friendly, very affable. You have to be affable when you’re on the bottom rung.” He believed it was a crucial gig for her. “That one performance,” he said, “might have been the thing that broke her in England.”

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The future Vogue magazine cover star, New York City, 1982

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inflected Love On The Run. Madonna signed a deal with Gotham, which secured for her $100 a week, an apartment and unlimited access to a recording studio. But the relationship between Madonna and Barbone, though key in her development, was short-lived, and soon their partnership was dissolved. Now without a manager, Madonna continued to write and record in tandem with Bray, although the idea was to market herself as a solo act. They recorded a demo using a Boss drum machine and some synthesisers, full of the sounds she was hearing in the clubs. It was 1981, a great year for music, when electronica was in its infancy and NYC clubland was alive to the sound of mutant disco, hip hop, no wave, punk-funk and synthpop. Madonna was at the epicentre of this alternative scene (she briefly dated one artist – Basquiat – and befriended another, Keith Haring) and she successfully captured some of the atmosphere and energy of the period on a series of new exuberant dance-pop compositions, including Everybody and Burning Up. One night, she approached music producer and DJ, Mark Kamins, in his booth at the club Danceteria and persuaded him to play a tape of Everybody, all bright amateurish vocals – far from the acrobatic melismas of today’s X Factor wannabes – over a functional machine beat, synth bass and keyboard twinkles. “I threw it on the cassette,” said Kamins, “and it worked.” Kamins became Madonna’s boyfriend, and

The newly emerging princess of pop, her early image complete, in a 1984 photo session

the pair moved into a small apartment on New York’s Upper East Side. (When he sadly died in 2013, Madonna said of him: “He believed in me before anybody else did”). Kamins sent a copy of the single to Sire Records president Seymour Stein. The label were sufficiently impressed that they signed Madonna to a one-off deal to record Everybody as a dance single. By November ’82, it was top of the dance charts and Sire had offered her an album deal. Madonna’s debut album, self-titled, came out in July 1983, just in time to perk up a music scene that was in danger of palling since the new pop explosion of 1981-’82. But it was actually the singles issued from the album that helped sell it, notably Holiday and Lucky Star. The album was preceded by the release, in March ’83, of her second single, Burning Up, a rock-funk blast featuring electric guitars and state-ofthe-art synths. Though melodically weak, it had energy to burn, not to mention a video directed by Steve Barron (Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean, A-Ha’s Take On Me) in which Madonna can be seen writhing around in the middle of a road and cavorting in black leather and chains. The single failed to chart but Madonna did promote it by performing at different clubs around New York, London and Manchester, thereby helping to spread the word about this rising star. It was her third single, Holiday, that catapulted her onto the next level of celebrity. The next logical

POP_UP Madonna’s ex-husband Guy Ritchie used Lucky Star in his 2001 movie, Snatch, in a scene featuring a tough-guy roughing someone up while it plays on the radio

IN 1981 ELECTRONICA WAS IN ITS INFANCY AND NYC CLUBLAND WAS ALIVE TO MUTANT DISCO, HIP-HOP, NO WAVE, PUNK-FUNK AND SYNTHPOP

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POP_UP Before remixing for Madonna, Jellybean had worked on Jimmy Spicer’s The Bubble Bunch, Rocker’s Revenge’s Walking On Sunshine and Afrika Bambaataa’s Planet Rock

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step after disco – a slightly electronicised version of the form – it had a melody written by unknowns Curtis Hudson and Lisa Stevens, with Nile Rodgersstyle scratchy rhythm guitar, an infectious recurrent keyboard motif, electronic handclaps, cowbell, a synth-string arrangement and production courtesy of Madonna’s latest squeeze, DJ and remixer John “Jellybean” Benitez. Holiday was, basically, irresistible. Not surprisingly, it became Madonna’s first mainstream hit in the US, reaching the Top 20 of the Billboard Hot 100. It also became her first Top 10 entry in Australia, Belgium, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands and the UK. By this point, Madonna’s thrift-store chic was catching on as fast as her music. With a little help from stylist and jewellery designer Maripol, her “look” comprised bleach-streaked hair tied with lace, fingerless gloves, bra tops, skirts over Capri pants, fishnet stockings, bracelets, and a liberal deployment of the crucifix. Like her spirit twin Prince, Madonna loved to blur the line between the sacred and the profane. The British public got its first glimpse of the new star in January 1984, when she appeared on anarchic pop TV show The Tube. It helped that she had a strong debut album in the shops to back her up – she was clearly more than a Eighties-stylish mannequin, or a glorified dancer. That album had a somewhat protracted birth, though. It was primarily produced by Reggie Lucas, the writer of album track, and fifth single, the sublimely sad-sweet Borderline. Lucas was also the producer of one of 1983’s most luscious examples of modern electronic soul, Mtume’s Juicy

Fruit, and as Warner Brothers’ in-house producer he made perfect sense as the man at the controls for Madonna’s tentative first foray. However, she was not happy, finding fault with Lucas’ approach to production, so she decided to seek help from Benitez, who embellished and enhanced Lucky Star, Burning Up, Holiday and Physical Attraction. The album was a showcase for the new technology, including the Linn drum machine, Moog bass and OB-X synthesiser, but there was also conventional instrumentation (guitar, bass, percussion, tenor sax). Whatever, it worked. From the ebullient synthshimmery opener Lucky Star to the nagging insistence of Think Of Me and Physical Attraction, the album hardly faltered – I Know It was a slight misfire (or a dry run for True Blue, if you were being generous), but that aside this was a bright, bubbling concoction, quite sparse and dubby in places, but terminally effervescent, a new dance-pop fizz for the midEighties with immediate widespread appeal. Even Madonna’s shrill, limited vocals had a colloquial charm, although they were an acquired taste: “Minnie Mouse on helium” became one common trope, while some critics dismissed her as a dance-pop novelty. Jim Farber from Entertainment Weekly was at the other extreme. Sensing the quality of the venture, he awarded the album an A, declaring, “Madonna might have wound up just another post-disco dolly if the songs on the album didn’t announce her ability to fuse club beats with peerless pop.” What her debut did was demonstrate emphatically that, far from a one-hit-wonder, Madonna was a legit artist with

MADONNA’S DEBUT ALBUM DEMONSTRATED THAT THIS WAS A LEGIT ARTIST WITH AMBITIONS TO SUSTAIN A CAREER OVER THE LONGTERM

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MADONNA’S BEST SINGLES OF THE EARLY EIGHTIES

HOLIDAY

LIKE A VIRGIN

This song was most people in Britain’s first experience of Madonna… and they really liked it. In fact, they’ve liked it consistently over the years, which explains why it has charted no less than three times in the UK. First, it reached No. 6 on its first release here in January 1984 (with its original artwork of an old black-and-white image of a couple and a train), then became a No. 2 on its re-release in August ’85 (when it was kept off the top slot by her own Into The Groove) and finally a No. 5 in 1991 to promote The Immaculate Collection.

Forget Lady Gaga and her meat dress – Madonna was causing controversies when La Germanotta was just a twinkle in her parents’ eyes. Still, although the lyric to her first chart-topper – “like a virgin, touched for the very first time” – raised eyebrows at the time, the writers of the song actually had in mind something rather more chaste from Motown’s classic Sixties era for the falsetto melody line: the demo was said to have been based on Smokey Robinson’s style of singing, or a song such as I Can’t Help Myself by The Four Tops.

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© Getty Images The Material Girl with accessories to the max in Chicago on the Virgin Tour, May 18 1985

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© Getty Images Madonna in her infamous wedding dress with ‘Boy Toy’ belt buckle at the first MTV Video Music Awards in New York, 1984

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ambitions to sustain a career over the longterm. That it sold in vast quantities – 10 million copies worldwide eventually, peaking inside the Top 10 of most territories – tells its own story: that by summer 1984, Madonna was making a considerable impact on the pop landscape. By late ’84, via her next series of releases, she began to seriously shape that landscape. The producer she chose to work on her second album, November ’84’s Like A Virgin, was Nile Rodgers, which made sense because Madonna was in many ways the naturally corollary of Chic disco with a new wave sensibility and Eighties vision. Fresh from producing David Bowie’s Let’s Dance album, Rodgers was on a roll. Like A Virgin was virtually a Chic reunion (although they had only just released, the year before, their final album, the underrated Believer), with a mixture of musicians and machines. Rodgers drafted in his old Chic partner, bassist Bernard Edwards, Chic regular Robert Sabino on keyboards and their drumming powerhouse Tony Thompson for sessions at the Power Station studio in New York. But this was Chic updated – Like A Virgin was largely recorded using digital technology. Madonna was ecstatic at the prospect of working with Rodgers. “I idolised Nile because of the whole Chic thing,” she said. “I couldn’t believe that the record company gave me the money so that I could work with him.” As for Rodgers, he had seen Madonna perform at a small club in New York in 1983. “I kept thinking to myself, ‘Damn, is she a star’, but she wasn’t at that time. I always wanted to

work with her and Like A Virgin seemed like a perfect opportunity.” Physical Attraction might almost have been written about Rodgers and Madonna. “The thing between us, man, it was sexual, it was passionate, it was creativity… it was pop,” he exclaimed. He later commented: “She may be the most magical person I’ve ever come into contact with. We were as close as two people could be without being lovers.” The first single to be issued from Like A Virgin was the title track in October ’84. Madonna had effectively launched the song in a notorious performance at the first MTV Video Music Awards (VMAs) two months prior to the single’s release. During it, she appeared onstage atop a giant wedding cake in a wedding dress, adorned with a “Boy Toy” belt buckle, and veil. The performance climaxed – literally – with her masturbating and rolling around on the stage. Cue outrage from America’s guardians of morality. Madonna, however, was quick to point out the ambiguity of the message. “I was surprised by how people reacted to Like A Virgin because, to me, I was singing about how something made me feel a certain way – brand-new and fresh – and everyone interpreted it as, ‘I don’t want to be a virgin anymore.’ That’s not what I sang at all.” Intensely hooky, instantly catchy, Like A Virgin became an immediate worldwide smash, reaching the higher echelons of the charts in most countries on earth, including No. 1 in America and Canada. The parent album saw Madonna go supernova. The cover image captured the artist balanced between virgin and whore while the music found the perfect

FRESH FROM PRODUCING DAVID BOWIE’S LET’S DANCE ALBUM, NILE RODGERS WAS ON A ROLL AND LIKE A VIRGIN WAS A VIRTUAL CHIC REUNION

MATERIAL GIRL

CRAZY FOR YOU

INTO THE GROOVE

Like A Virgin may have been Madonna’s first massive hit, but this follow-up from January ’85 became her calling card to the extent that the phrase “Material Girl” soon became a synonym for the artist. The song was widely misinterpreted as a thumbs-up for capricious gold-digging, yet its satirical quality was just made for the acquisitive Thatcher/Reagan era. The playful bassline, the shrill vocal and the robotic male chorus insinuated their way into the global consciousness, further establishing Madonna as the female icon of the age.

Madonna’s first ballad to be released as a single (in February ’85, the follow-up to Material Girl) became her second No. 1 hit in the US, and her first to receive a Grammy nomination. It was co-written by Jon Lind and John Bettis, the latter the writer of several songs for The Carpenters including Top Of The World, Goodbye To Love and Yesterday Once More. Although Crazy For You was a radical change of direction for Madonna, it was a commercial smash as well as a critical hit, with journalists calling it “the ultimate ballad”.

The song with the most propulsive bassline of the Eighties (give or take Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s Two Tribes), and Madonna’s first UK No. 1, was never released as a single in the US (it was issued as the B-side of Angel, perhaps why the latter reached No. 5). When the record company reissued Holiday on the back of Into The Groove’s barnstorming success, it made Madonna just the fourth artist to hold the top two spots on the chart simultaneously. The only others to do it were The Beatles, John Lennon… and Frankie Goes To Hollywood.

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POP_UP The writers of Like A Virgin also wrote The Bangles’ Eternal Flame, Whitney’s So Emotional, Cyndi Lauper’s True Colors, and Heart’s Alone. All were No. 1 hits in the US for female vocalists

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As Susan Thomas in a scene from Desperately Seeking Susan, named “one of the best films of 1985” by the New York Times

POP_UP Like A Virgin sold 21 million copies worldwide. It’s one of the blockbusters of the era, rivalled only by Thriller, Purple Rain and Born In The USA

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compromise between R&B, dance and mainstream pop. On Like A Virgin Madonna collaborated with her former boyfriend Stephen Bray, who co-wrote many of the album’s songs, including the scintillating Angel, Stay, Pretender and Over And Over. The second single, issued in January ’85, was Material Girl, which managed to become an iconic piece of pop music almost as swiftly as its predecessor, helped not a little by an equally iconic video, recasting Madonna as a latterday Marilyn Monroe singing Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend circa Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. It also had, like Virgin, an ambivalent lyric, some seeing it as a celebration of Eighties conspicuous consumption on a par with Wall Street’s “greed is good” ethos, others regarding it as a critique of materialism. Lust object or feminist totem? Madonna suddenly found herself the focus of water-cooler debates and academic critiques. Elsewhere on the album there were nods to her R&B roots via the selfpenned girl group/Motown homage Shoo-Be-Doo and the cover of Rose Royce’s classic quiet storm ballad Love Don’t Live Here Anymore. Madonna spent the rest of 1985 taking steps in her ascension towards total global ubiquity. Everything she did that year was “peak Eighties”. She started dating Sean Penn, marrying him on her birthday in August. Theirs was a passionate yet violent relationship that culminated with the actor

being charged with felony domestic assault, although Madonna later withdrew the charge and filed for divorce. She made further forays into cinema by playing a club singer in romantic drama Vision Quest; the soundtrack contained two new singles, her US No. 1 ballad Crazy For You, and Gambler. She also assumed the title role of the 1985 comedy Desperately Seeking Susan, starring alongside Rosanna Arquette. The film – decreed one of the 10 best films of 1985 by The New York Times – unveiled the brilliant Into The Groove, her first UK No. 1 single. In April ’85, Madonna embarked on her first concert tour of North America, the Virgin Tour, with rap bad lads The Beastie Boys as her opening act, filling out sporting arenas barely any time after playing hip but tiny venues such as CBGB and the Mudd Club. And then, in July, she reached an early peak, appearing before an audience of hundreds of millions at Live Aid in Philadelphia, where – through renditions of Holiday, Into The Groove and Love Makes The World Go Round – she delivered one of the most exhilarating performances of her career. Bette Midler prefaced Madonna’s arrival by announcing, “We are thrilled to be able to introduce to you today a woman whose name has been on everyone’s lips for the last six months.” Few that afternoon would have doubted that her name would still be on everyone’s lips six months – hell, even 32 years – later.

MATERIAL GIRL MANAGED TO BECOME AN ICONIC PIECE OF POP MUSIC AS SWIFTLY AS ITS PREDECESSOR, HELPED BY AN EQUALLY ICONIC VIDEO

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CAN YOU SPOT A DEPECHE MODE OR DEAD OR ALIVE INTRO IN SECONDS? COULD YOU NAME THE GROUP THAT FOUND A RAT IN MI KITCHEN ?

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MADONNA WITH...

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Madonna delivers her tribute to Prince at the Billboard awards, Las Vegas, May 2016

PRINCE

IF MADONNA WAS THE QUEEN OF EIGHTIES POP, ONE OF THE TWO KINGS WAS PRINCE. THIS IS THE STORY OF HER RELATIONSHIP, AND COLLABORATION, WITH THE PURPLE ONE… P A U L

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n the Eighties, no pop colossi were bigger than Madonna, Michael Jackson and Prince. Of these three megastars, Jackson’s relationship with Prince could best be described as frictional, Jackson’s with Madonna was cautious but flirtatious, while Madonna’s with Prince was… well, in contemporary parlance, let’s just say it was complicated. The Queen of Pop and Prince first met – and briefly dated – in 1985, just before she met and married actor Sean Penn (apparently, she left Prince for Penn), although some accounts contradict this. In May ’85, People magazine wrote that they “weren’t, aren’t [and] never considered” having an affair, before noting that Madonna went to greet Prince with the announcement, “Time to go meet the midget”. In the same interview, she was particularly vituperative about her pop rival: “He usually wants to be treated the exact opposite of the way he is dressed. His outfits say touch me, lick me, love me, lust me, but then he pretends he’s wearing a monk’s outfit. He needs to step back, look at his clothing and laugh at it.” Perhaps Madonna was feeling slighted. According to J Randy Taraborelli, in his book Madonna: An Intimate Biography, the pair first encountered each other backstage at the American Music Awards in January 1985, and it is believed their first date

around this time was a Prince concert at the LA Forum. Taraborelli alleges that the diminutive pop-funk genius had to fight Madonna off while they drove to the show so he could conserve his energy for his performance. “I heard she was pretty aggressive,” Prince’s friend TL Ross told the biographer, conjuring a vision of a fey pop flower being manhandled by a crushing Amazonian. “She was strong. He told me that she had the strength of 10 women.” The couple dated for the next two months, before Prince allegedly asked her to “go steady”, at which points things deteriorated rapidly after Madonna, known for her flightiness, declined to get further involved. Ross drew the distinction between the two stars’ respective needs vis a vis love and sex. “Prince is way too cosmic for Madonna,” he said. “For him, making love is a spiritual experience. For her – at least at that time – making love was just a physical expression. While he wanted to savour every second of the experience, she was into multiple orgasms. After two months, he cut her loose.” Madonna wasn’t used to being dumped, and she is said to have pestered Prince with phone calls for weeks. He later claimed that she screamed at him, “How dare you dump me. Don’t you know who I am?” In the aftermath of the affair, Madonna is

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However, just before Prince’s death in 2016, there was talk of a joint tour. Unfortunately, he turned her down. Madonna’s manager Guy Oseary pitched the idea to his artist and her eyes lit up. He recalled, “She said, ‘I like it, we can call it the Royalty Tour... The Queen and The Prince’.” Prince, though, felt that “the world isn’t ready for this, it’s too big”. By 2016, the hatchet appeared to have finally been buried. Madonna was among the celebrities cheering on Prince’s sold-out show at NYC’s Madison Square Garden; Prince also performed for Madonna, and 30 fans specially summoned for the occasion, at Paisley Park following her gig in Saint Paul, Minneapolis, while on her Rebel Heart tour. Prince played an amazing funk set while Madonna sat at the edge of the stage and gazed up adoringly at the purple deity. Following the shocking news of Prince’s death at the age of 57 in April 2016, Madonna posted a photo of the two of them on her Instagram page, featuring them both clad in yellow. She wrote: “He Changed The World!! A True Visionary. What a loss. I’m Devastated. This is Not A Love Song.” It made sense, then, that a clearly moved Madonna should be invited to honour her former adversary – and possible lover – at the 2016 Billboard awards. The reaction to her performance, which saw her – dressed in the colour purple – singing a version of Nothing Compares 2 U, before launching into a rendition of Purple Rain with Stevie Wonder, was mixed. Madonna, of course, proved resistant to critics of the production, and was defiant on social media. “Anyone who wants to do a tribute to Prince is welcome to,” she declared. “Whatever your age Gender or skin Color. If you loved him and he inspired you then show it!!!! I love Prince 4 ever.”

LITTLE WONDER PURPLE REIGN There were several megastars in the Eighties whose ubiquity and enormity was unparalleled since the days of The Beatles. But who was the biggest? Well, if you’re going to use the American singles charts as your measure – and why wouldn’t you? – and add up how many weeks each song by each artist spent on the Billboard Hot 100 between 5 January 1980 and 30 December 1989, the Top 5 list is as follows. At No. 5, Michael Jackson, with 20 hits and 326 weeks charted. At No. 4, it was Madonna, the only woman in the Top 5, with 19 hits and 332 weeks charted. Surprisingly at No. 3 was Billy Joel, who had three No. 1 singles, 22 hits and 336 weeks charted with tracks such as It’s Still Rock’N’Roll To Me, Tell Her About It, We Didn’t Start The Fire and Uptown Girl. Runners-up were Daryl Hall & John Oates, with five No. 1 singles, 13 Top 10 hits, 21 hits in total and 351 weeks on the chart. And at No. 1? It’s Prince, with 26 hits and 378 weeks charted. Prince wins the Eighties in terms of singles alone

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alleged to have referred to Prince as a “little troll”. She also joked in 1994 that he wouldn’t eat during a dinner date. “He was just sipping tea, very daintily,” Madonna said. “I have this theory about people who don’t eat. They annoy me.” Still, for all the fallout of their short-lived romance, they are believed to have kept things convivial in the aftermath. In fact, Prince is said to have come to Madonna’s assistance in a moment of domestic crisis. Melinda Cooper, assistant to Madonna’s manager Freddy DeMann, recalled that when Sean Penn was with her, in a rage he punched a hole in her wall after discovering that she’d dated Prince. Madonna then called Prince and told him to come and fix the hole, “because you’re responsible for it, after all,” at which point Prince apparently showed up, plaster in hand, and proceeded to repair the Penn-inflicted damage. Whatever the truth of their extracurricular liaisons, there’s no disputing the fact that Prince and Madonna worked together on her 1989 album Like A Prayer. He played guitar, uncredited, on three tracks – Like A Prayer, Keep It Together and Act Of Contrition – and they collaborated on Love Song at Prince’s Paisley Park studio. Though more of an idiosyncratic groove in search of a chorus than a contender for single release, it’s a rare example of two bona fide music superstars joining forces; arguably only David Bowie and Mick Jagger teaming up for Dancing In The Street matches it for Eighties starpower. Madonna revealed that she and Prince had originally planned to collaborate on a musical, “but that didn’t really pan out.” She added that “he seemed to fight the idea of just writing songs for a record together, because he’s done that with so many people.” However, they did start jamming on a few rough demos, and Love Song was one of them. It was mainly pieced together long-distance, because, as Madonna explained, “I had to be in LA and he couldn’t leave Minneapolis, and quite frankly I couldn’t stand Minneapolis. When I went there, it was like 20 degrees below zero, and it was really desolate. I was miserable and I couldn’t write or work under those circumstances.” She described Love Song as “a hate-love song that seemed to relate to all the other songs [on the album] because it’s about a relationship”, then proceeded to elaborate on the writing process: “We sent the tapes back and forth to each other and we started building it. He would write a sentence and I would add onto it and send it back to him and he would continue the story. It was fun.” She was equally enthused about Prince the man. “I think that Prince lives a very isolated life, and I don’t,” she said in 1989. “That is the big difference between us. I always try to be a positive influence on him. I’ve always been a fan. I think he’s incredible. I admire him – he’s quite courageous. He causes lots of controversy, too, which is great. I think he is a brilliant musician.” But there was further tension when Madonna decided she wanted to film a video to accompany Love Song, and Prince refused. Even when Madonna insisted that it would help her get over her divorce from Sean Penn, he wouldn’t budge. Eighteen years later, Prince was still smarting about her. During a 2007 concert in London, he sniped of her brood of children, “I got so many hits y’all can’t handle me. I got more hits than Madonna’s got kids.”

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Madonna in New York on the Who’s That Girl Tour, 1987

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WHILE THE UNABASHED ROMANTICISM OF TRUE BLUE REFLECTED MADONNA’S STATE OF NEWLYWED BLISS AND GAVE HER THE BIGGEST HIT OF HER CAREER, THE PRESSURE OF MEDIA SCRUTINY TOOK ITS TOLL ON HOLLYWOOD’S MOST TALKED-ABOUT COUPLE. POWERLESS TO SAVE HER MARRIAGE, MADONNA CREATED LIGHT FROM THE DARK AND PRODUCED HER MASTERPIECE…

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At Live Aid Madonna sang Holiday, Into The Groove and Love Makes The World Go Round with Thompson Twins and Nile Rodgers

POP_UP Following Live Aid, Madonna began appearing at more environmental benefits. As well as appearing on the Amnesty International Tour, she made her modelling debut at an Aids benefit charity fashion show

MADONNA

may have purposely decided to remove herself from the spotlight following her appearance at Live Aid in July 1985 so that she could enjoy her first few months of married life in domestic bliss with Sean Penn in their Malibu beach house, but that didn’t stop her ascendance into superstardom continuing at a rapid pace. Although she spent the latter half of that year laying the groundwork for her third album and mulling over movie roles in which she and Sean could star together, her omnipresence in the charts (thanks to the unstoppable pop juggernaut that was the Like A Virgin album) and in the tabloids (where her every movement was documented, much to the chagrin of her new, publicity-shy husband) made it feel like she had never been away at all. By the time 1986 was underway, Madonna was firmly back in work mode. Having struggled to settle in Hollywood, she alleviated her homesickness for her adopted hometown of New York by inviting her friends from the Big Apple to stay with her. One of the most frequent visitors was Stephen Bray, a former boyfriend from Detroit who had followed her to New York and become one of her first, and most successful songwriting partners. Inspired by Madonna’s state of post-marital bliss, the pair began writing songs for her next album. “Whatever she is going through, that’s what inspires her,” Bray later told Billboard. “At that time, she was in love so that’s what the record became about.” Madonna had also developed a strong rapport with Pat Leonard, the Musical Director of her Virgin

Tour, and had worked on songs with him while on the road. With the direction of the album determined, Madonna decided she would co-produce the album with Stephen and Pat - garnering protests from her record label, who would have preferred a big-name producer to helm the project. Finding herself in a position she had been in before, Madonna refused to back down. Musical differences with Reggie Lucas had marred her debut album and, unimpressed by how much Nile Rodgers earned for producing Like A Virgin, the already business-minded Madonna was insistent on her choice of collaborators. “She really fought for that and I’m very thankful that she did, because that’s what really put me on the map as a producer/songwriter,” Pat Leonard says. Bringing the production in-house certainly made financial sense, but Madonna also felt that she had something to prove. Despite selling millions of albums, she felt that she still wasn’t getting the credit she deserved from her peers and from critics, who didn’t take her seriously and accused her solely of capitalising on her provocative image. “There are still those people who, no matter what I do, will always think of me as a little disco tart,” she said. Although she had been adamant that the triumvirate of herself, Pat and Steve would be responsible for the entire album, Madonna was forced to relent when presented with two songs from outside writers. Her manager Freddy DeMann had been sent a rock song called Follow Your Heart and Michael Ostin, an A&R executive at Warners, had heard a song called

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Madonna hangs out in New York City in 1985, the year she went from playing small clubs to headlining sports arenas across the US

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Madonna on set for the video of Papa Don’t Preach, 1986

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Papa Don’t Preach which was to launch a new artist called Christina Dent. Ostin persuaded the song’s writer, Brian Elliot, to let Madonna sing it instead. “It just fit right in with my own personal zeitgeist of standing up to male authorities, whether it’s the pope, or the Catholic Church or my father and his conservative, patriarchal ways,” Madonna said. Although she only made very minor alterations to the lyrics to earn her a credit on the song, Madonna and Pat Leonard radically rearranged Follow Your Heart to become Open Your Heart, earning them co-writer status. Confident that she had the makings of a great record, Madonna took a break from the project to fly to Shanghai with Sean to shoot their ill-fated film, Shanghai Surprise, in which Madonna played Gloria Tatlock, a missionary in the Thirties. The filming was dogged by technical and logistic problems, and the persistent presence of the paparazzi led to countless confrontations between photographers and Sean, many of them physical. The problems with the film also spilled over into the newlyweds’ relationship, causing them to fight and argue. Upon her return to LA, Madonna resumed work on her album, shooting a video for Live To Tell. Although she was advised not to lead the album with a moody

ballad for fear of alienating her fans, the risk paid off when it became a huge hit and silenced even Madonna’s most voracious critics, if only temporarily. Papa Don’t Preach, a song about teenage pregnancy, saw Madonna face her biggest controversy to date, sparking debate and protests from various factions, with some accusing Madonna of encouraging teenagers to get pregnant while anti-abortion groups opposed its apparent pro-life message. However, the scandal did not stop Papa Don’t Preach going No. 1 on both sides of the Atlantic. To complement her more mature sound, Madonna also unveiled a sophisticated new look. With her lithe, gym-honed figure, minimal make-up and gaminecropped hair, the blonde with ambition that gazed out from a Rolling Stone cover story proclaiming “The New Madonna” was worlds apart from the streetwise urchin whose style had inspired a generation of wannabes. Her new image was bad news for her former stylist Maripol, who saw demand for her Madonna-inspired rubber bracelets and crucifixes plummet following the singer‘s image overhaul. Her business went bankrupt within months. Madonna’s desire to evoke old-school Hollywood glamour was predominant in the publicity images

PAPA DON’T PREACH, A SONG ABOUT TEENAGE PREGNANCY, SAW MADONNA FACE HER BIGGEST CONTROVERSY TO DATE

POP_UP La Isla Bonita was originally written by Pat Leonard and offered as an instrumental for Michael Jackson’s Bad album, but he turned it down. Madonna added the lyrics and melody to make the song her own

Sean Penn and Madonna on the set of the ill-fated Shanghai Surprise

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Just Like A

ReAM

Madonna accepts a “Vanguard” prize at the third MTV Video Music Awards, 1986

The notion of controversy equaling currency may be a prevalent marketing strategy in celebrity culture today but it was still a great risk in 1989, particularly when it came to religion. America was still reeling from the release of The Last Temptation Of Christ and Mississippi Burning, and anything purported to be even mildly blasphemous was taboo… not that that would have any bearing on Madonna once her mind was made up. “She was absolutely fearless,“ recalls director Mary Lambert. “She called me up and said she wanted me to work on the video and wanted to play me the song. I deduced that the song compared religious ecstasy to sexual ecstasy, and Madonna agreed. She had all these ideas of what she wanted, and the first thing she said was that she wanted to make out with a black guy on the altar. “Before we began shooting the video we had a meeting with various record company executives and they said point blank that they would like us to come up with something else. Madonna’s response was “F*** you”. She said she was going to do whatever she wanted and that the music stations would play it. After that they pretty much left us alone because Madonna had staked out her territory and said what she was going to do.” ”After I recorded the song, I kept playing it to get a visual sense of the sort of story it would evoke in me,” Madonna told Interview magazine. “I kept imagining this story of a girl in love with a black man in the South, a forbidden interracial love affair, and it turned into a story about bigotry and racism. Kind of, this is reality and reality sucks. Then Mary Lambert got involved as director and she came up with a story that incorporated more of the religious symbolism that I had written into the song. There was still sadness but she gave it a hopeful ending. I had these insane ideas about me running away with the black man and us getting shot in the back by the Ku Klux Klan, and she just made the thing much more palatable.” “I was ecstatic with the final cut,” says Mary. “The message worked, the video was beautiful and it was sexy. It was amazing to get the level of reaction that it got. It really was overwhelming.” “I think it was necessary,” Madonna said. “Art should be controversial and make people think about what they believe in and what they don’t. Everything is just opium for the masses – it puts people in a trance. I think it’s good to hit people over the head and make them question their beliefs.”

released to promote the album. With her platinum blonde hair, faded blue jeans and biker jacket, Madonna’s new look saw her emulate the immortal icons of the silver screen such as Marlon Brando, James Dean and Marilyn Monroe, with the Herb Ritts cover shot of the album referencing Warhol’s Marilyn. True Blue was released on June 30th 1986, with Madonna dedicating it to “my husband, the coolest guy in the universe”. Reaching No. 1 in 28 countries, the world’s biggest selling album of 1986 and the biggest selling album of the Eighties by a female artist with sales in excess of 26 million copies, True Blue was – and remains – Madonna’s most successful studio album. Even her harshest critics were forced to admit that she had proved herself a worthy peer to pop giants Prince and Michael Jackson. While her music career continued to go from strength to strength, her film career was dealt a major blow with the release of Shanghai Surprise in August 1986. The film was savaged by critics and proved to be a major box office flop. Undeterred, Madonna put plans on hold for her first world tour, so that she could shoot another film, Slammer. The tour may have been on hold, but for other aspects of Madonna’s music career, it was a case of full steam ahead. Each Time You Break My Heart, a song she wrote with Stephen Bray during the True Blue sessions, became a Top 10 hit for Levi’s model Nick Kamen (with Madonna on backing vocals), and True Blue’s title track also hit No. 1. In September, Madonna was the recipient of MTV’s Video Vanguard Award for her impressive videography. Feeling the pressure to maintain the high standard for the album’s final two promos, Madonna released her raunchiest video to date, donning a bustier with nipple tassels to play a stripper in the Open Your Heart video, while she was the perfect Spanish señorita in La Isla Bonita. Her ability to transform chameleon-like from video to video inspired the title of Who’s That Girl – a song she had written for the soundtrack to Slammer, which was renamed after the song and also became the name of her tour. “Every time I do a video or a song, people go, ‘Oh, that’s what she’s like’ – and I’m not like any of them,” Madonna said. “I’m all of them, and I’m none of them… and that’s why I called my tour Who’s That Girl.” Kicking off in Japan in June 1987, the Who’s That Girl Tour marked Madonna’s first live shows outside the US. She was keen to deliver a spectacle and not compromise any aspects of her live act, despite playing huge sports stadiums. The show encompassed theatre, art, dance and fashion, and critics praised Madonna for bringing full production values to the often soulless medium of stadium rock. As well as a mammoth stage with a grand staircase, moving platform and giant video screens, the show featured dancers and a string of costume changes based on the various guises Madonna portrayed in her videos. Having adopted a gruelling fitness regime and strict diet in order to meet the physical demands of the energetic show, Madonna commanded the vast stage, her electrifying stage presence belying her diminutive stature. Supported by Level 42, the tour was a resounding success which saw Madonna playing sell-out shows each night, while scenes of Madonnamania continued offstage with thousands of fans greeting her at airports and besieging her hotels.

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Performing La Isla Bonita in a red flamenco dress on the Who’s That Girl Tour

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Madonna during the filming of 1987 film Who's That Girl

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Madonna may have been gratified to be playing to crowds of 70,000-130,000 people, but the flipside of her career threw up an uncomfortable contrast when the Who’s That Girl movie tanked at the box office. The screwball comedy – in which Madonna played the part of Nikki Finn, an ex-con out to clear her name – was unfairly mauled by critics, and this hostile reception led to fans staying away from cinemas in their droves. However, the film’s failure did nothing to diminish Madonna’s position in the music scene, as proved by the success of its soundtrack. Despite only featuring four Madonna songs, the Who’s That Girl album sold over six million copies. The voracious appetite of Madonna’s fans for new material was proven further at the year’s end when You Can Dance, an album of dance remixes of singles and popular album cuts and one new song, Spotlight, was released, going on to sell five million copies. While things couldn’t be better for her careerwise, Madonna’s personal life was a different story. The tour had acted as a welcome distraction to the troubles within her marriage to Sean. He served 30 days in jail for assaulting a photographer while she was on the road, and the media – who dubbed them “the Poison Penns” – persistently featured reports

about the volatile nature of their troubled marriage. Reports surfaced that Madonna had split from Sean at the end of 1987 and began a three-month relationship with John F Kennedy Jr. With the notion of failure anathema to Madonna, in 1988 she resolved to fix the two areas in which she was unsuccessful – her marriage, and her acting career. First, she reconciled with Sean, and second, she shot cameos in Woody Allen’s Shadows And Fog and Bloodhounds Of Broadway before accepting a role in a Broadway play, David Mamet’s Speed The Plow. Alas, her acting ability was once again savaged by critics, and her reunion with Sean was also temporary. Madonna, who was relishing her return to New York, was subject to speculation about her sexuality after she was spotted frequenting notorious New York gay clubs such as The Cubby Hole with comedienne Sandra Bernhard and Dirty Dancing’s Jennifer Grey. The group dubbed themselves The Snatch Batch – a direct riposte to Young Hollywood’s Brat Pack of actors. Sean was furious that Madonna was playing up to the speculation, feeling that she was making a fool of him, and an appearance on The Late Show With David Letterman, in which Madonna and

THE SCREWBALL COMEDY WHO’S THAT GIRL WAS UNFAIRLY MAULED BY THE CRITICS, YET THE SOUNDTRACK ALBUM SOLD OVER SIX MILLION COPIES

POP_UP Having played the part of Madonna's father in the Papa Don't Preach video, Danny Aiello went on to record a much maligned answer song from the father's perspective entitled Papa Only Wants The Best

Madonna with Jennifer Grey at Sardi’s, New York, after appearing at the 1988 Tony Awards

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POP_UP Introducing Express Yourself at the 1989 MTV Awards, Madonna debuted voguing – the dance craze she would become synonymous with the following year – from behind a backlit screen

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Madonna in the Dame Edna-inspired outfit used on the Who’s That Girl World Tour

Bernhard appeared dressed identically and joked about the nature of their relationship, only enraged him further. Though their marriage had been turbulent throughout, an alleged altercation between Madonna and Sean took place on December 29th 1988 when Sean allegedly held Madonna captive and beat her in their Malibu mansion, leading to a police report being filed. The specifics of what happened have been widely speculated over the years but never confirmed. In 2015, Madonna gave evidence in a defamation lawsuit brought by Sean against director Lee Daniels denying that he ever beat her with a baseball bat. “While we certainly had more than one heated argument during our marriage, Sean has never struck me, ‘tied me up’, or physically assaulted me, and any report to the contrary is completely outrageous, malicious, reckless, and false,” she testified. Devastated that her marriage had failed, Madonna sought solace in her work, entering the studio to work on her fourth album. Having just turned 30 she was feeling increasingly introspective, and forced herself to confront her feelings about life-altering events that she had brushed aside for years, delving into her psyche and channelling her feelings on her marriage, the death of her mother and her Catholic upbringing into what was to become her magnum opus. ”We called it the divorce album,” says Pat Leonard, who co-wrote and co-produced the Like A Prayer album with Madonna. “Everything took four or five times longer to do as she kept breaking down in the studio. It was a hard time for her.”

They worked meticulously on the album throughout 1988, Leonard working on musical ideas while Madonna drew from years of her diaries and journals to form the lyrics. “They were the kind of songs I was writing at the time,” Madonna told Songtalk magazine. “I was in a very, very dark place and they were just pouring out of me. I just wrote what I was feeling and didn’t candycoat anything to make it more palatable for mass consumption.” As well as the searingly honest lyrics, a huge part of the songs’ authenticity came from the conviction in Madonna’s vocal delivery. The much-maligned “Minnie Mouse on helium” girlish voice of her earlier work was replaced by defiant, battle-scarred tones, often thick with emotion. “A lot of the vocals we kept were the first takes,” Madonna said. “They were a lot more spontaneous and emotional and integral to the music. We had every intention of going back and fixing them but when we listened to them we said ‘Why should we? They’re fine.’ I think it’s because I didn’t have the pressure of knowing it was the final vocal. Strange sounds and imperfections – we kept them all in because they’re emotions too.” Although it had been cathartic for Madonna to pour her heart out in Like A Prayer’s darker, dramatic moments, lighter moments such as Cherish, Dear Jessie and the funk-driven Express Yourself were included to ensure the album was not too much of a culture shock to Madonna’s fanbase. Love Song, a long-awaited duet with Prince (a remnant from an aborted musical they had been working on) completed the album.

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At True Blue cover photographer Herb Ritts’ birthday party, August 1989

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Madonna dons a new outfit to perform True Blue at Soldier Field, Chicago in 1987

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The world first heard about Like A Prayer in January 1989 when Pepsi announced that they had signed an unprecedented $5 million deal with Madonna to be their new face and would be debuting her single in an ad in a simultaneous broadcast around the world as well as sponsoring her next world tour. Described by Madonna as the “ultimate meeting of art and commerce”, the deal was a mutually beneficial alliance: Pepsi had pop royalty in their ranks, and Madonna had one of the biggest platforms in the world to launch her new single. However, Madonna’s main concern on entering into such a deal was that she “didn’t feel used”, and she inked the deal subject to a set of her own stringent ground rules. She refused to be seen holding a can of Pepsi and didn’t want to dance in the ad (she eventually relented after meeting choreographer Vincent Paterson). Also, as other artists had done, she categorically refused to allow her song be amended in any way to incorporate Pepsi into the lyrics, feeling it would cheapen her song. Madonna’s Pepsi commercial, entitled Make A Wish, was screened around the world on March 2nd 1989 to an estimated audience of 500 million people. The two-minute advert – screened in the US during The Cosby Show, at that time America’s biggest TV programme, and during an episode of popular police soap The Bill in the UK – was a sentimental depiction of Madonna watching home movies of her eighth birthday party, comfortable in the knowledge that all her birthday wishes were about to come true. Thrilled with the response and delighted with their new signing, Pepsi swiftly put an edited version of the ad into heavy rotation across the world. Although Madonna and Pepsi’s hook-up was commended as perfectly executed by business analysts, the success was to be short-lived – for the following day Madonna released her video for Like A Prayer, with cataclysmic results. While Like A Prayer is generally regarded today as one of the greatest pop videos of its age, the furore that greeted its release was unprecedented. Directed by longtime Madonna collaborator Mary Lambert, Like A Prayer was a latter-day passion play with a strong anti-racist message in which Madonna witnesses a black man wrongly accused of murder, experiences stigmata, kisses a black saint (often misconceived as being a “black Jesus”), makes love on an altar, and dances in a field of burning crosses. The response was even more extreme than anyone had imagined. Religious groups were up in arms, burning effigies of Madonna and threatening a boycott of her and anyone associated with her. Madonna was typically defiant in her response, claiming the video’s positive message had been overlooked. Frustrated that their plight was falling on deaf ears, the protestors turned their attentions to Pepsi, threatening to boycott Pepsi and all of their associated companies. Pepsi buckled under the pressure and ended the deal, allowing Madonna to keep her $5 million fee but pulling out of sponsoring her forthcoming tour. Madonna saw the outcome as a complete triumph. She viewed the fact that her video had remained on air while the ad had been pulled as a huge victory for free speech; she had garnered herself acres of free publicity, and, despite the controversy her video had generated, she had proved herself a superb marketeer. She was the most talked-about star in

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LIVE TO TELL From TRUE BLUE (1986)

Live To Tell introduced a new emotional depth into Madonna’s music. A brooding ballad about finding inner strength, the song has a particular resonance with Madonna’s LBGT fans. “Sometimes when I’m writing, I’m just channelling,” Madonna said. “I could say Live To Tell was about my childhood, my relationship with my father and my stepmother. Or it could be a story that I heard once. It’s true, but it’s not necessarily autobiographical.”

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PAPA DON’T PREACH From TRUE BLUE (1986)

Papa Don’t Preach, like Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean, dealt with the complications a pregnancy would impose on someone’s life. Madonna described the track as “a message song that everyone is going to take the wrong way”. The song marked a shift in style for the singer, using her platform to generate discussions and spark debate about social issues that mattered to her. Controversy aside, the irresistible track reached No. 1 around the world.

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OPEN YOUR HEART From TRUE BLUE (1986)

Open Your Heart began life as a rock song called Follow Your Heart written by Gardner Cole and Peter Rafelson and was intended for Cyndi Lauper until Madonna’s manager heard it. Madonna agreed after adapting the lyric and style, earning herself a co-writer credit. It’s also notable for being one of Madonna’s greatest 12” remixes. Over 10 minutes long, the extended remix was the perfect intro to open her Who’s That Girl World Tour.

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LIKE A PRAYER From LIKE A PRAYER (1989)

Divine intervention in the vocal booth of the studio helped Madonna create an uplifting anthem which ranks among her greatest ever. “I really wanted to do something really gospel-oriented and acapella, with virtually no instrumentation, just my voice and an organ,” she said. “So we started fooling around, and we’d take away all the instrumentation so that my voice was naked. Then we came up with the bridge, and we had a choir. Then we had it.”

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EXPRESS YOURSELF From LIKE A PRAYER (1989)

Written with Steve Bray, Express Yourself – inspired by Sly & the Family Stone’s Stand – is Madonna’s anthem to female empowerment. While the original version had a pounding wall-of-sound beat and plenty of soulful horns, the Shep Pettibone remix incorporated a more electronic, house-y vibe. Madonna was so impressed with the remix that his version was promoted over the original. Two interpretations, one incredible song. 39


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POP_UP The opinion-dividing “peepshow” video for Open Your Heart premiered on The Tube TV show as its presenter, model Felix Howard, co-starred as the young boy that Madonna eventually dances away with

Madonna taking over the 1989 MTV Video Awards with a compelling rendition of Express Yourself

the world, and Like A Prayer shot straight to No. 1 around the world, proving the old adage that there is no such thing as bad publicity. Controversy aside, when the album was released, on March 21st 1989, Madonna was surprised to find herself the subject of unanimous critical acclaim – something which had alluded her up until that point of her career. NME gave the album 10/10, while Rolling Stone described it as being “as close to art as pop music gets”. “People didn’t realise I was a songwriter as well as a slut,” she lambasted. “I guess the image gets in the way. What am I supposed to do? The information is on the label. If they don’t read it, that’s not my problem. I’m not gonna put a sticker on the front of the record saying ‘Listen, I wrote these songs’! People will pay attention to what they want to pay attention to.” The album’s cover image reflected her newfound musical maturity. Featuring a close up of her trademark midriff bedecked with rosaries and crucifixes, the image reflected Like A Prayer’s fusion of religion and sexuality. Once the Like A Prayer brouhaha had died down, Madonna seemed to be keeping a low profile. Having established herself as pop’s premier provocateur, the very last place you’d have expected to find her was ensconced in the Disney studios, yet that’s exactly where she was, having landed the role of femme fatale Breathless Mahoney in Dick Tracy. Filming the movie and recording the soundtrack throughout 1989 meant that she would be absent from the promo trail and would have to delay her

planned world tour, so she took a break to shoot videos for Like A Prayer’s subsequent singles. By now all too aware of the power of the medium of the music video, Madonna shot a series of videos that would provoke controversy, challenge stereotypes and remain among the highlights of her videography. From David Fincher’s sexually-charged, futuristic fantasy world inspired by Fritz Lang’s Metropolis for Express Yourself to Oh Father’s harrowing depiction of Madonna as a child mourning her mother and battling for the love of her father, from Herb Ritts’ Cherish – capturing a playful Madonna frolicking in the Californian surf with a group of mermen – to the sweet animation of Dear Jessie, the Like A Prayer-era videos remain some of her most iconic moments The care and effort Madonna put into presenting her work visually was rewarded at the 1989 MTV Video Music Awards where, after a classic performance of Express Yourself, she was crowned the First Lady of MTV, picking up the Viewer’s Choice Award for Like A Prayer, ironically sponsored by Pepsi, whom Madonna thanked in her acceptance speech “for causing so much controversy”. It was to cap a year of extraordinary career highlights for Madonna, which shaped the kind of artist she would become, using her spotlight and fame to highlight issues and causes she was passionate about while producing a body of work which was the blueprint for every pop diva that came after her. With Like A Prayer, Madonna not only created the perfect pop album… she also wrote pop’s New Testament.

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Madonna’s early collaborator Stephen Bray, pictured here at The Lilly Awards Broadway Cabaret

MADONNA WITH...

STEPHEN BRAY

BONDING OVER A LOVE OF CLASSIC MOTOWN, SOUL AND FUNK, MADONNA AND STEPHEN BRAY CREATED A GROOVE THAT ESTABLISHED THE SINGER AS THE ULTIMATE DANCE DIVA M A R K

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tephen Bray has a vivid recollection of the first time he met Madonna. “Oh, it was just like that Human League song, only I was the waiter in a cocktail bar,” he laughs. “I was working at a bar and she came in to dance with some friends. I bought her a gin and tonic as I felt she’d earned it, having cleared the dance floor with her attention-getting moves.” Madonna may have emptied the floor on that occasion, but over the next 10 years, as the couple became firm friends, occasional lovers and musical soulmates, they created some of the Eighties’ greatest floor-fillers. Aside from being a waiter in the Blue Frogge club in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Bray was a drummer in a band and a budding songwriter. Madonna became a regular fixture at his gigs around the area. “She wasn’t really a musician back then; she was just dancing,” Bray says. “She stood out, quite a lot. There were hardly any people at our shows but she was always up the front dancing up a storm. In fact, I’m sure people started coming because they knew she’d be there, and they’d come to watch her dance.” Having emerged as a local celebrity with a largerthan-life personality, Madonna felt stifled by her smalltown surroundings and headed to New York to further her career in 1978. Two years later, Bray

received a call saying Madonna was now pursuing a career in music and needed a drummer for her band. Upon his arrival in New York Bray was impressed by how much headway Madonna had made. “She already had 12 or 14 songs written when I showed up, and I just had to learn them,” he says. “Her time with The Breakfast Club [Madonna’s first band] had helped develop her early songwriting skills as well as performing.” After The Breakfast Club had come another band, Emmy; Madonna left when she felt that her ideas were being ignored. Nonetheless, it had been her band (even its name was her childhood nickname) and she had a clear view of its direction. “She was playing raucous rock’n’roll, influenced by The Pretenders and The Police,” says Bray. Madonna and Bray began a very close working relationship, consumed by their music, even living in their rehearsal studio on New York’s 8th Street. “The Music Building was near Macy’s in Herald Square,” Bray recalls. “There were a lot of singers and bands working in rehearsal halls and studios there. It was like living in a commune – a good place, very artistic, you could just taste the creativity there. It was a fantastically romantic, bohemian artist lifestyle… playing gigs at Max’s Kansas City, Danceteria, CBGB’s and the clubs of the time was pure heaven.”

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if she’s not in love she definitely won’t be writing love songs. That’s why the love songs for Like A Prayer – First Is A Kiss and Love Attack – weren’t on the record. She didn’t feel they were real enough at that time.” Stephen did co-write two of Like A Prayer’s strongest songs, Express Yourself and Keep It Together, both funk-driven dance tracks inspired by the pair’s love of Sly & the Family Stone. The latter was an ode to family life and remembering your roots, while Express Yourself was a feminist rallying call to arms, celebrating independence and encouraging being assertive. It became one of her signature songs. They were to be the final Madonna/Bray songs released by Madonna. In 1991, Get Over, a song they had written and recorded as a potential new track on The Immaculate Collection, was released by former model Nick Scotti, while in 1996 Bray released Pre-Madonna, an album containing the early demos they had worked on in New York – a move said to have enraged Madonna, and which put an end to their working relationship. While many of her former collaborators have gone on to criticise Madonna for “using” them on her rise to the big time, Bray harbours no grudge and would welcome the opportunity of seeing if their old chemistry still exists. “I’ve gone down a different path into music theatre of late but I can still find my way around a sequencer,” he says. “When people say Madonna exploited them, that’s resentment of someone who’s got the drive. It seems like you’re leaving people behind or you’re stepping on them, and the fact is that you’re moving and they’re not. I had never met anyone so ambitious, dedicated and driven – she was really inspirational to be around, and that still holds true to this day.”

LITTLE WONDER INTO THEIR GROOVE As the co-creator of some of Madonna’s signature songs, Stephen Bray is one of her key collaborators. Inspired by a shared loved of Motown and Sly & the Family Stone, the classic Madonna/Bray song structure is chorus/verse/chorus/verse/chorus… before – almost without fail – a killer bridge elevates the song to another level. These trademark bridges rival the choruses for impact. Listen to Into The Groove (“Live out your fantasy…”), Express Yourself (“And when you’re gone…”), Causing A Commotion (“I hope you find what you’re looking for…”), Spotlight (“Don’t be afraid to fall…”), Can’t Stop (“Don’t be afraid to try…”), Where’s The Party (“Don’t want to grow old too fast…”), Keep It Together (“When I look back on all the misery…”) and Each Time You Break My Heart (“I see the look in your eyes…”). In most cases Madonna utilises the lower register of her voice for the bridge, creating an even bigger contrast to the rest of the song. Major influence: Sly & the Family Stone

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Madonna and Bray’s voracious appetites for New York nightlife exposed them to many musical styles. Madonna scored a solo management deal with Camille Barbone, and the pair began working on songs. Swayed by the hip-hop and Latin music they danced to at the Funhouse and Paradise Garage, they began to move away from the new wave of Emmy to more dance-oriented material. “Those early days with Madonna were some of the happiest musical times of my life – we finished each other’s musical sentences,” Bray said. “I don’t think I’ve ever gotten along as well with any other collaborator in terms of writing.” Everywhere she went, Madonna carried a four-track cassette containing Ain’t No Big Deal, Everybody, Don’t You Know and Stay in the hope of scoring a club hit. Her breakthrough came when Danceteria DJ Mark Kamins played Everybody. Getting a great response from the crowd, Kamins took it to Seymour Stein of Sire Records, where he was working as an A&R man. Stein signed Madonna on the spot. As she began working on her debut album with producer Reggie Lewis, Madonna was dismayed by how little say she had creatively. Madonna and Bray had a major falling out when he discovered he was to play no part in her album, a decision he was “very hurt” by. Dejected, Bray sold the publishing rights of Ain’t No Big Deal to July Fourth Music. After disco act Barracuda scored a hit with it before Madonna, it was dropped from the LP in favour of Everybody. Following her rise to superstardom and with more creative control, Madonna was keen to make amends with Bray and the pair began working together again. Stay was re-worked for Madonna’s Like A Virgin album, which also featured Bray co-writes Pretender, Angel and Over And Over. As Madonnamania gripped the world and Madonna scored her first lead acting role in Desperately Seeking Susan, she called upon her old friend to work with her on a song for the soundtrack. They had begun a song which shared the film’s title but submitted Into The Groove instead, feeling it would be better suited to the film’s nightclub scene. Though it was the first Madonna song that they had written and produced together, it would go on to be one of her defining hits, topping the charts worldwide – and Bray became one of Madonna’s most frequent producers throughout the Eighties. “I would call her up and say ‘I have another track for you’, then we would get together,” Bray recalls. “I’m used to collaborating with others, so we would work on a few songs, and she would use some of them later.” After Madonna moved to LA following her marriage to Sean Penn, it was Bray she called to help her work on True Blue. He produced Papa Don’t Preach and co-wrote and produced True Blue, Where’s The Party and Jimmy Jimmy as well as Causing A Commotion and Can’t Stop for the Who’s That Girl soundtrack, Spotlight for the You Can Dance album, and Each Time You Break My Heart, which became a hit for Nick Kamen. The ultra-poppy sound of the True Blue era was directly influenced by where Madonna found herself in her personal life – newly-married and optimistic of a happy-ever-after. However, by the time they got together for 1989’s Like A Prayer, it was a different story; Madonna’s marriage had collapsed and she was in a much darker place. “She tends to write according to her mood,” Bray says. “If she’s in love she’ll write love songs,

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STRIKE

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A POSE

THE TRANSFORMATIVE NINETIES WOULD TAKE MADONNA FROM HIGH TO LOW FASHION, FROM SEX TO MOTHERHOOD, FROM NEW YORK TO AN ENGLISH COUNTRY GARDEN… I A N

W A D E

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Madonna and designer Jean-Paul Gaultier visit her brother Christopher’s art exhibition, Paris, 1990

POP_UP The Vogue video recreated a number of classic vintage photographs of stars such as Jean Harlow, Marilyn Monroe, Veronica Lake, Marlene Dietrich, Katharine Hepburn and Greta Garbo

HAVING

begun the Eighties as an aspiring singer and dancer, Madonna entered the Nineties as one of the most famous people on the planet. This next decade would become her most rewarding yet, both professionally as a businesswoman and personally as a mother. As Madonna began the new decade in the UK Top Five with the sweet baroque pop confection of Dear Jessie, she was busy planning a tour in support of the previous year’s Like A Prayer album, and simultaneously putting the final touches to I’m Breathless, an upcoming soundtrack to the Dick Tracy film in which she also starred. It was quite literally all go. As the year started to thaw, Keep It Together was released as the sixth and final single from Like A Prayer… well, over in America at least. The UK were to be kept waiting another few months, when Vogue arrived in March 1990. The Vogue project was inspired by dancers and choreographers such as Jose Gutierez Xtravaganza and Luis Camacho Xtravaganza from the Harlem “House Ball” community. These two took Madonna along to the Sound Factory club in New York and introduced her to their underground world. Voguing was a dance style based around transitioning

between fashion model-type poses, rather as if the performer was being snapped for a magazine cover by a very slow photographer. It wasn’t the first time voguing had had a brush with the charts – Malcolm McLaren had flirted with voguing on his Waltz Darling album the year before – but it had not quite such the impact it had when Madonna got interested. Ostensibly part of the I’m Breathless soundtrack, Vogue flew up to the top of the charts everywhere and has since gone on to attain classic status. One of her biggestselling singles ever, it went on to eclipse the rest of the soundtrack and render it almost forgettable – bar the material Stephen Sondheim had composed. His Sooner Or Later went on to win an Academy Award for Best Original Song. The follow-up single from the soundtrack was the more “in keeping with the theme of the movie” Hanky Panky. Considered one of her lower points, time has been slightly kinder towards it as a saucy piece of Bette Midler showgirlness, offering a cheeky take on light sadomasochism. It still managed to reach UK No. 2 that summer. Madonna embarked on her Blond Ambition tour that April, with an emphasis on touring Like A Prayer. Indeed, the tour was almost named after the album, and was separated into five thematic sections: Metropolis, Religious, Dick Tracy, Art Deco and Encore. Jean-Paul Gaultier, who designed

MADONNA’S VOGUE PROJECT WAS INSPIRED BY DANCERS AND CHOREOGRAPHERS FROM THE HARLEM “HOUSE BALL” COMMUNITY

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Performing Vogue at the 1990 MTV Video Music Awards wearing Michelle Pfeiffer’s dress from Dangerous Liaisons

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many of the costumes for the tour, worked on his and Madonna’s concept of mixing “femininity with a little masculinity… a very sexy mix, a very Madonna mix”. This led to the creation of one of pop’s most iconic pieces of underwear, and a legend in its own right – the conical brassiere. Having been spoofed ever since, it’s become fancy dress shorthand for Madonna, as recognisable as David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane flash, Adam Ant’s white stripe, or Geri Halliwell’s Union Jack dress. Madonna spoke to Vanity Fair around the time of the tour, which was beset with outrage, wound up both the Catholic Church and the Church of England, and had threats of arrest and bans should she dare perform in that area; even the Pope chipped in. “I’m sort of naturally a pain in the ass,” she allowed. “I naturally like to do things that rub people the wrong way. No, that’s wrong. Let me rephrase that. I just like being controversial, I guess. Even that doesn’t sound right. But somehow it happens that way. It’s more like ‘Hey, well, you know how they always say things are this way? Well, they’re not!’ Or they don’t have to be.” The tour went on to gross over $60 million from 57 shows. It was also filmed, and with over 250 hours of footage available the idea was to commemorate the tour with a documentary movie that followed Madonna onstage and off, and work began on editing it into shape for future release.

Meanwhile, November saw the release of Madonna’s first greatest hits collection, The Immaculate Collection. Covering selections from Holiday to Vogue, it encapsulates Madonna’s first decade magnificently. As is the way with a greatest hits compilation featuring all the highs of a career, two new tracks – Justify My Love and Rescue Me – were added just in case any further encouragement was needed to purchase a peerless compilation of some of the best pop ever created. The album spent nine weeks at No. 1 upon its release and went on to sell 3.7 million copies in the UK alone, becoming the biggest-selling solo female hits compilation of, yes, all time. By this time the documentary about the Blond Ambition tour, following it from beginning to end, had been edited by the filmmaker Alek Keshishian. He’d been originally hired by Madonna to shoot some backstage segments for the singer’s HBO special, but then these developed into Truth Or Dare – aka In Bed With Madonna, for those outside America. From starting her tour in Japan during rainy season via the Dick Tracy premiere, with “getting threatened with arrest if she pretends to masturbate onstage again”, it’s all there. With a cast including her tour dancers, an increasingly grumpy Warren Beatty (“Turn the camera off? She doesn’t want to live off camera, much less talk,” he muttered darkly at one point), Al Pacino, Sandra Bernhard and – in an

“I LIKE TO DO THINGS THAT RUB PEOPLE UP THE WRONG WAY. NO, THAT’S WRONG – I JUST LIKE BEING CONTROVERSIAL, I GUESS”

POP_UP Blond Ambition redefined the live experience. The BBC said it “invented the modern multi-media pop spectacle” while Rolling Stone dubbed it the “greatest concert of the Nineties”

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Above: Madonna performs closing Blond Ambition tour number Keep It Together. Opposite Page: the infamous Gaultierdesigned cone bustier

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POP_UP Some 15 years after Truth Or Dare, Madonna apologised from the stage to Kevin Costner for the scene where she mimed throwing up after he jokingly described her show as “neat”

At Wembley on the Girlie Show Tour, September 1993

infamous scene – Kevin Costner, it went on to become the highest grossing documentary film at that point, making over $29 million. Speaking of the almost on-screen dissolving of her relationship with Beatty, Madonna told the LA Times, “I don’t think that if you let cameras follow you around for six months that you’re giving up your soul. The world knows about everything in my life. They know when I have an abortion. They know when I go out on a date. So why is a doctor examining my throat suddenly off limits? For some reason, Warren thought filming a visit to the doctor was verboten – this incredibly intimate thing. Meanwhile, the National Enquirer illegally purchases my medical records. What’s to hide?” Madonna also was one of the founders – alongside Frederick DeMann and Veronica “Ronnie” Dashev – of the entertainment company Maverick, the name being composed of “Ma” for Madonna, “Ver” for Veronica and “rick” from Frederick. Basically, this was her own label and production company, which – like Prince’s Paisley Park imprint – would still be owned and operated through Warners. It included a recording company (Maverick Records), a film production company (Maverick Films), book publishing, music publishing, a Latin record division (Maverick Musica) and a television production company. Madonna’s Erotica album, along with the infamous Sex book, would be the first releases.

Outside of Madonna, Maverick had a decent amount of success with its roster: for instance, the first signing of grunge types Candlebox’s 1993 self-titled debut went quadruple platinum. However it was the signing of Alanis Morissette in 1994 – whose third album Jagged Little Pill became Maverick’s biggest hit of the decade, selling 33 million copies worldwide – that helped keep it afloat past being a Madonna vanity vehicle. Maverick also released albums by the Prodigy, Deftones, Meshell Ndegeocello and UK sister trio Cleopatra – who seemingly existed for approximately a fortnight, yet still managed to clock up a handful of Top 5 hits in 1998-’99. The Penny Marshall-directed film A League Of Their Own followed in July 1992, featuring Geena Davis, Tom Hanks, and Madonna herself playing the taxidancer-turned baseball player Mae Mordabito in a fictionalised account of the real-life All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL) during World War II. Madonna also provided the song This Used To Be My Playground for the film, which gave her a No. 3 hit in the UK and topped the Billboard list. The Sex book has its many detractors, but foresaw the art book trend of pop celebrity ephemera, where it became the norm for musicians to collaborate with photographers. For Sex, Madonna worked with Vogue photographer and chum Steven Meisel, accompanying his snaps with writing “in

“THE WORLD KNOWS EVERYTHING ABOUT MY LIFE. THEY KNOW WHEN I HAVE AN ABORTION. THEY KNOW WHEN I GO OUT ON A DATE”

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Madonna and her beau Warren Beatty are snapped by veteran paparazzo Ron Galella in 1990

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KEY SINGLES OF THE NINETIES

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Madonna arrives for the launch of the Sex book with Steven Meisel, October 1992

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VOGUE From I’M BREATHLESS (1990)

In a now iconic video directed by David Fincher, Madonna took inspiration from old-school glamour, homaging movie legends from the Twenties and Thirties – who are all now, frustratingly, dead. Equally as iconic would be her performance of the tune at that year’s MTV Music Video Awards, where she wore Michelle Pfeiffer’s actual dress from the 1988 film Dangerous Liaisons, in a eighteenth century-themed routine. It has gone on to be regarded as Madonna’s ultimate banger.

02

JUSTIFY MY LOVE THE IMMACULATE COLLECTION (1990)

Basically Madonna muttering fruitily over a Public Enemy breakbeat, it was originally based on a poem by Prince protégé Ingrid Chavez, and was co-written with Lenny Kravitz. It became her ninth No. 1 in the US, helped by the Jean-Baptiste Mondino directed video, which saw Madonna wandering down a hotel hallway in a nod to the 1963 film La Baie des Anges, having a fling with her then-boyfriend Tony Ward, and donning the garb that Charlotte Rampling wore in steamy thriller The Night Porter.

03

EROTICA From EROTICA (1992)

The single itself, accompanied with a frisky video of Madonna mincing about menacingly with a whip mid sado-romp, was the first time one of her lead-off singles had not gone straight to the top, as this time she had to settle behind Boyz II Men and Tamsin Archer. The rest of the singles off the album were all Top Tenners, but she wouldn’t be hitting the Top Three for another few years… hardly a disaster. Perhaps Erotica was simply overshadowed by the rumpo-fest of the Sex book.

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about it freely, we would have more people practicing safe sex, we wouldn’t have people sexually abusing each other.” By the end of the decade, it seemed like Madonna had the last, dark laugh; “I see a lot of things I did in my Sex book now in advertising and I think, well, I was happy to get the shit kicked out of me so that you guys could have this freedom,” she said to FHM in 1999. If Sex had any negative effect at the time, it was that the hubbub surrounding Madonna’s apparent move into pornography overshadowed the release of the Erotica album, coming out in tandem the same week. For the self-styled concept album about sex and romance, Madonna – along with producer Shep Pettibone and Andre Betts – put together a strong array of tunes. The singles such as Bad Girl, Deeper And Deeper, Rain and Fever were highlights, but with the running time of 76 minutes, it was felt to be a little on the long side. It may have been less successful saleswise than her previous work, but went down reasonably well with the critics. Despite declaring she’d never tour again after her Blond Ambition globetrot, Madonna hit the road again in 1993 with The Girlie Show. Admittedly, at 39 dates it was significantly shorter than Blond Ambition, focusing on the places where Erotica had sold better. It was framed around a “sex circus” wherein Madonna and company would perform in specially designed costumes from Dolce & Gabbana. The four segments of the show – Dominatrix, Studio 54, Weimar Cabaret, and Encore – summed up the mindset and spirit Madonna was channelling. 1993 saw Madonna make another foray into film with the quite hopeless erotic thriller Body

“I DON’T THINK THAT BEING IN TOUCH WITH YOUR SEXUALITY IS BAD. I THINK THE PROBLEM IS THAT EVERYBODY’S SO UPTIGHT ABOUT IT”

04

SECRET From BEDTIME STORIES (1994)

With the lead-off single from 1994’s Bedtime Stories, Madonna returned with a sound that nodded to contemporary R&B as well as throwing in an acoustic guitar for authenticity, managing to sound the most relaxed and unforced she’d been in years. She doesn’t reveal what her baby’s secret is, infuriatingly, but there you go. Starring as a nightclub singer in the video, she’s wearing considerably more than she had done for the previous few years.

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TAKE A BOW From BEDTIME STORIES (1994)

Take A Bow featured Madonna accompanied by an orchestra – the first time Babyface had worked with one – and featuring Japanese touches such as the recurring pentatonic strings. As a single it only managed a lowly No. 16 in the UK, breaking her run of 35 consecutive Top Tenners, but spent seven weeks on top of the Billboard charts. As is tradition with Madonna videos, Take A Bow caused controversy, this time with animal rights activists, who did not take well to the bullfighting theme.

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POP_UP Retailing at $50, each copy of Sex was wrapped in Mylar and bound with approximately a pound of aluminium sheet. It sold an astonishing 1.5 million copies in just three days

character” as Mistress Dita, inspired by Thirties film actress Dita Parlo. However this wasn’t just a catalogue of staged cover shoots – this was more akin to the muckier end of the photo book spectrum, focusing on influences such as the provocative glimpses of Guy Bourdin and the hyperstylised pervery of Helmut Newton. The project was described as “groundbreaking”, despite the presence of some genuinely beautiful people – Isabella Rossellini, Big Daddy Kane, Naomi Campbell, Joey Stefano, Udo Kier, Tatiana von Fürstenberg and nightclub owner Ingrid Casares – getting up to various forms of unsavouriness (Madonna being licked by Vanilla Ice was one image no one whatsover was desperate to see again). Certainly a classy object unopened, Sex came in a special silver polythene bag – an idea Madonna had based on PiL’s Metal Box packaging – and has gone on to be a collectors piece. Viewed 25 years on, academics reckon it represents a defining moment in Madonna’s career. Certainly it had a deep impact on culture, and is considered a bold, post-feminist work of art. Indeed, for all the artiness, Sex dealt with its subject matter honestly and frankly in a way that had only been skirted around in pop up until then. Ultimately, despite all the images of Madonna looking to be anything but in control, it seems she very much was. She was suitably forthright when she tackled the backlash around the book. “I don’t think sex is bad. I don’t think nudity is bad,” she pointed out. “I don’t think that being in touch with your sexuality and being able to talk about it is bad. I think the problem is that everybody’s so uptight about it and have turned it into something bad when it isn’t. If people could talk

RAY OF LIGHT From RAY OF LIGHT (1998)

Lyrically Ray Of Light is based on an early Seventies track called Sepheryn by English folk music duo Curtiss Maldoon (William Orbit had worked with Maldoon’s niece). Madonna reworked it into one of her more colossal electronic toe-tappers aided by a frantic hyper coloured Koyaanisqatsi-influenced video, directed by Jonas Åkerlund, which was basically “a day in the life of the earth to show that we are rushing forward to the end of the century at full speed”. It’s impossible to stay still to. 53


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POP_UP Truth Or Dare and With Honors director Alek Keshishian went on to direct 2006’s Love And Other Disasters and co-wrote 2011’s W.E. with Madonna

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The singer in a still from Body Of Evidence, 1993

Of Evidence, in which she co-starred with William Dafoe and Julianne Moore. It was universally panned and vanished instantly from the box office. “I’m disappointed in it,” admitted Madonna later that year, “but I’m not sorry I did it. I think I did a good job. But I got the blame for everything. It was like I wrote it, produced it, directed it, and I was the only one acting in it, you know?” Body Of Evidence was followed by the Abel Ferrera-directed Dangerous Game, a Maverick production costarring Harvey Kietel and James Russo. This time the critics were slightly kinder to Madonna’s portrayal of Sarah Jennings, an actor in a marital drama. In Japan it was released as Body II, even though it had nothing in common with Body Of Evidence bar the presence of Madonna. Madonna helped Alek Keshishian again when he released his first feature film With Honors in 1994. A slight comedy drama starring Joe Pesci, Brendan Fraser and Patrick Dempsey, it bombed at the box office but gave Madonna a hit single with I’ll Remember. This time, wisely, she steered clear from being in front of the camera. During the same period, Madonna appeared on The Late Show With David Letterman. Having set the tone with his opening monologue of “Our first guest tonight is one of the biggest stars in the world, and in the past 10 years she has sold over 80 million

albums, starred in countless films and slept with some of the biggest names in the entertainment industry”, Madonna walked on with a pair of knickers in her hand, which she asked him to sniff. Then she lit up a cigar and started swearing like a navvy. The episode became the most censored show in US talk-show history, yet also handily the surrounding controversy gave the show one of its highest ratings ever. Madonna’s sixth album, Bedtime Stories, followed in October, having been heralded by the single Secret a month before. This time Madonna collaborated with Dallas Austin, Babyface, Dave “Jam” Hall, and Nellee Hooper on a selection of tunes designed to move the artist back towards a more mainstream sound. The first two single releases off the album – Secret and Take A Bow – were a step away from the shenanigans of the Erotica era, and sounded unforced and agenda-free. Human Nature, meanwhile, saw Madonna taking on her critics, echoing her earlier rallying cry of “Express yourself” but adding “don’t repress yourself”, as if a nod to the reception and fuss her recent work had provoked. Over a sampled beat of Main Source’s What You Need, Madonna is unapologetic about talking about sex. It’s basically her Je Ne Regrette Rien… albeit delivered in a video medium while wearing a PVC catsuit. When discussing the album with The Face, and asked whether she’d gone as far as she could

ON BEDTIME STORIES MADONNA COLLABORATED ON A SELECTION OF TUNES DESIGNED TO MOVE TOWARDS A MORE MAINSTREAM SOUND

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Madonna attends the premiere of With Honors, Los Angeles, April 26 1994

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Performing Bedtime Story at the Brit Awards at the Alexandra Palace in London, 1995

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with the whole sex thing, Madonna replied “I feel I’ve been misunderstood. I tried to make a statement about feeling good about yourself and exploring your sexuality, but people took it to mean that everyone should go out on a f***-fest and have sex with everyone, and that I was going to be the leader of that. So I decided to leave it alone because that’s what everyone ended up concentrating on. Sex is such a taboo subject and it’s such a distraction that I’d rather not even offer it up.” The almost-titletrack Bedtime Story was a cowrite with Björk, Nellee Hooper and Marius De Vries, and was a nod to the dance sounds coming from the UK around that period; Madonna performed it when she appeared at the 1995 Brit Awards. One of her lowest-charting singles in the US, it was a first hint of the sound she’d fully explore with Ray Of Light a few years later. Something To Remember helped heal any sales rift between any fans who were feeling increasingly adrift while Madonna was being a sexual warrior looking set for the dumper. It was ostensibly a compilation of her finest mellower moments, with selections such as Crazy For You, Oh Father and Live To Tell spanning her career, alongside one-offs – This Used To Be My Playground, I’ll Remember – recorded for movies. Madonna also recorded a handful of new numbers, working with Canadian producer/songwriter

David Foster, known more for his work with Barbra Streisand, Earth Wind & Fire, Chicago and on the soundtracks to Top Gun and St Elmo’s Fire. This yielded One More Chance (a UK No. 11) and You’ll See (a UK No. 5). She also worked with Massive Attack and Nellee Hooper on a cover of Marvin Gaye’s I Want You. Their downtempo collaboration bookended the album, and was also a canny tipof-the-hat to the sounds emerging from Bristol, such as Massive Attack cohort Tricky, and Portishead. Something To Remember helped remind people there was more to Madonna than her detractors had previously believed. It helped reposition her back as a pop force, during an era of dance one-hit wonders and the resurgence of guitars and Britpop. Madonna kept it quite gentle on the next few singles too, as the soundtrack to her starring role as Eva Perón in the cinematic version of Evita required her to belt out some of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s – and indeed musical theatre’s – best-known numbers. She made a good fist of Don’t Cry For Me Argentina, and was rewarded with the Christmas No. 3 for her efforts, following the new song – You Must Love Me – especially written by Lloyd Webber along with Tim Rice for the film adaptation, and which would go on to win an Academy Award for Best Original Song. The film itself, directed by Oliver Stone, and co-starring Antonio Banderas as Ché (allowing

SOMETHING TO REMEMBER HELPED REPOSITION MADONNA AS A POP FORCE DURING THE ERA OF ONE-HIT WONDERS, GUITARS AND BRITPOP

POP_UP Others who took part in Evita – hailed by some as the best musical of the Nineties – included Procol Harum’s Gary Brooker, The Corrs’ Andrea Corr, and Jimmy Nail

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Madonna as Eva Perón on the set of Evita with director Alan Parker, 1996

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POP_UP Ray Of Light swept up the prizes, winning four Grammys (including Madonna‘s first non-video Grammy), six MTV Video Awards, two ASCAP awards and numerous international trophies

Picking up a Golden Globe for the song Masterpiece from the film W.E., 2011

us to marvel at his take on Oh What A Circus, having known the definitive David Essex version) and Jonathan Pryce as Juan Perón. Released on Christmas Day in the States, Evita also did excellent business at the box office, grossing $141 million worldwide, and winning Madonna the Best Actress – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy award at the ’97 Golden Globes. With the birth of Lourdes Maria Ciccone Leon in October 1996, Madonna spent much of 1997 retreating from the limelight to focus on being a mum, and have a wellearned few months off. It was also around this time when she took a keen interest in Kabbalah – a religion with its roots in Judaism, which on-off chum Sandra Bernhard had introduced her to, and she investigated facets of various other Eastern religions. She also parted ways with Lourdes’ father Carlos Leon that May, after a three-year relationship. Also this year, Madonna was deeply affected by the sudden deaths of both Gianni Versace and Princess Diana. Paying tribute to the designer – and close friend – with a poem at his memorial and piece in Time magazine, she signed off with “I’m going to miss you, Gianni. We’re all going to miss you. But I’ve got a pocketful of memories in my Versace jeans, and they’re not going anywhere.” She remembered Princess Diana in a speech she gave while presenting an award at the 1997 VMAs, and also in an interview with The Times immediately

after the accident: “People say that if she had been travelling with her sons, it would have been all right, but that’s bullshit. They don’t draw the line like that… when I came to Europe to promote Evita, I was in Rome and the paparazzi didn’t even give me time to strap my baby into the car. We were driving at about 90 miles per hour, and we were being followed, and flanked and surrounded”. Princess Diana was, as Madonna said herself to the New Musical Express, “the only person who had it worse than me”. The first musical sign of post-motherhood Madonna emerged with the release of the single Frozen in early 1998. The lead tune from her next album Ray Of Light, the Chris Cunningham video saw Madonna being all ethereal and spookily cloaked in McQueen, before turning into a flock of birds and a dog at various points. It was her sixth UK No. 1 and the first time she’d returned to the top since 1990 with Vogue. The album, Ray Of Light, was released in February 1998 to extremely positive reviews. Many critics hailed it as Madonna’s most adventurous album to date, applauding its maturity and claiming it to be her most personal work yet. Working with William Orbit (Madonna had been a huge fan of his Strange Cargo albums) had allowed Madonna to stretch out vocally, her voice far more impressive now in range and warmth after the training she underwent for the filming of Evita; across trancier, techno, doofier textures, it

RAY OF LIGHT WAS RELEASED IN FEBRUARY 1998, AND MANY CRITICS HAILED IT AS MADONNA’S MOST ADVENTUROUS ALBUM TO DATE

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Madonna in a still from the video for Ray Of Light, 1998

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Performing at the 41st Grammys in 1990, where she won four awards

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I’ve never known because I grew up without a mother. I mean, I did have my father… but I think that the love that you got from a mother is quite different. It’s had a huge impact on me, as I suppose it has on everyone who has children.” The album went to the top of the charts worldwide, far eclipsing the sales of her last few albums, and won a Grammy for Best Pop Album the following year, with the title track winning Best Dance Recording and Best Short Form Music Video categories too. The album was also seen as something of a breakthrough for electronic music in America, with it becoming one of the key inspirations in what would become the next decade’s musical preoccupation, EDM. Quiet – by her standards – but not fully taking time out in 1999, Madonna popped up to release Beautiful Stranger, which was the William Orbit-produced theme tune to the Mike Myers film Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, and filmed a video with the buck-toothed fancy dress trope. She was also in front of the camera again, beginning work on The Next Best Thing with Rupert Everett. Madonna wouldn’t tour Ray Of Light for another couple of years, as she was focused on bringing up Lourdes and her new relationship with British film director Guy Ritchie; she’d even upped sticks and moved to London in order to do so. After a frantic Nineties, life was at last settling down a little, and she even managed a holiday (her first in a decade) and enjoyed a Guinness at her local. “Never in a million years could I have imagined myself sitting in a pub, drinking,” she said in 2000… showing that you can never really second-guess what Madonna, the mother of invention, will do next.

“I’M TRYING TO AFFECT PEOPLE IN A QUIETER WAY. I SET OUT TO BE HONEST. I WAS ONLY TRYING TO DEAL WITH THE TRUTH RIGHT NOW”

KEEP IT TOGETHER Prince! Britney! Gorillaz! Pet Shop Boys! Drake! All the stars of the ages have worked or been involved in an onstage snog-up with Madonna at some point over her career. Here are a few of the more interesting collaborations and dalliances she had in the Nineties.

VANILLA ICE

Mr Ice was literally still quite hot back in 1992, both famewise and lookswise. Although he may not have turned up on any of her tunes, you can see him mid-clothes falling off in Madonna's Sex book, and he also pops up in the Erotica video.

LENNY KRAVITZ

Len was still quite a new name back in 1990, after his 1989 debut Let Love Rule had propelled his hippy ways and throwback-rock to moderate success. He co-wrote and produced Madonna's Justify My Love, as well as wordlessly ad-libbing along in the background.

WARREN BEATTY

Madonna and Warren were "a thing" back in the pre-celeb couple portmenteau era - would they have been MadWar or Madotty? Hmmm - and as well as starring in Dick Tracy together, he pops up to croon along with her on Now I'm Following You.

WAS (NOT WAS)

ORBITAL

EVERLAST

JIMMY NAIL

Well... Not strictly the case, however a pre-fame Madonna recorded vocals for the Was brother's tune Shake Your Head, but when they originally released it, they'd shorn her off the track. Then in 1993, the brothers approached Madonna about releasing their version with her, and she refused. So then they asked Kim Basinger, and it became a global hit. Fancy that! Everlast was at the height of his faux-Irish bro-rap rock fame as part of House of Pain, whose Jump Around had been genuinely everywhere in 1992-3. He turns up on a remix of Waiting and "drops" a verse…

TUPAC

Believe it! Madonna made a demo of Bedtime Stories track I'd Rather Be Your Lover with Shakur, the deceased-yetstill-popular rapper. She settled on the version with Meshell Ndegeocello instead, but their version is up online now.

MASSIVE ATTACK

The Bristol then-three-piece provided the grittily luxurious trip hop backing for Madonna's cover of Marvin Gaye's I Want You, which tops-and-tails her Something To Remember collection, released in 1995.

POP_UP Madonna abandoned her final movie project of the Nineties, Music Of The Heart, leaving the main role to Meryl Streep – who had originally been in line to play Evita

was her most electronic album yet, giving nods to all the other elements such as drum’n’bass and trip hop. Previous subjects that had populated Madonna’s oeuvre that decade were brushed aside, with songs named after JG Ballard novels, motherhood and Madonna’s increasing interest in spirituality, with Shanti/Ashtangi even featuring her singing in Hindu Sanskrit. As befits an album that had the working title of Mantra, she handled it wonderfully. “I’m trying to affect people in a quieter way,” she said of Ray Of Light to Vanity Fair. “I set out to be honest about where I am now. I was only trying to deal with my truth right now.” The singles were also among the finest she’s pulled from an album. The Ballard-titled Drowned World/ Substitute For Love followed the title track as a single in Europe, and was accompanied by a nightmarish video of Madonna emerging from London’s Claridge’s Hotel and chased around by paparazzi, encountering distorted faces and sneaky maids, with definite parallels with the sort of harassment Princess Diana had faced. The elegant swelling orchestra-assisted Power Of GoodBye followed, and is one of her finest ballads. Also, a welcome respite for the Madonna fans who feared she’d gone completely rave. Nothing Really Matters, by contrast, is the most straightforward four-to-the-floor dance number, and became a single over a year after the album had first come out. The song was essentially about Lourdes, and when asked about it in an interview with Miranda Sawyer in Q, Madonna talked about the unconditional love she felt for her daughter.”She doesn’t know about me being famous. She hasn’t got a clue. And it’s completely unconditional love, which

Okay, not an actual collaboration, more of a remix. I mean, light-up spook-spec techno brother duo Orbital only remixed Bedtime Story into a tremendous banger. We could have singled out Junior Vasquez, Masters At Work, Stereo MCs, Sasha, Luke Slater, Kruder & Dorfmeister, even producer William Orbit, who remixed a fair few. Well to be fair, it was the soundtrack to Evita, and it was not just the Ain't No Doubt hitmaker, but also Jonathan Pryce, Antonio Banderas and Andrea Corr who featured on tracks with Madonna. It's not like they made a whole album together or anything. Imagine.

DEEPAK CHOPRA

In 1998, Deepak Chopra asked some chums to read the mystical love poems of thirteenth century Persian writer Rumi for the snappily titled album Gift of Love: Deepak & Friends Present Music Inspired By the Love Poems of Rumi. Madonna pops up on the tune Bittersweet, and there's also people such as Jared Harris and Demi Moore involved across 36 tracks operating very much in the arena of New Age, but it's nothing particularly whistle-able. 61


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Caption

MADONNA WITH...

WILLIAM ORBIT

GUIDING MADONNA THROUGH WHAT MANY FEEL IS HER FINEST ALBUM, PRODUCER WILLIAM ORBIT HELPED THE QUEEN OF POP SWAP SEXUALITY FOR SPIRITUALITY… M A R C

T

A N D R E W S

he sheer breadth of work that Madonna has created with the assistance of producer and songwriter William Orbit is remarkable. Their partnership may have been the longest collaboration of her entire career, and yet the strangest thing about this hugely influential musical hookup is that it ran successfully for a number of years without the two ever actually meeting. It all began in 1990, when Orbit – then a visual artist, studio owner and member of the band Torch Song – was selected to remix Madonna’s seductive sonnet Justify My Love. Two years later he was chosen to attach his edgy post-rave sound to the Erotica single, yet events still intervened to stop the two meeting, let alone booking studio time together. But as she moved into her second decade as a global superstar it was becoming evident that one of Madonna’s greatest talents was being a zeitgeist catalyst, knowing when to work with the right people… and she was about to accelerate her relationship with Orbit at exactly the right time. There had been reports Madonna was planning an album of lullabies after the birth of her first child, Lourdes, in 1996, or that it would be influenced by her interest in Kabbalah, an esoteric offshoot of Judaism which had taken Hollywood by storm. Yet the

collaboration between Madonna and Orbit – who finally met in the summer of 1997 – miraculously combined all of that and brought out the best in both of them. Together they fashioned a timeless, classic work of spiritual pop art that embodied the hopes, aspirations and newly mature investigations of a new mother. Released in February 1998, the album was called Ray Of Light. The album’s singles encapsulated its mastery, range and cosmic connections. The spooky yet sumptuous Frozen picked up where Bedtime Story had left off; the kinetic killer title track won MTV’s Best Video of the Year Award. Then there was the stirring, wistful electro-ballad The Power Of Good-bye, the new age house banger Nothing Really Matters, and the eradefining opener Drowned World (Substitute For Love). NME gave the album 8/10, Entertainment Weekly rated it A-, and Rolling Stone awarded it four stars. But anyone assuming that the producer was the one in charge would be dead wrong: “The one with all the equipment is assumed to be pressing all the buttons, but she presses all the buttons,” Orbit told GQ. “She hasn’t shouted about her musical abilities but she is the consummate songwriter.” Sales-wise, Ray Of Light returned Madonna back to stratospheric numbers. Collecting an armful of

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commitments that took up the artist’s limited time, such as perfume ranges and teen fashion contests and other such endeavours which are beyond my own limited understanding of pop star agendas”. A month later Orbit formally and remorsefully apologised for his outburst, tweeting: “The MDNA comments. I should not have said them publicly. I see that and I regret that I said online. Not fair to M.” This was to be the last time the two would work together. As it transpired, post-MDNA fallout, both Madonna and Orbit turned out to be winners of sorts. Album extra Masterpiece, written for her full-length movie directorial debut W.E. and produced by Orbit, won her a Golden Globe for Best Song. Orbit, meanwhile, threw Chris Brown one of the MDNA offcuts Madonna had passed on: Don’t Wake Me Up wound up a platinum-selling single globally and one of the first bona fide crossover EDM hits in the US. Since then Orbit has gone on to work with two other former Madonna BFFs, namely Britney Spears and, posthumously, Michael Jackson (teaming up for 2014’s Queen collaboration There Must Be More To Life Than This). While many still hold out hope for further collaborations, it appears the pair’s working life together, stretched across three decades, came to a close in an organic fashion. Whether or not that remains the case, their trippy, hippychick electronica opus Ray Of Light still shines as one of the greatest albums of all time. Rolling Stone puts it at #367 in their rankings, while Q more kindly opts for #17. “With William, we’ve worked on stuff for so many years that we kind of finish each other’s sentences,” Madonna said of her special relationship with Orbit. “He knows my taste and what I like. Magic happens when we get into a recording studio together.”

LITTLE WONDER IN ORBIT WITH WILLIAM Two years Madonna’s senior, Orbit – real name William Mark Wainwright – found his calling when he got a job at a London recording studio. After being spotted by a model scout he met fellow poser Hamish Bowles (now an editor for Vogue) and the duo started a band, Torch Song. Orbit set up his own recording outfit, Guerilla Studios, and throughout the Eighties he orchestrated arty projects with a musical bent, including, funnily enough, Malcolm McLaren’s Deep In Vogue. At the end of the decade he formed Bassomatic who scored a Top 10 UK hit with Fascinating Rhythm. After that, he cranked out remixes for Madonna, Prince and Lenny Kravitz while indulging in avant-garde pop with Strange Cargo and his electro take on the classics, Pieces In a Modern Style. After his groundbreaking work on Ray Of Light he lent his talents to artists such as Blur, P!nk, All Saints and U2. He is currently writing a book and painting with oils on canvas – a true man of colours.

Orbit formed Bassomatic with MC Inna Onestep and singer Sharon Musgrave (pictured)

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Grammys for the album the following year, and opening the show in full geisha garb, Madonna was at last embraced by the music industry. Following the approval that met Ray Of Light, whenever there was anything Madonna required musically, Orbit was now her go-to guy. While in 1999 Madonna had yet to become involved with James Bond, she got her hands on the next best thing – Austin Powers. Pilfering the Swinging Sixties vibe from his own Ray Of Light remixes, Orbit pulled off some nifty recycling for Beautiful Stranger. Kept at No. 2 in the UK by S Club 7’s Bring It All Back, in the US her record company bizarrely decided to issue it only as a 12” dance single, adding to her record-beating tally of No. 1 Billboard Dance Club Songs. Madonna also called on Orbit’s trademark sound for a contribution to Ricky Martin’s debut English language album with Be Careful, which forged a whole new genre in Latina electronica. When Madonna decided to plunge back into movies that same year, it was Orbit again who came to the rescue. For the soundtrack to her film The Next Best Thing they tackled Don McLean’s American Pie. While purists screamed musical murder, the cover version hit the top of the charts in 13 countries. McLean eloquently called it “a gift from a goddess”. A second track, the pensive Time Stood Still, lay almost forgotten on the movie’s soundtrack. Yet by the time of the next album, Madonna had a wild impulse to go rogue again with a new music man, Mirwais Ahmadzaï, and Orbit only contributed two tracks to the five-time Grammy nominated Music album. Amazing, planned as a fourth single but ditched due to her touring commitments, was – even in Madonna’s opinion – too similar to Beautiful Stranger. The other Orbit offering, Runaway Lover, found him playing catch-up to Mirwais’ hipster hooks. Orbit’s sweeping, bleepy soundscapes had become ubiquitous and slavishly copied the world charts over and Madonna, better than anyone, knew that. Yet this wasn’t to be the end of the Madonna/Orbit story – though it would be another decade before they would finally team up again. After her trendcatching return to R&B on 2008’s Hard Candy failed to connect either commercially or critically, despite 4 Minutes with Justin Timberlake and Timbaland attaining a No. 3 place, Madonna took stock again. Leaving Warner Brothers after 25 years, she gathered together an array of hip hitmakers for her 12th studio album, with Orbit rightfully back on board. 2012’s MDNA, her first album on Interscope Records, was Madonna’s attempt to own a part of the EDM movement, as electronic dance music had finally come into its own in the US thanks in part to her own earlier footwork. With six writing and producer credits on MDNA, Orbit was clearly Madonna’s main music man again. Unfathomably, none of his efforts were put forward as singles, though tracks such as the gorgeous Falling Free and the post-Guy Ritchie divorce kiss-off Love Spent might have sat comfortably on a natural successor to Ray Of Light. As fans and critics alike weighed in on the choices of singles while the album quickly slipped off the charts, Orbit weighed into the fracas. On his Facebook page he launched into an uncharacteristic rant about how the producers on the MDNA project were “pushed for time” due to Madonna’s business schedule. He claimed the album’s failure was due to “various pressing

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M R , Y D E J H IF YOU ASSUMED MADONNA PEAKED IN THE EIGHTIES AND NINETIES, THINK AGAIN. IN MANY WAYS, HER THIRD DECADE AS A SUPERSTAR WAS HER MOST PRODUCTIVE TO DATE… P A U L

L E S T E R

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Unlike

her Eighties superstar peers Michael Jackson – who only released one album in the first 10 years of the 21st century – and Prince, whose LP sales were severely diminished by the end of the Nineties, Madonna spent the new decade in as good commercial shape as ever. In 2000, she hit the ground running. In March she starred in The Next Big Thing, and although the film was panned and the response to her performance in this movie about a gay man (Robert Whittaker, played by Rupert Everett) and a straight woman (Madonna as Abbie Reynolds) who have a baby together was mixed, to say the least – she won a Golden Raspberry for Worst Actress – it did respectable business at the box office. She had two songs on the film’s soundtrack – the ballad Time Stood Still and her cover of Don McLean’s 1971 classic American Pie – and the latter went to No. 1 in eight countries, including the UK, on its release as a single. Reviews were mixed. The NME dismissed it as “sub-karaoke fluff” while the song’s writer saw it rather differently, joking: “It means that if I don’t want to, I don’t have to work again.” That August, in Los Angeles, Madonna gave birth to Rocco John Ritchie, her son with film director Guy Ritchie, who would soon become her second husband. The same month, we also got to hear the first fruits of Madonna’s collaboration with French DJ and producer Mirwais Ahmadzaï. Having worked with William Orbit on 1998’s Ray Of Light, she felt the need, as ever, to change, move direction, pursue a different sound. As soon as she heard a demo of Mirwais’ music via her partner, Guy Oseary, at her label Maverick, he response was immediate: “Oh my God,” she said, “this is what I want.” “This” was a sharp, crisp electronic pop sound, somewhat influenced by the then none-more-hip “filter disco” sound of French dance acts such as Daft Punk, Cassius and Stardust. The single opened with Madonna, pitch-shifted to sound neither male nor female, imploring androgynously, “Hey Mr DJ, put a record on, I wanna dance with my baby”. Headily affirmative, Music was compared to previous Madonna singles that exulted in the power of music, especially the dance variety, such as Everybody and Into The Groove. “Music makes the people come together/ Music makes the bourgeoisie and the rebel,” sang Madonna, who got the idea for the lyric, quite unexpectedly, after attending a Sting concert and watching as he switched from lukewarm solo material to cherished renditions of ancient Police hits. “Everyone was practically holding hands... I mean, it really moved me,” she told Rolling Stone magazine. Madonna’s own assessment of the song, featuring as it did a mix of guitars, vocoders and analogue synths, was that it was “funky, folky, electronic and

melodic”. Vibe magazine applauded the fact that Madonna – now a 42-year-old mother – could still produce a banger. Entertainment Weekly said Music “recaptured the perfection of Holiday” while Slant magazine declared it Madonna’s finest club anthem since Vogue, even Into The Groove. The general good feeling was that, with Music, Madonna, now in her third decade as an artist, had managed to produce a record every bit as vital as the new generation of stars, notably the ex-Disney teenage powerhouse vocalist likes of Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera. No wonder Music – accompanied by a video directed by Jonas Åkerlund and featuring Madonna giving a party in a limousine driven by comedian Sacha Baron Cohen in the guise of Ali G – earned two Grammy nominations the following year, for Record of the Year and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance. It also peaked at pole position in 25 countries, including Australia, Canada, Italy, New Zealand, the UK and US. It became Madonna’s 12th Stateside No. 1 as well as the second most successful dance single of the decade in the States, behind Madonna’s own song Hung Up (2005). Within a month, Music, Madonna’s eighth studio album, was in the shops. It wasn’t a radical departure from predecessor Ray Of Light – this was, after all, still largely dance music – but it was a different type of electronica. Much of that had to do with relatively unknown producer Mirwais, who brought his own panoply of gadgetry and dazzling effects to bear on Madonna’s material. She loved the end results. “I love to work with the weirdos that no one knows about, the people who have raw talent and who are making music unlike anyone else out there,” she enthused. “Music is the future of sound.” Assembling the album proved to be a fairly involved process. It was recorded in New York, LA and, mostly, London, and necessitated Madonna hopping back and forth from America for sessions at Sarm East and Sarm West in Ladbroke Grove. The results were worth the fuss. After the opening title track came Impressive Instant, another blast of French house, all vocoder, laser bloops and synths that found an electronically-tweaked Madonna proclaiming, “I’m in a trance”. It was the first song that Madonna and Ahmadzaï worked on and recorded and was issued as a promotional single a year later, maintaining the music’s momentum in the clubs – in fact, it was about catching sight of someone at a club and realising they’re “the one”. If Runaway Lover had more of a Ray Of Light flavour, that’s because it was one of two tracks on the album – the other being Amazing – produced by William Orbit. I Deserve It was an acoustic ballad with a hip hop beat and extraneous synth whirrs – hick hop, to coin a phrase, or spacecountry (the album’s front cover image was of

POP_UP Madonna opened the 2001 Grammy Awards show with a rendition of Music during which she emerged from a limo “driven” by underage rapper Lil’ Bow Wow

HEADILY AFFIRMATIVE, MUSIC WAS COMPARED TO PREVIOUS SINGLES OF THE DANCE VARIETY SUCH AS EVERYBODY AND INTO THE GROOVE

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Madonna and singers Niki Haris and Donna DeLory performing Music at the 2001 Grammy Awards

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Madonna on the Drowned World Tour in Los Angeles, 2001

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Madonna as a cowgirl). The lyric – “It’s amazing what a boy can say/ I cannot stop myself/ Seems I love you more than yesterday/ I love you and no one else” – seemed to reflect Madonna’s feelings for her new film director boyfriend. Nobody’s Perfect was a showcase for Madonna’s ethereal vocoderised meditations on the human condition. The beaty acoustica of Don’t Tell Me was followed by What It Feels Like For A Girl, which went from dreamy to technodancey. The latter was produced by Guy Sigsworth (Björk, Seal) and came prefaced by reflections on the sexual divide from singer Charlotte Gainsbourg. Madonna admitted it was addressed to her then-four-year-old daughter Lourdes, as well as to herself. “It’s about me discovering that being an overachiever is not always to your benefit when it comes to relationships and dealing with men, because men are quite intimidated by women who accomplish a lot,” she told The Face. Finally, there was the downtempo orchestral trip hop of Paradise (Not For Me), and the typically adroit combination of acoustics and electronics that was Gone, shrouding the album in an atmosphere of doubt and fatalistic despondency, Madonna singing about dreaming

away her dreams, her life. “Turn to stone, lose my faith,” went the sorrowful closing refrain, “and I’ll be gone before it happens.” What could she possibly have meant? “This record, more than any other records, covers all the areas of my life,” she offered. “I left off partying on Ray Of Light. But I’d just had a baby, so my mood was complete, like wonderment of life, and I was incredibly thoughtful and retrospective and intrigued by the mystical aspects of life.” In contrast, Music found her “living a pretty lowkey domestic existence”, missing the energy and engrossing aspects of performing, dancing – being on the road. “So,” she explained, “part of the record is about that. And then the other part is about love. So there’s the frivolous side of my life and then there’s the – hopefully – non-frivolous side of my life. I usually make a record that’s one or the other, and I feel I did both on this one.” She concluded that Music was designed for crepuscular enjoyment, even if there were still paeans to the belief that “only when you’re dancing can you feel this free”. “This is night listening,” she said of the album. “I think it’s too moody to listen to during

“THIS RECORD, MORE THAN ANY OTHER, COVERS ALL THE AREAS OF MY LIFE… THE FRIVOLOUS SIDE AND THE NON-FRIVOLOUS SIDE”

POP_UP The hook to Hung Up was based, with permission, on Abba’s Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight). It was only the second time Bjorn and Benny had granted such a request to use a sample: Fugees was the other

Madonna and Guy Ritchie at baby Rocco’s christening in Scotland, 2000

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POP_UP Pet Shop Boys and Madonna have long been mutual fans. Messrs Tennant and Lowe were invited to remix her single Sorry, but before that they wrote the 1988 song Heart for her – although they never delivered it

the day. You could put the first two tracks on before you go out. And the third track is a William Orbit track and is also a really uptempo, dancey, clubby song as well. And then, after you meet the man of your dreams you come back and listen to I Deserve It and Amazing.” In November 2000, Don’t Tell Me was the second single lifted off the album; it reached No. 4 on both sides of the Atlantic. On December 21, 2000, Madonna and Guy Ritchie’s son Rocco was christened at Dornoch Cathedral in Dornoch, Scotland; the following day the pair got married at nearby Skibo Castle. In April 2001, What It Feels Like For A Girl became the third single from Music. It was accompanied by a Ritchie-directed video – a controversial one, not for sexual imagery this time, but rather for its violence. In the video, Madonna rides around in a yellow car (with license plates reading “Pussy” and “Cat”), running over men and setting things on fire. Hardly surprisingly, the video was played just a few times before it was banned. It harmed the single’s progress somewhat – it peaked at No. 7 and No. 23 respectively in the UK and US. That June, Madonna’s fifth concert tour – the Drowned World Tour – started, going on to become the highest-grossing concert tour of the year by a solo artist, earning $75 million from 47 sold-out shows. “If most musicians put a tenth of the creative energy into their shows as Madonna has into this one, we would all be a lot better off,” wrote Alex Needham in the NME, while Slant opined: “Though her cowgirl image is easily her least significant incarnation to date, Drowned World proves that Madonna is still unmatched in her ability to lift cultural iconography into the mainstream.” In November 2001, Madonna released her second greatest hits collection, GHV2, a compilation of 15 singles from the singer’s second recording decade (“I only wanted tracks that I could listen to five times in a row,” she explained). The following year she

starred in the film Swept Away, directed by her new husband. Released direct-to-video in the UK, it was a commercial and critical failure. On a happier filmic note, in October 2002 Madonna issued Die Another Day, the theme tune to the 12th James Bond movie. But although it fared well on the world’s charts, it was not regarded by critics as one of the great Bond themes, some dismissing the stuttering, electronic Mirwais production as inappropriate while the song itself was deemed to be melodically uninteresting and harmonically repetitious, even if the line “Sigmund Freud/Analyse this” was universally praised. Her brief cameo in the film was decried as “incredibly wooden” in the Guardian. There was little public activity from Madonna until April 2003, when she issued the first single from her ninth studio album, American Life. The result, once more, of a collaboration with producer Mirwais, who used electronics and organic instrumentation as he did on Music, the single was part-club anthem, parttherapeutic confessional. “It’s a reflection of my state of mind and a view of the world right now,” said Madonna at the time. It seemed to reflect a new disillusion on her part, a new post-9/11 world-weariness as she questioned the shallowness of modern life and the hollow nature of the American dream. Towards the end of the song, all bleeps and beats, Madonna raps – or rather lists – some of the accoutrements of (her) wealth. Critics, usually ardent supporters, responded harshly. Blender magazine named American Life the ninth worst song of all time. Slant magazine called it a “trite, self-aggrandising and often awkward song about privilege”, while Stylus found the plaint about commercialism and the emptiness of celebrity culture, from one of the world’s richest women, “hypocritical rather than insightful”. The first video for the song, directed once again by Jonas Åkerlund, featured Madonna, surrounded by female soldiers, lobbing a hand grenade at

‘I’M FEELING SUPER-DUPER’ KEY RECORDINGS: SINGLES

MUSIC (2000)

AMERICAN LIFE (2003)

Madonna’s second single of the 2000s – following her cover of American Pie – opened with an androgynous voice demanding, “Hey, Mr DJ, put a record on”. Over the lyric, an electronically tweaked Madonna can be heard wondering, “Do you like to boogie woogie?” The latest in a long line of illustrious invocations to dance from the artist – reaching as far back as Everybody – Music was ecstatically received by fans and critics alike. The New York Daily News proclaimed it “her most instantly embraceable single since Holiday.”

Her first single from her 2003 album was a Marmite affair. Or rather, a “soy latte” affair, of which, according to the lyric, Madonna was requesting “a double shottie”. American Life was her demolition of the American dream, celebrity culture, materialism, capitalism – the works. In it, the supremely successful singer admitted to feeling disillusioned, notwithstanding her new Mini Cooper, her chef, three nannies, driver, jet, trainer, butler and stylist. “Do you think I’m satisfied?” she asked, incurring some of the most hostile reviews of her career.

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2004, and Madonna performs the Circus/ Cabaret segment of the Re-Invention Tour

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The Military/Army section of the Re-Invention Tour, with costumes by Arianne Phillips

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fortune, and I feel that I have a right to an opinion on what it is and what it isn’t. All everyone is obsessed about at the moment is being a celebrity. I’m saying that’s bullshit… and who knows better than me? Before it happens you have all kinds of notions about how wonderful celebrity is and how much joy it’s going to bring you. Then you arrive… “It’s the allure of the beautiful life,” she continued. “Look like this, you’re gonna be happy. Drive this car, you’re gonna be popular. Wear these clothes and people are gonna wanna f*** you. It’s a very powerful illusion and people are caught up in it, including myself. Or I was.” The second single, Hollywood (No. 2, UK, July 2003), featured an almost grunge-lite guitar intro, although the beat had more in common with techno. Lyrically, it seemed to address the fake allure of Tinseltown, another case, perhaps, of Madonna having her cake and guzzling the whole lot down. I’m So Stupid (“I used to live in a fuzzy dream, and I used to believe in the pretty pictures that were all around me”) shifted her critical gaze towards herself. Third single Nothing Fails (UK No. 11, October ’03) had an acoustic intro, and featured lyrics from Welsh singer-songwriter Jem; it was followed by Love Profusion (also a UK No. 11, December ’03), which came complete with a Luc Besson video and found Madonna confused and

“ALL EVERYONE IS OBSESSED ABOUT IS BEING A CELEBRITY. I’M SAYING THAT’S BULLSHIT… AND WHO KNOWS BETTER THAN ME?”

HUNG UP (2005)

SORRY (2006)

4 MINUTES (2008)

This became Madonna’s best-selling single ever, selling more than 8.7 million copies worldwide in only seven months. It went to No. 1 in 41 countries, including Australia, Canada, France, Germany and Japan. It was also voted by the Digital Spy website “the biggest pop banger of the 21st century”, ahead of Britney Spears’ Toxic, Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance and Kylie Minogue’s Can’t Get You Out Of My Head. And it was the first track on Madonna’s 2009 compilation Celebration. Explaining why to Rolling Stone, she said, “Because it’s a badass song.”

The second single from Confessions On A Dance Floor topped the charts in Italy, Spain, Romania and the UK, where it became Madonna’s 12th No. 1, making her the female artist with the most No. 1 hits in Britain. One of the remixes of the song came courtesy of Pet Shop Boys, featuring added lyrics written by the duo. Many critics deemed Sorry the strongest track on the album, the reviewer from the BBC even discerning from the lyric “there are more important things than hearing you speak” a subtle critique of her critics.

This was Madonna’s 13th UK No. 1, 23 years since her first, Into The Groove – a record for a female artist. It was also only her second-ever duet, after her Britney team-up, Me Against The Music. It found her and Messrs Timberlake and Timbaland conspiring to save the planet. “If you’re paying attention to what’s going on in the world – the Middle East, the [US] election, the environment – there’s so much chaos and turmoil everywhere,” she said. “Are you going to be part of the problem or part of the solution?”

POP_UP In 2002 Madonna took on the role of Loren in a London West End production of the play Up For Grabs, the story of an art dealer trying to boost the bidding for a rare Jackson Pollock up to £20 million

George W Bush – at this sensitive juncture, around the time of the Iraq War, it was deemed inappropriate and the video was cancelled. It was replaced by a more anodyne version, with Madonna cavorting harmlessly against a backdrop of flags from around the world. The single performed weakly in the US (No. 37) and well in the UK (No. 2). The rest of American Life, the album – released two weeks after the single – was equally full of beats and lush orchestrations. “We set out to put the two worlds of acoustic and electronic music together,” explained Madonna of her and Mirwais’ approach this time around. “It is another step on. I don’t ever want to repeat myself or make the same record twice. Yuck!” The album’s front cover image was of Madonna perhaps trying to reclaim the idea of herself as somehow revolutionary, and not the tweedy American wife of an Englishman living in the Home Counties. She was portrayed on the sleeve as a freedom fighter, all Che Guevara beret and military chic; she had been pictured a few months earlier, almost preparing the world for her latest “look”, on the cover of Vanity Fair magazine, posing in dark green and black clothes and combat boots. This was a Madonna in belligerent mood, and keen to reveal all about her rejection of celebrity and its attendant luxuries. “I know it sounds clichéd,” she told Q magazine, “but I’ve had 20 years of fame and

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POP_UP The reason 4 Minutes is so titled was due to the song’s length, although the radio version actually lasts three minutes and nine seconds, while the album version is four minutes and four seconds

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After that kiss: “I’m kissing Britney and passing on my energy,” explained Madonna. “It’s like a mythological fairytale”

uncertain, seeking answers to (American) life’s great existential imponderables, deciding, “And the world can look so sad”. On Nobody Knows Me, via a vocoder, she declared, “I’ve had so many lives/ Since I was a child/ And I realise/ How many times I’ve died”, and ended with her feeling “misunderstood”. Intervention (“I’ve got to save my baby/ Because he makes me cry”) was another downbeat electro-acoustic affair. No less lugubrious was a co-write with young British musician and producer Stuart Price: titled X-Static Process, it neatly – noirishly – expressed Madonna’s disorientation (“Don’t know who I’m supposed to be”) and confusion. On Mother And Father, she recalled her troubled childhood, particularly the death of her mother, but the dolorous mood was broken by another banal rap with a series of simplistic rhymes (“My father had to go to work/ I used to think he was a jerk”). Penultimate track Die Another Day was followed by Easy Ride, which itself sounded like a movie theme, heavy as it was on the symphonic strings. With its intimations of mortality, it closed the album in mournful style, even as the sweeping strings gave way to techno bleeps and

electronically treated guitar. Despite getting mixed reviews, American Life fared well commercially, topping the charts in several countries (including Britain and America). In November 2003, Maverick released Remixed & Revisited, a remix album containing four songs, in remixed form, from American Life, as well as a previously unreleased song, Your Honesty, originally written for her 1994 album Bedtime Stories – and you could tell, because it was essentially a rewrite of Inside Of Me from that album. The other tracks on the album were live renditions of Like A Virgin and Hollywood from the 2003 MTV Video Music Awards – the controversial one that ended with Madonna snogging co-performers Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera – and a remix of Into The Groove. Ah, yes: the Kiss That Shook The World. It was on August 28, 2003, that Madonna, proving she was still the queen of provocation, snogged not one but two teen pretenders to her throne: Britney and Xtina (see panel). In October ‘03, Madonna and Britney sealed their burgeoning relationship when they recorded a single together, Me Against

ON AUGUST 28 2003, MADONNA, STILL THE QUEEN OF PROVOCATION, SNOGGED NOT ONE BUT TWO PRETENDERS TO HER THRONE

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The perfect American gentlewoman: Madonna does some promo for her book The English Roses

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2 0 0 0 S Madonna with former Ethiopian famine victim Birhan Woldu at Live 8 in London, 2005

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didn’t want to over-think things too much [this time]. I don’t want to be complicated now. We both got sucked into the French existentialist vortex. We both decided we were against the war, and we both smoked Gauloises and wore berets, and we were against everything. No, it’s about the universe conspiring. With the last album I was in a very thoughtful mood, a very angry mood, a mood to be political, very upset with George Bush. I don’t need to be going on about the war in Iraq. I made a lot of political statements in my show and in my film [I’m Going To Tell You A Secret]. I don’t want to repeat myself, so I moved to another area and that’s, ‘God, I really feel like dancing right now’. It was too intense. It’s not just a reaction to what I was doing work-wise, but also a reaction to what was going on in the world. I just wanted some relief.” With Confessions…, she was once more the disco evangelist, but she was also now a humanitarian. In 2007, she released Hey You, a charity song she’d written and had co-produced with Pharrell Williams. The song was released as part of the Live Earth campaign and was free to download from websites like MSN. That year, she announced her departure from Warner Bros. Records after 25 years, and the signing of a new $120 million, 10-year deal with Live Nation. She produced and wrote a documentary on the problems faced by Malawians called I Am Because We Are (she had adopted David Banda from Malawi in 2006), and directed her first film Filth And Wisdom, about three friends and their aspirations. It earned encouraging reviews. In March 2008, she was inducted into America’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame alongside Leonard Cohen, John Mellencamp and The Ventures. At the induction

POP_UP The band in Madonna’s film Filth And Wisdom was portrayed by “gypsy punk’ outfit Gogol Bordello, while lead singer Eugene Hütz played the main character

The Music. Produced by some of R&B, hip hop and pop’s finest, including Terius Nash aka The-Dream and Christopher “Tricky” Stewart, and evincing the influence of The Neptunes’ collaborations with Justin Timberlake, Me Against The Music was praised for Spears’ input but lambasted for Madonna’s. Stylus Magazine remarked harshly of the star’s propensity for enlivening her output by hooking up perennially with young talent that “Madonna vamps it up (literally – her appearance here is not Sapphic but vampiric, the wizened old crone bleeding another period of forced longevity into her career like a cruenating corpse leaking plasma backwards).” The single nevertheless was a hit around the world, peaking at No. 2 in Britain and No. 11 in America. Having mastered music and enjoyed a varied career in the movies, it was inevitable that Madonna would try her hand at book writing. In September 2003, she published her first children’s book, The English Roses – the story of four jealous English schoolgirls. It became the fastest-selling children’s picture book of all time. A few months later, she embarked on her sixth global concert foray, the Re-Invention World Tour; it became one of the highestgrossing tours of 2004 – matched only by Prince, Celine Dion and Metallica – earning around $120 million. It also became the subject of her 2005 Jonas Åkerlund-directed documentary I’m Going To Tell You A Secret, “a less artful insight into her world than her last tour movie Truth Or Dare more than a decade ago”, according to the Observer magazine. Critics were almost unanimous in their praise of the tour, however, comparing it favourably to her previous Drowned World Tour. In November 2004, she was one of five founding members inducted into the inaugural UK Music Hall of Fame, along with The Beatles, Elvis Presley, Bob Marley and U2, ultimate proof of her standing among the all-time greats. In January 2005, she performed a cover version of John Lennon’s Imagine at Tsunami Aid, a benefit held for the tsunami victims of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake. She also performed at the Live 8 benefit concert in London in July 2005. There, organiser Bob Geldof brought her together with Birhan Woldu, the starving child who achieved global repute from the original 1984 CBC News report that led to the formation of Band Aid and Live Aid – she and Madonna held hands while the singer performed the first verses of Like A Prayer. Later, Madonna went from saintly to coarse when she started swearing repeatedly during her final song, Music. That October saw the release of Hung Up, the first single from Madonna’s 10th studio album, Confessions On A Dance Floor, the result of her artistic liaison with British producer and musician Stuart Price (see page 42). The album – regarded as one of Madonna’s very best – contained four singles: Hung Up, Sorry (a UK No. 1 in February 2006), Get Together (No. 7 in the UK in June ’06) and Jump (UK No. 9, October ’06). It was a successful, happy time for the star, a restatement of first (hedonistic) principles after her collaborations with Gallic brainiac Mirwais. “Have you ever met Mirwais?” she asked the journalist from the Observer magazine. “Jean-Paul Sartre comes to mind. He’s very intellectual, very analytical, very cerebral, very existential, very philosophical. You have to be in the mood for it. I

KISS ME, KISS ME, KISS ME MADONNA, BRITNEY AND XTINA GET PERSONAL

The date was August 28, 2003, the place was New York’s Radio City Music Hall, the event was the annual MTV Video Music Awards – and a culturally dramatic pop event was about to take place. First came Britney Spears, the newly crowned Princess of Pop, dressed in white, singing Madonna’s Like A Virgin. Then a second figure lifted her veil to reveal Britney’s only serious young rival for pop primacy: Christina “Xtina” Aguilera. But there was more excitement to come: Madonna emerged to the strains of Hollywood, then removed her jacket to reveal her honed musculature, stuffed her microphone down her top, and kissed Britney and Xtina flush on the mouth – much to the horror of Spears’ ex, Justin Timberlake, who the cameras immediately panned to, to best immortalise his displeasure. According to Larry Rudolph, Spears’ longtime manager, “that kiss happened and the world exploded”. He added: ”Madonna had been very, very, very rigid about the rehearsals. She would never address me by name, she would just say, ‘You make sure Britney’s here at 10 o’clock.’” Madonna was ecstatic with the results of the gruelling rehearsals. In fact, there was more kissing when, following the performance, Rudolph found himself in an elevator with Madge. He recalls her wrapping her arms around his waist and giving him a big smacker on the lips. Her words to the manager: “You see, Larry? It was all worth it.” 77


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POP_UP Justin Timberlake was impressed by Madonna’s stash of ideas for Hard Candy. “All these thoughts, riddles, poems, feelings, written in huge notebooks... she kept handing them over. It was amazing”

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Justin Timberlake inducts Madonna into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, 2008

ceremony fellow inductees and Michigan natives, legendary proto-punks The Stooges, performed her songs Burning Up and Ray Of Light. She also thanked Christopher Flynn, her dance teacher from 35 years earlier, for encouraging her to follow her dreams. March ’08 also saw the release of 4 Minutes, the lead single from her imminent, brand new studio album, Hard Candy. Jointly produced by the stellar Tim “Timbaland” Mosley, Justin Timberlake and Floyd “Nate” Hills aka Danja (producer of hits for Britney, Mariah Carey, Usher, Whitney Houston and more), it had a characteristically idiosyncratic Timbaland beat. Quirkily appealing, this song about saving the planet sold three million copies and reached No. 3 in the US, making it her 37th Top 10 hit, beating the record previously held by Elvis Presley. Her 11th album, Hard Candy, came out in April, and was a showcase for the writing and production talents of some of the world’s hippest, and biggest, names: Kanye West, Danja, Justin Timberlake, and inarguably the two biggest R&B producers of the decade, Timbaland and The Neptunes, the latter the production moniker of Pharrell Williams and his

relatively silent partner Chad Hugo. Timbaland and Williams had a hand in every one of the dozen tracks on Hard Candy, and Madonna spoke highly of her collaborators. “I think Pharrell is a natural musician,” she said, just after production on the album was completed and the record had just hit the shops. “I like his inventiveness – he would grab my acoustic guitar, which he couldn’t play, but start playing percussion on it. He would find bottles and start playing them with spoons. He is very inventive in the studio, he’s not precious and I like his lo-fi approach to making music. “He is also,” she added, “a little kid and silly… he would come to work, take these Mickey Mouse slippers out of his giant Hermes bag and put them on… I don’t feel like he took himself too seriously.” Of former pop idol turned serious adult artiste Timberlake, she said, “I can totally relate to Justin as a songwriter. We would sit down together and say, ‘Okay, let’s come up with a concept. What story do we want to tell?’ We would riff off of each other and play with words. He likes to play with words and the rhythm of words and so do I.”

HARD CANDY WAS A SHOWCASE FOR THE HIPPEST NAMES: KANYE WEST, DANJA, JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE, TIMBALAND AND THE NEPTUNES

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It’s August 23 2008, and the lucky city of Cardiff is the first to witness the Sticky & Sweet Tour

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POP_UP The original title for Hard Candy was Black Madonna, and a photoshoot was done, but Madonna changed her mind: “I thought, twenty five percent of the world might get this. It’s not worth it”

“One of the greatest talents the world has ever known.” Madonna pays tribute to Michael Jackson, 2009

Finally, she spoke about the Timbaland Effect. “He would seem like he was disappearing from the room, then he would take his headphones off and suddenly blast something on the speakers and give the thumbs up. He was sort of a silent godfather to the project.” Riffing on the individual tracks, Madonna described LP opener Candy Shop as “cheeky and fun… it sort of represents the sassy side of me”. More generally of this album of R&B club bangers and rhythmically audacious pop, she said, “I felt more introspective because I was writing with Pharrell and Justin. On Confessions, which I wrote all the lyrics to, I wanted to stay away from anything serious, even though ‘confession’ implies seriousness. I just wanted to make a frivolous dance record, and with this one I had to dig deeper and go to a different place… For me, it’s a true collaboration, intellectually and artistically.” If any criticism could be levelled at Hard Candy, it was that it was an exemplary Timbaland/ Neptunes album, but a less good Madonna one – her personality was somewhat subsumed beneath their trademark beats and studio tricks. Kerri Mason from Billboard liked the new sound and the musical direction taken by Madonna but was worried that she had become a producer’s puppet while Stephen Thomas Erlewine from AllMusic complained, “There’s a palpable sense of disinterest [in Hard Candy], as if she just handed the reins over to Pharrell and Timba/Lake, trusting them to polish up this piece of stale candy.” Commercially, it was hardly a dud: it debuted at pole position in 37 countries and was the 11th best-selling album worldwide in 2008, shifting more than four million copies. It bequeathed three singles – 4 Minutes, Give It 2 Me and Miles Away, the latter pair reaching No. 7 and No. 39

respectively in the UK – and the accompanying tour confirmed Madonna’s supremacy in her third decade: on the Sticky & Sweet Tour, Madonna performed to over 3.5 million fans in 32 countries, grossing a total of US$408 million, making it the second-highest grossing tour of all time (behind The Rolling Stones) and the highest-grossing tour by a solo artist (she was later superseded by Roger Waters of Pink Floyd). Madonna’s escapades and achievements in the Noughties were a statistician’s dream. She concluded her contract with Warner Bros with her third greatesthits collection, Celebration, in September 2009. It contained ravey new song Celebration (UK No. 3) and the team-up with rapper Lil Wayne, Revolver (which fared less well, failing to chart high anywhere except Italy), along with 34 hits spanning her career with the label. Celebration reached No. 1 in Canada, Germany, Italy and the UK. She paid tribute to Michael Jackson – who died that June – at the 2009 MTV Awards in September, and she ended the 2000s as the best-selling single artist of the decade in the US and the most-played artist of the decade in the UK. She also was the third top-touring artist of the decade, behind only The Rolling Stones and U2. Dazed & Confused asked her whether she saw any advantage in getting older, and her reply suggested there was plenty of life in her yet. “It’s an advantage in terms that you’ve got a lot more experience and you tend to not make the same mistakes. And you feel a bit wiser and less impulsive,” she said. “It’s great to feel experienced. But I also work with people who are half my age, so I feel I have to work even harder to keep up with everybody… but the fact of the matter is I can kick all of their asses! I guess I’m okay for now. It does keep the flame under my foot, though.”

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MADONNA WITH...

Stuart Price, Madonna and Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs

STUART PRICE

MADONNA’S COLLABORATION WITH STUART PRICE – 2005’S CONFESSIONS ON A DANCE FLOOR – GAVE HER ARGUABLY THE MOST SUCCESSFUL ALBUM OF HER RECENT CAREER… P A U L

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L E S T E R

eleased in 2005, Madonna’s 10th studio album, Confessions On A Dance Floor, saw her team up with a little-known British DJ and producer called Stuart Price. Up until then the boy from Reading was a cultish attraction thanks to his pseudonymous work as Jacques Lu Cont and Les Rythmes Digitales, as well as his retro-pop project Zoot Woman, his joint production (with former Madonna producer Nellee Hooper) of P Diddy’s 2003 single Let’s Get Ill ft. Kelis, and the occasional remix, notably of New Order’s Guilt Is A Useless Emotion. But his involvement with Madonna propelled his reputation skywards, while also confirming her ability to divine the potential in a collaborator, even one without a “name”. Indeed, the follow-up album, 2008’s Hard Candy, fared far less well than Confessions…, despite the presence behind the studio console of Timbaland, The Neptunes, Danja et al. Actually, Confessions… wasn’t the first time Price had been on Madonna’s payroll. He had been employed as the musical director for her 2001 Drowned World Tour after remixing some of the tracks on 2000’s Music; he reprised the role for her 2004 Re-Invention World Tour (as he would for her 2006 Confessions Tour). This time around, Price was contacted by Madonna and given the task of creating

tracks sounding like “disco on acid” for a musical she was developing called Hello, Suckers! That musical never happened, but Madonna was intrigued by Price’s modus operandi, and it was decided that they would join forces for a new album. Madonna later compared her and the young DJ/ producer’s relationship to that of siblings. It certainly wasn’t a case of untouchable icon meeting fawning admirer. “I wasn’t really a fan [of hers] when I was growing up,” said Price, who was more into British electronic artists such as Pet Shop Boys and Erasure, to Mixmag. “Those,” he said, “were the people who made me go and get my first keyboard.” If anything, his parents – both classically-trained pianists – had more impact on the him than the queen of disco-pop. “It was mainly Bach, Liszt, or Chopin,” he told studio software company Universal Audio. “Pop music wasn’t really around in our house.” After hearing The Human League’s seminal 1981 synthpop opus Dare at the age of 19, he discovered Orbital and their techno ilk, followed by idiosyncratic electronicists such as Thomas Fehlmann and Polygon Window. It was only around the time of Justify My Love – “when it became obvious she was using these good producers and coming up with unique music” – that he began to appreciate Madonna’s contributions.

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records when we were making this album – obviously Abba and Giorgio Moroder – so to me it’s more of an homage to other people’s records than mine,” Madonna explained. Future Lovers paid such explicit homage to Donna Summer and Moroder’s I Feel Love that Madonna chose to mash it into her performance of the song during 2006’s Confessions Tour. This was Madonna the Danceteria club kid, reclaiming her electro-disco roots – there was even a track entitled I Love New York that reeked of Studio 54 with the faintest trace of CBGB. Let It Will Be was a rumination on fame with a propulsive groove and pizzicato string motif. How High explored her own notoriety, but the music was strong enough, poppy enough, to avoid accusations of self-indulgence. Forbidden Love – no relation to the song from Bedtime Stories – evinced the influence of EDM and Daft Punk. Jump bore elements of Ibiza techno and Pet Shop Boys techno-pop. Push carried lyrical and melodic hints of The Police’s Every Breath You Take. Isaac – featuring vocalist Yitzhak Sinwani, who sang portions of the Yemenite Hebrew poem Im Nin’alu in the track – was an exotic digression, while Like It Or Not closed the album in affirmative style. Madonna alluded to her tabloid-baiting incarnation (“You can call me a sinner/ Or you can call me a saint”) and added a commitment to uphold the boundary-pushing obduracy of her younger self. “This is who I am,” she declared, unbowed, “You can like it or not. You can love me or leave me, ‘cause I’m never gonna stop.” Thanks in no small part to Stuart Price – who managed to tap into and tease out Madonna’s essential Madonna-ness with the 12 million-selling Confessions – Madonna had one of the most successful albums of her later career.

LITTLE WONDER TRANSATLANTIC MADONNA Stuart Price has described Madonna as “the greatest hands-off producer ever”, despite the fact that she avoided most of the gadgetry on the studio console. “Most people think producers should be pressing the buttons but she doesn’t pretend to do any of that,” he revealed to Mixmag. “She just sits on the couch and tells you when you’re not being very good.” Madonna’s sense of humour, according to Price, is very English indeed. They spent most evenings on the Re-Invention Tour “quoting every line from The Office”. Indeed, when the pair glimpsed Ricky Gervais at 2005’s Live 8 show, she and Price darted over, Madonna shouting, “Ricky, Ricky, Ricky, we know all your lines, we’ve seen all your shows and we think you’re really funny!” Apparently, a poker-faced Gervais turned around and said, “Sorry, what’s your name?”…

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Confessions… was largely recorded in Price’s tiny home studio – a converted loft space – in West Kilburn, London. “It wasn’t anyone’s idea,” he said of the choice of location. “We wanted to experiment with ideas, and seeing as I do all my other music here it made sense for her to come over. When you work out of your flat you’re less concerned about the money you have to spend on a studio, and more relaxed because you don’t feel silly messing around with ideas in front of people you don’t know.” Madonna concurred: “I couldn’t have made this record anywhere else but up here,” she said of Price’s modest studio. The nature of the space didn’t just appeal to her; she saw it as crucial to the process, as well as a reminder of her roots. “Where you record is very important,” she mused to Simon Garfield in The Guardian. “It can’t be too nice, it can’t be too expensive, it can’t have a view to an ocean or a field. I’d rather be in a prison cell with Pro Tools. I don’t want to know what’s going on in the rest of the world. I want it to be exactly as it was when I wrote my first song, in a small space with hardly any frills. I want it always to be straightforward. I can’t deal with the pressure of how much things cost. Otherwise I think, ‘Oh God, I’ve got to turn out 12 No. 1 hits to justify how much the space costs.’” The sessions went well: Price described them as “very relaxed”, explaining that Madonna would arrive at around 3pm every afternoon, ready to work, “having been up all morning in meetings with her publishers, publicists and accountant”. “By the time she gets to mine it’s like the end of her day,” he added. “She hasn’t got time to waste so you get used to working fast. You don’t f*** around.” If the process was breathless, so was the end product. There is an urgency to Confessions… missing from predecessor American Life (2003); that sense of pace, of a headlong rush, was enhanced by the way the tracks were sequenced together to run as one continuous piece of music, or mix – the album played like an hour-long nightclub DJ set. The album artwork, featuring Madonna, in a purple-pink leotard, apparently poised to do a workout at the dance studio in Saturday Night Fever, was steeped in Seventies retro-kitsch, and indeed on Confessions…, Madonna – who sang on Into The Groove, “Only when I’m dancing do I feel this free” – reasserted the primacy of the dancefloor. After the somewhat politicised American Life, her intention was simply to make people dance, and smile. “I just want people to hear it and go, ‘Oh my God’,” she told the Observer Music Monthly. “I want it to lift people up and get them dancing round their house, driving round in their car until the record’s finished. I just want to make people happy.” The album opened with the ecstatic Hung Up, which turned a sample from Abba’s Mamma Mia into one of the hookiest Madonna anthems in aeons. Not for nothing did it top the charts in 41 countries when it was issued as a single (according to Billboard, it was the most successful dance song of the decade). Further singles included Sorry, a Pet Shop Boys-ish affair that became Madonna’s 12th No. 1 in the UK (and received a PSBs remix), and Get Together, which bore the influence of “French house” classic Music Sounds Better With You by Stardust. Confessions… was riddled with references to past triumphs, Madonna’s or otherwise. “We listened to a lot of other people’s

Gervais at Live 8 in Hyde Park, 2005

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BITCH I’M

nNa

BIG BUDGET MOVIES, EMBARRASSING MISHAPS AND A CELEB-HEAVY COMEBACK HAVE FORGED YET ANOTHER UNEXPECTED ERA FOR THE QUEEN OF POP, BUT CAN MS. CICCONE SUSTAIN HER CREDIBILITY AND MAKE IT THROUGH THE CURRENT DECADE UNSCATHED? F L Y N N

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R I K

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Still hardwired to the zeitgeist: Diplo opens for Madonna on the Rebel Heart Tour

POP_UP The video for Bitch I'm Madonna was painstakingly rehearsed and then shot in one night. In the rooftop scene, they’re not losing light – it’s the sun coming up

“You’re

gonna love this/ You can’t touch this/ ’Cause I’m a bad bitch…” The opening lines of Bitch, I’m Madonna, the third single from Madonna’s most recent studio album Rebel Heart, set out her stall without reserve, regardless of the much-publicised hiccups that the present decade has brought the veteran entertainer thus far. It’s electro-pop with the club as its intended domain – nothing unusual there – but with that title and those lyrics, it’s hard to shake the feeling it was purely built to antagonise… and there’s a growing mob of online haters more than willing to take up that particular mantle. Aside from those that air their enmity on social media in their thousands, mostly in gutless anonymity, there are plenty of tabloid journalists who see fit to knock Madonna down a peg or two in plain sight. At times it’s constructive, but for the most part it’s just plain spiteful, ageist bullying. So how did Madonna get from the rallying cry of her 1982 debut US dance hit Everybody to this defiant throwing down of the (fingerless) gauntlet? Furthermore, the accompanying Jonas Åkerlunddirected video – filmed on the swanky top floors of the Standard Hotel in NYC – is equally confrontational as Madge, sporting a girly pink studded leather jacket, struts through corridors snogging topless models, towel-whipping behinds as she goes. There are nubile beauties fake-frenching naked in the bath

(with obligatory black tape nipple crosses), neon sock puppets (why not?), a crew of achingly hip dancers (with whom Madonna holds her own admirably) and plenty of bohemian micro-happenings that conjoin to storm our eyes in an immoderate assault of colour – and plenty of front… and that’s without mention of the literal flash-flood of celebrity cameos – a ploy that seems almost obligatory these days. Collaborator Nicki Minaj offers up her urban interruptions via a widescreen TV, Miley Cyrus flips us the bird as only she can (with both hands), the song’s co-writer Diplo is standing on the bar, Beyoncé respectfully vogues to the beat, and Katy Perry, Kanye West, Chris Rock, Rita Ora and Alexander Wang all make their show of support. Deep into it and she mimics her many trolls, haters and lounge-commentators via screams of “Who do you think you are!” It’s another new Madonna for another new album – as always – but it’s a well-worn tactic. The message is clear. She’s still here. She’s still the same indiscreet, sassy and exceptionally strongwilled woman, and everyone who’s anyone right now is happy to publicly stand aside to return her to where she belongs… back on top. It’s nothing if not suitably provocative. The song itself is neither here nor there – with clunky lyrics about pumping basslines, and getting “freaky” – but it’s rendered entirely secondary to the statement. Once again Madonna is begging the world to disapprove. It’s either complete genius or – as some would have it – just a tad embarrassing. Either way, it went viral.

THE MESSAGE IS CLEAR. SHE’S STILL HERE. SHE’S STILL THE SAME INDISCREET, SASSY, STRONG-WILLED WOMAN

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Flashback to the Eighties: Madonna delivering 1983’s Burning Up with guitar in hand in Miami, Florida, January 2016

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On set in New York's Central Park, during the filming of W.E.

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Rewind to the beginning of the decade, and Madonna was nowhere to be seen. Her closing statement in a 25-year relationship with Warner Bros, 2008’s Hard Candy, had debuted at No. 1 in 37 countries, sold over four million, given her her 37th Top 10, won her two Grammys and spawned the highest grossing tour ever by a female solo artist (knocking her own Confessions Tour off the top spot). While it was clearly business as usual on the musical front, Madonna still had had to weather the seemingly endless media storm surrounding the adoption of her second Malawian child, Mercy James, something that hasn’t let up to this day. On top of that, she was preparing to face ex-husband Guy Ritchie over custody of their other son Rocco. Whatever the reality of her personal life, it would be enough to break most people. She had earned a break – which in Madonna terms, really only meant a break from music. Fashion, fitness and philanthropy were the focus as the decade got underway. With January came an appearance at the Hope for Haiti Now benefit in New York that featured a beautifully reworked acoustic version of her 1989 hit Like A Virgin, elegantly lifted by a water-tight choir – and filmed for MTV. A few weeks earlier she’d appeared at ex-husband Sean Penn’s Help Haiti Home fundraiser in Beverly Hills, a (likely innocent) dalliance that was bound to get tabloid tongues wagging. For her intimate performance that night she strummed a ukelele and sung La Vie En Rose solo (and in French).

Her entrepreneurial activities continued in earnest. Aside from the unveiling of her Eighties-inspired Material Girl fashion line, launched with daughter Lourdes, she released a range of MDG sunglasses with Dolce & Gabbana and appeared in several ad campaigns. On top of that, she cut the ribbon for her global fitness brand Hard Candy Fitness, with the first centre opening in Mexico City in November. What’s more, she found time to make trips to both Malawi and Brazil to follow up her humanitarian projects. Madonna’s main focus throughout 2010, however, was her second movie production in the directorial chair. W.E. was a big budget feature that told the story of the infamous fairytale romance between American socialite Wallis Simpson and King Edward VIII, the monarch who put love before leadership and abdicated. It’s fair to say that the criticism that followed its release was often needlessly harsh and – sadly for Madonna – W.E. bombed at the box office with takings that barely scratched the surface of its super-scale budget. The tabloids were more interested in her love life, that saw one companion traded for another when she split with model Jesus Luz for one of her troupe of fleetbodied dancers, Brahim Zaibat. The only real mention of music came at the year’s close in December, with a Facebook tease: “It’s official! I need to move. I need to sweat. I need to make new music! Music I can dance to. I’m on the lookout for the maddest, sickest, most badass people to collaborate with.”

W.E. WAS HER SECOND MOVIE IN THE DIRECTORIAL CHAIR, BUT THE TABLOIDS WERE MORE INTERESTED IN HER LOVE LIFE

POP_UP Though Madonna was buried in work for W.E., 2010 finally saw a live CD/DVD/BluRay compilation from the recordbreaking Sticky & Sweet Tour, taped in Buenos Aires in 2008

Madonna performs with dancer Brahim Zaibat at Hyde Park, London, July 2012

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POP_UP The Super Bowl show used 500 costumes, was set up in seven minutes, lasted for 12, and was taken down in eight. The industry reported a 17-fold increase in demand for Madonna's back catalogue

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Madonna opening the Super Bowl XLVI half-time show with a spectacular performance of Vogue

As movie director she may have disappointed, but a redeeming factor came with the singular Madonna track on the W.E. soundtrack. Masterpiece, a William Orbit composition and further proof of the duo’s ongoing compatibility, would go on to win a Golden Globe in 2011 for Best Original Song (and would later feature on next album MDNA). The awards ceremony itself would not pass without incident, particularly with Ricky Gervais continuing his ratings-boosting tenure as compere-cum-hiredmickey-taker. No-one was safe from a roasting, but as Gervais quickly discovered, one takes on Madonna at one’s peril. His comment about her being “just like a virgin”, was met with a sharp riposte: “If I’m still just like a virgin, Ricky, then why don’t you come over here and do something about it?” she parried. “I haven’t kissed a girl in a few years… on TV.” Touché, albeit missing the joke somewhat. Masterpiece was a minor victory, but Madonna was clearly finding it hard to keep up with her insane schedule. “Everything kind of converged in a bottleneck,” she told the Wall Street Journal. “I ended up finishing my film much later than I had expected so, because I had already scheduled time with all the producers and writers for my record, I had to multitask and work on my record at the same time I was finishing my film. And then somehow it worked out that the record was being finished right around the time the movie was coming out. Then I got talked into doing the Super Bowl…”

In December 2011, almost exactly a year after her initial Facebook teaser, Madonna announced that her new album would arrive in spring 2012. The unofficial yet seriously heavyweight launch of MDNA came with the Super Bowl in February, where she performed at the halftime show, viewed by over 100 million (higher figures than the actual game). It was the most-watched item in US TV history. “I have 12 minutes and 40 seconds to do something extravagant and exciting in the middle of something that’s quite sacred to all of America,” she had told the Los Angeles Times prior to the performance. It seemed the enormity – and the frightening logistics – of playing such a huge event was enough to weaken even Madonna’s steely reserve: “I’m more nervous about this than most things I’ve done, simply because… it’s not how I’m used to working,” she admitted. “I’m a perfectionist. I like everything to be done just so, and I like to run things and run things until people can do it with their eyes closed.” When it finally arrived, it was a gargantuan production put together with regular choreographer Jamie King as music director and aided by a creative think tank that included multimedia gurus Moment Factory and theatrical tour de force Cirque Du Soleil. There were four songs in total: an epic, Greco Romanthemed production of Vogue that cast Madonna as goddess-ruler in gold robe and headdress surrounded by legionnaires; her multi-national No. 1 Music that upped the urban with track-suited

THE UNOFFICIAL LAUNCH OF MDNA CAME IN FEBRUARY 2012 WITH HER SUPER BOWL HALFTIME SHOW

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Launching into Give Me All Your Luvin’ at the Super Bowl show

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POP_UP M.I.A’s raised middle finger during a deleted rude lyric at the Super Bowl led to her being fined a reported $16 million by the NFL. It was settled in 2014 in an undisclosed agreement

Madonna and CeeLo Green closing the Super Bowl show with Like A Prayer

breakdancers and segued into a mash-up with pop pranksters LMFAO; MDNA’s lead single, Give Me All Your Luvin’, dropped at the height of the show, complete with collaborators Nicki Minaj and M.I.A. and cheerleaders (to remind the audience they were at an American Football game and not a Madonna show); and finally a marching band led by CeeLo, who duetted an abridged Open Your Heart/Express Yourself medley with Madonna, before joining her in a stirring rendition of Like A Prayer, again sung with a gospel choir. The performance was solid – albeit obviously-choreographed – but didn’t pass without controversy. This time M.I.A. was the troublemaker, as she flicked the chicken wingeating masses of America the bird… “I was looking to collaborate with women who I think have a strong sense of themselves,” Madonna said afterwards. She could say that again… Aside from NFL bigwigs (and most of conservative America) being none too pleased with that illadvised middle digit, the response was good and the critics, for the most part, waxed lyrical: “Madonna is Madonna for a reason. And we saw it firsthand Sunday,” wrote the Los Angeles Times; “It’s Madonna Louise Ciccone’s world, we’re just living in it,” added Billboard. It was a fitting platform for the launch and pre-orders shot up after the show. But Super Bowl or no Super Bowl, Madonna had lost none of her allure: in Billboard's 2011 year-end poll, readers had voted MDNA their most anticipated album of 2012 with a whopping 42% of the vote.

The album’s title, a “triple entendre” and seditious for its blatant ecstasy reference, is somewhat of a red herring. Yes, there are plenty of reach-for-thelasers moments and EDM is its central thread, but lyrically MDNA concerns itself in the most part with her divorce from Guy Ritchie. “Wake up ex-wife/ This is your life,” begins I Don’t Give A, before she opines, “Lawyers suck it up/ Didn’t have a pre-nup…. I tried to be your wife/ Diminished myself.” It’s one of several candid references to the split, none of which are open to interpretation. The album also marked the beginning of Madonna’s reported $120 million, 10-year deal with concert promotion giant Live Nation (and label Interscope) – a fresh start and likely to line the pockets of all concerned, at least in the live arena. Finances aside, she seemed relieved to be back in the studio after the tiring filmmaking process. “I’m using a different part of my brain when I work on music versus when I’m directing a film,” she told The Sun. “There are a billion more people on a film and I don’t have that visceral outlet of being able to sing, scream… jump around… it’s very different. I love doing both but it was nice to have the simplicity of songwriting after three years of writing a script and directing and editing and talking about my film, to sit down and play my guitar and sing a song. I almost cried.” MDNA featured several first-time collaborations. The first was with Parisian house DJ and producer Martin Solveig, who took the reins for four tracks,

MADONNA HAD LOST NONE OF HER ALLURE: IN A BILLBOARD POLL, READERS VOTED MDNA THE MOST ANTICIPATED ALBUM OF 2012

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Turn Up The Radio, Give Me All Your Luvin’, I Don’t Give A and the M.I.A.-assisted B-Day Song (later removed from the main tracklisting). Together they concocted a mixture of Ray Of Light-era atmospherics, uncomplicated electro-pop and punked-up beats. Further raising the heat were Italian producers Benassi Bros, who added euphoric four-to-the-floor sensibilities into the mix with the uncomplicated dance-pop of Girl Gone Wild and the neat Giorgio Moroderinfluenced Italo-disco of I’m Addicted. Meanwhile two more Gallic talents, Hardy “Indiigo” Muanza and Michael Malih, worked on the mainstream stylings of Superstar, notable for the fact that daughter Lourdes sings backing vocals. Its risqué video treatment that involved Madonna as a “Terror Bride” – a mix of traditional Iraqi bridal veil and US soldier’s uniform – was deemed a stretch too far even for Madonna and was abandoned. She clearly felt happy in the company of European producers again. “I think maybe I just have more of a European sensibility,” she mused. “People say that about my songs as well. I like working with people who are well-read and know what’s going on in the world… with Martin Solveig we always end up getting in to discussions about foreign films. When I’m working with people I can’t just write music, I have to be able to talk about life and the world, and art.” The Demolition Crew, Klas Åhlund and a few others had a seat at the table too, but the general consensus came back that the pick of the tracks were those produced by seasoned Madge confidante William Orbit. The minimal, haunting electronica of Gang Bang is a league above with its stark build and the bileful lyrics (almost certainly aimed at Ritchie) that portray a jilted bride. Co-writer Mika took to Twitter saying the track was “weird as f***, underground and lyrically cool; it’s amazing and bizarre. I love it, she sounds so good singing words so harsh.” Orbit agreed. “We were all dancing around the control room… It was a total atmosphere of spontaneity.” Dirty synths dominate Some Girls, with a nod to Eighties clubland, while the classy Love Spent – another divorce song and vocally reminiscent of her younger self – deliver a punch last heard on Hung Up. There’s even a banjo. Then Masterpiece gives way to what is perhaps the pair’s finest moment here, Falling Free, a wonderful synth oddity that positions Madonna’s voice front and centre. Closing the album, it provides a jarring simplicity and in many ways stands alone in her catalogue. It certainly provides respite to the fuller productions elsewhere. “I like to have something that is just slammed with noise and sound and bass and drum, sensory overload,” she told The Sun. “And then create something like Falling Free, which is stripped back and all you can really hear is my voice and the lyrics.” British critics and bloggers got a first taste of MDNA at London’s Abbey Road studios. NME called it “a riot of uncontrolled emotions”, and they were right on the money. So how did it fare? While the record followed its predecessor to the top spot in its first week (her eighth album to do so), it plummeted soon after and earned the rather dour title “largest second-week percentage sales drop for a No. 1-debuting album”. Orbit, as mentioned in our Collaborators feature on page 63, perhaps imprudently aired his feelings about the artist’s other “pressing commitments” in public. He later apologised.

KEY REC r

01

MASTERPIECE

From W.E./MDNA (2012)

A high point on the W.E. soundtrack and later included on MDNA, Masterpiece was somewhat of a saving grace for both. Once again highlighting Madonna’s compatibility with William Orbit, the track also illustrated that she could hold her own without the need for vast productions. Her voice is delicately seated atop Orbit’s plaintive beat, backed by beautifully layered string-like soft synths. The lyrics are a simple declaration of love. No wonder it won Best Original Song at the 69th Golden Globes.

02

FALLING FREE From MDNA (2012)

Following Masterpiece on MDNA was this sublime synth curioso. On an LP that candidly addressed her divorce with Guy Ritchie, as the album’s curtains close, this final track seems to lay those demons to rest: “Deep and pure our hearts align/ Then I’m free, I’m free of mind/ I let loose, don’t need to know/ We’re both free, we’re free to go”. A candidate for her track of the decade thus far and more proof that Madonna is at her best when offering uncomplicated expressions of the heart.

03

BITCH, I’M MADONNA From REBEL HEART (2015)

Madonna offers up her grand statement of the 2010s with this zeitgeist-chasing dancefloor single. Trap pioneer Diplo is on production duties, Nicky Minaj crashes in halfway through and the all-star video is so far up in your grill it’s impossible to take your eyes off it. Her 46th single to reach No. 1 on the Billboard dance chart, Bitch, I’m Madonna is the perfect item to soundtrack her crusade against ageism and sexism in the music industry and it leaves the Spice Girls coughing in its dust.

04

GHOSTTOWN From REBEL HEART (2015)

From its sensuous intro through to its crashing final chorus, the second single from Rebel Heart evokes a disarming post-apocalyptic mis-en-scene, mirrored in its stunning Jonas Åkerlund video. “When I write with people, we always try to come up with a theme,” Madonna explained. “This one is about the city after Armageddon. The burnt out city, the crumbling buildings, smoke still lingering after the fire.” A favourite of critics and fans alike, Ghosttown stands up as a Madonna ballad of the finest order.

The critics were hardly awed by what they were hearing. “Large chunks of MDNA are shockingly banal… drably competent tunes better suited to D-list Madonna wannabes,” wrote Pitchfork. The Guardian called it “neither triumph nor disaster”, while Rolling Stone offered a deeper analysis: “There’s something remarkable about Madonna’s decision to share her suffering the way she once shared her pleasure. Her music has always been about liberation from oppression, but for the first time the oppression is internal: loss and sadness.” Hot and cold reviews aside, MDNA made No. 1 in 40 countries and 93


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POP_UP At the 2014 Grammys Madonna joined stars including Macklemore & Ryan Lewis and Queen Latifah as 33 couples exchanged their vows to promote marriage equality

© Getty Images

Madonna and Miley performing their hoedown mash-up of Don’t Tell Me and We Can’t Stop

earned Madonna three Billboard awards. Give Me All Your Luvin’ became her 38th Billboard Top 10, lengthening her lead as the artist with the most Top 10 singles in the chart’s history. The tour that followed was the 10th highest-grossing tour of all time. MDNA may have fallen well short of her A-game, but it was none too shabby a result nonetheless. A major milestone arrived as the year came to an end. October 2012 marked the 30th anniversary of the release of her debut single Everybody. She celebrated onstage in San Jose while on tour, by dropping to her knees in thanks to her fans, before making a rousing speech that introduced a rare performance of the track. “I remember the feeling to this day that I had when I heard the song on the radio for the first time,” she beamed. “I was so low wondering when and if anything good was ever going to happen for me. Well be careful what you wish for is all I can say…” With the madness of promoting MDNA behind her, 2013 was a quiet year. She ventured out for the GLAAD Awards, a ceremony set up to honour media outlets for their representations of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. There she made a speech that criticised the Boy Scouts of America for banning gay members; she was, of course, dressed in a scout uniform. Other philanthropic endeavours included her Raising Malawi organisation building 10 schools in Malawi and the launch of #secretprojectrevolution, an off-beat short film that addressed artistic freedom and human rights.

September saw the release of the MDNA live album. The tour had grossed $305 million thanks to 88 sold-out shows. Despite relatively poor album sales, Madonna’s share of live revenue still helped elevate her to the top of Forbes’ List Of The TopEarning Musicians for 2013. By January the tabloids were baying for blood, this time declaring Madge “try-hard” as they taunted her outings with new boyfriend Timor Steffens, 29 years her junior. Unfazed, Madge put in a superb showing at the Grammys, where she sang a rejigged Open Your Heart, and soon after, joined Miley Cyrus for her MTV Unplugged show. Their country-tinged rendition of Don’t Tell Me merged seamlessly with Miley’s own We Can’t Stop. Needless to say, Madonna couldn’t resist mirroring Miley’s signature tongue pose. One month later and news arrived of new album plans. “I’m right now in the process of talking to various co-writers and producers,” Madonna told the Globe And Mail. Further teases as to the identity of those collaborators were divulged via Instagram (by now her choice of online communication) where she revealed Swedish dance guru Avicii was involved. Then, in May, she made revealing mention of working with US DJ Diplo: “Diplo is a slave driver!” she joked. “Got me working all hours of the night in the studio.” Diplo confirmed the rumours when he told Idolator that she’d requested him to deliver the “craziest record [he] had”. “We really pushed the envelope… she was up for anything,” he

MADONNA PUT IN A SUPERB SHOWING AT THE 2013 GRAMMYS AND JOINED MILEY CYRUS FOR HER MTV UNPLUGGED SHOW

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2 0 1 0 S

© Getty Images

At the 24th annual GLAAD Media Awards in New York, March 2013

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© Getty Images In a Givenchy matador outfit at the Grammy Awards, 2015

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2 0 1 0 S

SEX, GUNS n U

Madonna’s MDNA Tour was one of her most controversial thus far. As a result, she faces two lawsuits; one from an allied group of Russian activists who are claiming “moral damage” in reaction to her outspoken opposition to St. Petersburg’s ban on gay pride, her vocalised support for subversive female punk band Pussy Riot and for her promotion of “homosexual propaganda”; the second comes from the French National Front, who took offense when she superimposed a swastika onto the forehead of their party leader Marine Le Pen during the Paris leg of the tour. Reports also surfaced that the star was booed and heckled at the Paris L’Olympia show when she finished her set after only 45 minutes. More trouble arrived in Warsaw at reports that Madonna was planning to project footage of the Warsaw Uprising in the Polish capital to highlight the anniversary of the 1944 event. To add to that, religious groups also took offence at her use of religious iconography and her promotion of homosexuality and nudity. Roman Catholic group Krucjata Mlodych (Youth Brigade) petitioned online to have the MDNA show boycotted via their “Don’t Go To See Madonna” campaign and promotional billboards were defaced throughout the Polish capital with the sign of the Polish Home Army (the underground WWII resistance movement). She ruffled feathers back at home, too. At her Washington DC show she urged the audience to vote for Barack Obama, referring to him over the microphone as a “black Muslim in the White House”. She later clarified her “joke”: “I was being ironic on stage,” read a statement. “I know Obama is not a Muslim – though I know that plenty of people in this country think he is. And what if he were? The point I was making is that a good man is a good man, no matter who he prays to. I don’t care what religion Obama is – and nor should anyone else in America.’ And it didn’t end there. Madonna had to defend herself from attacks from the anti-gun lobby for her use of fake handguns in her stage show, and ignored requests to remove the guns from her Edinburgh show in light of the Aurora movie theatre shootings. “It’s true there is a lot of violence in the beginning of the show and sometimes the use of fake guns – but they are used as metaphors. I do not condone violence or the use of guns,” she wrote in a letter to Billboard. Lastly, to add insult to injury Elton John laid into the star, calling the tour “a disaster”, likening her to a “fairground stripper” and saying her career was over. They have since made up.

dance chart – her record-breaking 46th single to do so – but it still only limped into the Hot 100, peaking at No. 84. Regardless of its lack of hits, Rebel Heart debuted at No. 2 in both the US and UK. “The reason I wanted to call the record Rebel Heart was because I felt like it explored two very distinct sides of my personality,” she told Billboard. “The rebellious, renegade side of me, and the romantic side of me.” Musically it does just that, with yet another sizeable cast of producers and a schizophrenic array of genres including pop, house, Italo, trap and reggae. Guests included Nicki Minaj, Nas, Chance the Rapper and Mike Tyson. Rebel Heart was a mixed bag in more ways than one: better than MDNA, but world’s away from her prime. In May, Madonna attended the Met Gala dressed in a black Givenchy get-up that left little to the imagination. In her words a “political statement” in her continuing fight against ageism, to others a desperate attempt to shock. Joan Collins called it “ludicrous” on morning telly; “Put. It. Away,” tweeted Piers Morgan – but Madonna cared none. “I’m not afraid to pave the way for all girls,” she wrote. “We cannot effect change unless we are willing to take risks. By being fearless and by taking the road less travelled by. That’s how we change history.” In August 2016, the Material Girl celebrated her 58th birthday dancing the night away in Cuba. When voted Billboard’s Woman Of The Year for 2016, her speech silenced the crowd. “‘Age is a sin’ in the world of music,” she declared. “People say that I’m so controversial, but I think the most controversial thing that I’ve done is to stick around.” A challenging new era is upon us and Madonna has yet again put herself on the frontline… and that is why she still wears the crown.

POP_UP In October 2016, guesting at comedienne Amy Schumer’s Madison Square Garden show, Madonna promised oral sex to anyone who voted for Hillary Clinton

continued. “I love when an artist gives a producer the confidence he needs to work with them, and Madonna was very open-minded to my ideas.” All seemed well with this latest project, until the year’s close when calamity struck and a wave of new album demos – including Bitch, I’m Madonna, Rebel Heart and Unapologetic Bitch were leaked. Madonna swiftly took to Instagram to underline that the purloined tracks were “unfinished demos stolen long ago”, but when she later likened the leak to “artistic rape and terrorism”, she was pounced upon by detractors who felt her comments to be inappropriate in the wake of the Peshawar school attack and the Sydney hostage crisis. Regardless, the timeline for the meticulously-planned release was upended and there was little else the fuming star could do but rush-release a six-track collection onto iTunes, calling it “an early Christmas gift”. In January 2015 The Hollywood Reporter announced that Israeli police had arrested a 39-year old man in connection with the leak, but the fiasco was far from over. The following month all 25 tracks of the Rebel Heart deluxe edition were out there, five weeks before the official release. Further controversy arrived in the run up to the March release when Madonna was criticised for re-posting fan-made memes of Martin Luther King, Bob Marley and Nelson Mandela, their faces bound by black rope to mirror the album’s artwork. Her “apology” came via Facebook: “I’m sorry. I’m not comparing myself to anyone. I’m admiring and acknowledging there [sic] Rebel Hearts. This is neither a crime or an insult or racist!” She took yet more flack with what she described as an “inspired wardrobe malfunction”, when she revealed her posterior to the paparazzi on the red carpet at the 57th Grammy Awards, a cheeky stunt intended to highlight the ongoing problem of ageism. She emphasised her feelings about the issue in Rolling Stone: ‘It’s still the one area where you can totally discriminate against somebody and talk shit. Because of their age. Only females, though. Not males. So in that respect we still live in a very sexist society… Women, generally, when they reach a certain age, have accepted that they’re not allowed to behave a certain way. But I don’t follow the rules. I never did, and I’m not going to start.” Flashing aside, she looked stunning on the Grammy stage clad in a Givenchy-made red matador outfit, flanked by dancers in bull headdresses. It was the most watched performance of the night. In the UK, she took the song to the BRITS, a performance that made headlines for entirely different reasons when her cape failed to release and she took a nasty tumble – it hardly covered her in glory. More bad press followed in April when her impromptu snog with Drake at Coachella made the Twittersphere audibly wretch. Later, when she literally got her “leg over” the Tidal table to sign up to Jay-Z’s streaming service, for many it was more clumsy cougar than scrummy mummy. To add to her woes, Rebel Heart had crawled out the gates at a snail’s pace with two non-charting misfires: the ho-hum electro-disco of Living For Love (featuring Alicia Keys on piano) and the marginally superior Ghosttown. It was her first album where big hits were notably absent. That headline-grabbing Bitch I’m Madonna vid looked like it would turn her fortunes around when the track made No. 1 in the

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© Getty Images

MADONNA WITH...

Mirwais and Madonna launching American Life at the MTV studios, New York, 2003

MIRWAIS

POST-RAY OF LIGHT MADONNA REFUSED TO PLAY IT SAFE. INSTEAD UNEARTHING A FRISKY, AND LATER RISIBLY RISKY, FRENCH MILLENNIAL ALLY FOR HER MUSIC… M A R C

“I

A N D R E W S

love to work with the weirdos no one knows about, the people who have raw talent and are making music unlike anyone else out there,” Madonna informed Billboard in August 2000 on the eve of the release of her new album, simply titled Music. After the blissful reception that met Ray Of Light, expectations were high – yet we were about to discover yet another facet to Madonna. “Leading up to Ray Of Light I was in a quiet space, going through lots of changes,” she reflected. “Then, almost without warning, I felt like I needed to explode. I felt like dancing.” Madonna’s Maverick Records employee and future manager Guy Oseary had pitched his boss a demo by French disco scientist Mirwais Ahmadzaï. With William Orbit busy with Blur, All Saints and Mel C, Madonna substituted Paris for London. “After Ray Of Light everyone was working with [Orbit],” Madonna complained. “I had to move on. I don’t want my records to sound like everyone else’s. That’s boring.” Half-Italian, half-Afghan and pushing 40, Mirwais had been a member of Eighties new wave band Taxi Girl. His electro techno prototype Disco Science appeared on the Snatch soundtrack from her soon-tobe-husband Guy Ritchie, with Madonna declaring her new musical mentor “the future of sound”.

The initial Madonna/Mirwais alliance hit a roadblock: Mirwais barely spoke any English. His manager had to turn translator before Impressive Instant, M&M’s first joint work, slid into view. Yet working with the biggest English-speaking pop star in the world didn’t faze Mirwais. “I was relaxed,” he told Keyboard magazine. “I knew she was asking me to do what I do, she was interested in me for my own work, and not for my ability as a performer, or for what I’d done for someone else’s songs. We were in tune, on the same wavelength.” The collaborators’ second attempt infused his acid rock with her epiphany about the healing power of music, after attending a concert by her yoga buddy Sting. Released in August 2000, a month before the album of the same name, the Music single reached No. 1 in 25 countries and still stands as Madonna’s last US No. 1. Entertainment Weekly noted the Grammy-nominated single “recaptures the simple perfection of Holiday and brings her career full circle”. According to GQ, “Music has turned her into a critical darling for perhaps the first time in her career”. “When” they added, “was the last time you heard the word ‘bourgeoisie’ on a No. 1 record?” Mirwais, rebranded “one cool ass French dude” by Madonna, called Music’s chart-topping success in the

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of the record with Mirwais,” she told The Observer, “and then it turned out to go in the other direction, because the first song resonated so monstrously.” Produced by another cult dance name, Stuart Price (then of Les Rythmes Digitales), that song, Hung Up, would top the charts in 41 countries. Her new, “less angry, more fun” album Confessions On A Dance Floor was a virtual reboot, with only two Mirwais contributions, Future Lovers and Let It Will Be, sneaked on. Two others were siphoned off as bonus tracks. The final death-knell to the Madonna/Mirwais collaboration came when It’s So Cool, a leftover from American Life, was ungraciously dumped as an iTunes bonus track for 2009’s Celebration compilation. The future had already shapeshifted. Yet when Rolling Stone reassessed Madonna’s 50 Greatest Songs in 2015, they ranked Music at No. 9 and Don’t Tell Me at No. 27. Miraculously, three American Life tracks appeared too – I Deserve It at No. 32, Hollywood at No. 44 and Die Another Day at No. 50. Whereas William Orbit had inspired Madonna’s spiritual side, Mirwais fostered her political resolve – although it’s questionable whether this was more Guy Ritchie’s influence. What’s beyond debate is that besides adding Music and Don’t Tell Me to her arsenal of hits, Mirwais irreversibly made Madonna seem a little like a weirdo too, often wonderfully so. “I think provocation is a really important element of pop music because without it, music isn’t exciting,” Mirwais said of the futuristic, if sometimes flawed, collaboration. “Everybody wants to be underground, to be the next Björk and for me that’s the mainstream now. It’s more interesting to invert the process. It raises the level of music and that’s the future. Madonna’s interesting because she understands that.”

LITTLE WONDER BACK TO THE SOUND OF THE UNDERGROUND After working with Madonna, Mirwais lent his production talents to NYC’s electroclash gods Fischerspooner for their 2005 sophomore album Odyssey, remixed Franz Ferdinand and Mika, then zipped back to his roots in 2009 to produce/co-write the first all-Arabic electropop album. Arabology was released in France by Lebanese singer/composer Yasmine Hamdan as Y.A.S (despite including a rare sample from Kraftwerk, the album stiffed). He also contributed to Uffie’s underrated debut album Sex Dreams And Denim Jeans. Lead single ADD SUV featured Pharrell Williams. Not only was the track sonically an open homage to Music, but the video’s car-meets-cartoon similarities were hard to ignore. While his second solo album, Production, was released pre-Madonna in 2000, Mirwais has long been dealing with difficult third album syndrome. On his Facebook page in mid2016 he promised a new release “some day soon”… © Getty Images

US “a small victory for underground music… proof that you can make profit with creativity”. With the iconic video (directed by Jonas Åkerlund, who had done Ray Of Light) introducing America to comedian Sacha Baron Cohen via his Ali G character, Music danced its way to becoming the second biggest club hit of the decade. Only Madonna’s own Abba valentine, Hung Up, released half a decade later, would be able to top it. The Music album, dubbed “fresh” by Spin, “radical” by Q and “a lick of pop genius” by Mojo, was released a month later. While three Orbit tracks made the cut, the bulk of Music was Mirwais’work. Electro-folk second single Don’t Tell Me, co-written with Madonna’s brother-in-law Joe Henry, proved to be one of her most endearing hits. With the success of 2001’s Drowned World Tour, her first in eight years, it was as if Madonna could do no wrong, thanks in no small part to Mirwais’ input. Prior to the arrival of her ninth album, the pair formulated a bristling techno title song for Die Another Day. Hitting the Top 10 in late 2002, the Bond theme would earn a Golden Globe nomination, two Grammy nominations and usher her into the record books as the artist with the most top 40 singles in the US (44), beating Aretha Franklin. The following April, Madonna released her new single and album, both called American Life – her riskiest album sonically, lyrically and visually. It is also only the second album of her career to be entirely produced by one person, after Nile Rodgers on Like A Virgin two decades earlier. It is something she would ominously never repeat again. American Life spluttered further into avant-garde, lo-fi Euro-techno complete with vocodered vocals. Nouveau “British” Madonna preached, and even rapped, about life, love and lattes, while on the cover she struck a curious pose as Che Guevara with a gun. Although filmed long before the Iraqi war broke out, the apocalyptic video – again by Jonas Åkerlund – was released in the middle of the combat operation, and Madonna was caught in an immediate media storm. The single’s success was undermined, if not sabotaged by Madonna herself, who sensed a shifting political climate and censored her own video. Matthew Rettenmund in his Encyclopedia Madonnica tome pointed out “not only was it a total loss on a major creative statement, it was a rare example of Madonna flinching under a barrage of criticism”. Compounding the issue was that, despite hitting No. 1 in 13 countries, the American Life album proved to be no critics’ darling, with reviewers mocking it as misguided, redundant and, at worst, “folkie psychobabble”. “Too much electronic music has been used for fashion and is overly popularised,” Mirwais decreed to Electronics on the album’s release. Virtually foretelling his own future, he added: “It is time for the music to go back underground”. American Life, single and album alike, sank swiftly, taking down with them the menacing Hollywood and feelgood Love Profusion as subsequent singles. Shifting just five million copies, American Life tallies as her worstselling studio album to date. The following year’s Re-Invention World Tour cunningly repaired the damage by showcasing the hits instead of her latest release – and, somewhat surprisingly, Mirwais was still initially inked to produce her tenth album. “I intended to do the bulk

Mirwais accompanies Madonna at Tower Records, NYC, 2003

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© Getty Images

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TAKE A BOW

RECENTLY NAMED THE MOST SUCCESSFUL SOLO TOURING ARTIST IN HISTORY, MADONNA’S LIVE SHOWS ARE RENOWNED NOT ONLY FOR BEING EXTRAVAGANZAS MERGING MUSIC, ART AND FASHION, BUT ALSO FOR BEING THE ONLY PLACE TO SEE POP’S PREMIER PROVOCATEUR EXPRESS HERSELF, UNFILTERED AND UNCENSORED… M A R K


L I N D O R E S

19/01/2017 16:00

© Getty Images

Burning up the stage: Madonna on the Virgin Tour, 1985

WITH A JOURNEY

that has taken her from the dancefloors of New York’s nightclubs to the stages of the world’s biggest stadiums, Madonna’s reputation as a live performer is unrivalled. Her 10 spectacular world tours have broken boundaries, pioneered the way live music is presented and entertained millions, leading to her being named the most successful touring solo artist of all time by Billboard for the $1.31 billion she has grossed from touring since records began. Kicking off on April 10th 1985, Madonna’s first foray into the live arena, The Virgin Tour, was frothy, fun and flirty, perfectly encapsulating her “Boy Toy” persona of the time. In a show which appeared to be tailor-made for her legions of wannabes, Madonna thrilled her fans by bringing to life the sassy star of her videos, performing all her hits in a series of outfits bearing all her trademarks… bare midriff, cut-off tights, lace underwear, crucifixes and rosaries, all of which were enthusiastically copied by her audiences. As these live shows were the first time that Madonna was actually seeing the scale of her fanbase first-hand, the hysteria was overwhelming. “That whole tour was crazy,” she told Rolling Stone. “I played a small theatre in Seattle and the girls were all wearing flap skirts and tights cut off below their knees and lace gloves and rosaries and bows in their hair and big hoop earrings. I was like, ‘This is insane!’ After Seattle, all the shows moved to sports arenas.”

Despite the huge success of The Virgin Tour, plans to extend it beyond the US were axed when newlywed Madonna vetoed the idea in favour of making a new album and film, enabling her to spend time in her new Malibu mansion with Sean Penn. By the time she was to head out on the road again, stadium rock was at its zenith and she had to come up with something that would enable her to operate in a field dominated by acts such as Bruce Springsteen, U2 and Queen. The Who’s That Girl Tour saw Madonna introduce elements of Broadway shows and Hollywood musicals into her live act – something which she would later utilise on a much grander scale. By now a streamlined sex siren, Madonna presented herself as a much more polished performer, showing off her gym-honed figure in costumes inspired by the characters she portrayed in her videos. Madonna was praised for her vocals and slick choreography, and the Who’s That Girl Tour’s production values were seen as a genuine breath of fresh air. The stage incorporated a grand staircase, a moving walkway and giant video projections, injecting the element of spectacle to a genre not known for its stimulating visuals. The way in which Madonna had flirted with the idea of playing different characters and introducing an element of theatricality proved to be the impetus for her next tour – a show which would transform the way music was presented in a live setting. The Like A Prayer album had presented a more personal and confessional side to her music and Madonna wanted to carry that over into her concerts, incorporating

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BLOND AMBITION WAS THE BLUEPRINT FOR EVERY POP SHOW THAT SUCCEEDED IT

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music, fashion, theatre, dance and art to create a show in which the setlist would tell a story and possess more emotional intensity. The result, 1990’s Blond Ambition Tour, was – and still remains – the blueprint, in many ways, for every pop show that has succeeded it, the first to split the show into acts, each with different sets and costumes. With her headset mic, ponytail and Jean-Paul Gaultierdesigned conical bra Madonna played the eroticallycharged automaton, the hermaphrodite-flanked harem girl, the Twenties chanteuse, the good-time gal and the S&M siren in a show which combined her greatest hits with visual cues from sources as widespread as Cabaret, A Clockwork Orange and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Given the cinematic nature of the show, Madonna decided to immortalise it by having it filmed and released as a concert film. However, that idea metamorphosed into Truth Or Dare (aka In Bed With Madonna), a revealing music documentary depicting life on the road with her touring family. Having found Blond Ambition physically and emotionally exhausting, Madonna had vowed never to tour again – a decision she reneged on when the controversy over her Sex book in 1992 overshadowed her Erotica album. Intensely proud of the record, Madonna felt that heading back out on tour was her best option of showcasing it properly. Influenced by the circus and burlesque, 1993’s The Girlie Show was a gloriously theatrical homage to Hollywood icons such as Marlene Dietrich, Audrey Hepburn and Gene Kelly, the decadence of disco, the heady hedonism of the Hair musical, inter-war

S T A G E

Weimar cabaret, the seedy S&M underworld of the Sex book and the joyful exuberance of a carnival, all presided over by a tragic Pierrot character – revealed at the end of the show to be the singer herself. Lasting just three months and with costumes by Dolce & Gabbana, it was the last time Madonna’s fans would witness her live for eight years. By the time she returned to the stage in 2001 with the Drowned World Tour, Madonna was a married mother of two and the new show revealed a rebranded performer. The sexual overtones had been ditched: instead, the Drowned World Tour’s shock factor came courtesy of artfully orchestrated scenes of ultra-violence, as images of Madonna’s bloodied and bruised face and a Manga cartoon rape scene were flashed across the video screens, while onstage the show was split into cyberpunk, geisha, cowgirl and flamenco-themed segments. Although visually impressive, Madonna’s decision to focus almost exclusively on the Ray Of Light and Music albums for material proved to be something of a self-indulgent mistake, as the more introspective album cuts fell rather flat in the vast auditoriums in which the tour was playing. Critically, the show lacked the “fun” factor that had come to be expected from the Madonna live experience, and it left many fans left feeling short-changed… particularly as this was the first tour on which Madonna had enforced her elevated ticket prices. While the Drowned World Tour had been an artistic statement, for her next global jaunt Madonna decided to begin to make peace with her past and get back into her groove. Following the underperformance of her American Life album she almost certainly knew that it would be wise to reintroduce some of the classic hits back into the show, and this she agreed to on the condition that she could perform the older material with brand-new arrangements. It was an idea which not only shaped the show, but also gave it its name – The Re-Invention Tour. Although this time round it was billed as such, performing her older material in remixed or rearranged form was something Madonna had always done to try to make the live show a more unique experience for her fans, as well as keep them fresh for her while on long

AND THE WINNER IS… From her now infamous performance of Like A Virgin at the first MTV Video Music Awards in 1984 to her homage to that performance to commemorate its 20th anniversary in which she locked lips with Britney Spears, Madonna’s appearance at an award show is guaranteed to make it headline news. Aside from the MTV Awards, at which she has delivered four more incredible performances – Express Yourself, Bye Bye Baby, Ray Of Light and her iconic 1990 rendition of Vogue dressed in full Marie-Antoinette regalia – Madonna has graced the stages to deliver show-stopping performances at the Academy Awards (Sooner Or Later in 1991 and You Must Love Me in 1997), the MTV European Music Awards (The Power Of Goodbye, Music and Hung Up), the Grammys (Nothing Really Matters, Music, Hung Up with Gorillaz, Same Love/Open Your Heart with Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, and Living For Love), the American Music Awards (Take A Bow with Babyface in 1995), the Brits (Bedtime Story in 1995 and Living For Love, with that infamous fall, in 2015). Her most recent performance was at the 2016 Billboard Music Awards where she performed Nothing Compares 2 U and Purple Rain with Stevie Wonder as a tribute to Prince.

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jaunts. “I’m really not interested in just performing the songs as they are on record, because you could just buy the record if you wanted to hear them,” she told MTV. “Also, even after a couple of months I get sick of them, so I have to reinvent them. I’d be too bored if I just went out and sang them. Most of the joy of the shows is the magic of creating them – the theatre. I’m a perfectionist, I like hard work.” The tour marked a return to form for Madonna, who delivered the spectacle her fans expected from her. While on Drowned World she had been distant and cold, Re-Invention brought her closer to her audience, performing on a walkway that extended out into the crowd; there were even dugouts in the stage for a limited number of fans. The tour struck a perfect balance between old and new material, with Madonna showcasing American Life alongside rearranged versions of hits such as Vogue, Like A Prayer, Into The Groove and Papa Don’t Preach. So impressed was Madonna by the job musical director Stuart Price had done on this tour that she

RAYS OF LIGHT It was being exposed to her fanbase for the first time during her Virgin Tour and being shocked by the level of influence she had over them as they turned up dressed as clones of herself that inspired Madonna to use her voice and influence to highlight important issues. Writing with the tour’s musical director Pat Leonard on the road, she penned her first social consciousness song, Love Makes The World Go Round, and debuted the song at Live Aid in July 1985 – her first appearance at a benefit concert. Since then, she has used her musical muscle to lend support at countless benefits including Rock For The Rainforest in 1998, Tsunami Aid and Live 8 in 2005, Live Earth in 2007, and Hope For Haiti Now in 2010. In December 2016 she held an auction and performed her acclaimed Tears Of A Clown show in Miami – “an evening of music, art and mischief”, as she described it – in support of her Raising Malawi Foundation in order to raise funds ($7.5 million, no less) to equip and staff a hospital in the country. Having first performed the show in Melbourne in March 2016, the show – a mixture of stand-up and rarely-played album tracks – was so well received that Madonna now has plans to perform it in various cities to raise more funds for her charity.

REBEL HEART FOUND MADONNA NOW AT EASE WITH HER PAST AND PRESENT hired him to co-write and produce Confessions On A Dancefloor, spawning The Confessions Tour, a lavish, state-of-the-art spectacle. From the moment Madonna arrived onstage from an exploding disco ball, the show was one showstopping performance after another: whether riding a carousel horse around the stage for Like A Virgin, hanging from a mirrored cross for Live To Tell, dancing up a storm in a Travolta-esque white suit for Music Inferno or gyrating on a boombox for Hung Up, the high-octane attack on the senses was Madonna at her very best and it made it the highestgrossing tour by a solo artist of all time. With Madonna now racking up record-breaking tour after record-breaking tour she signed a deal with Live Nation in 2007 worth $120 million, which placed touring at the forefront of her future projects. Financially the move paid off as 2008/2009’s Sticky & Sweet Tour became the highest-grossing tour by a solo artist of all time, raking in $408 million, beating her own record… and yet creatively, she appeared to have come unstuck. The show failed to match her own high standards, with everything from the stage set to the costumes and the setlist proving a disappointment when compared to former tours. While Madonna had always been a pioneer in the art of live performance, Sticky & Sweet failed to live up to not only her past live outings but also those of fellow pop divas who had followed her lead and were now producing giant productions of their own. Whether it was the frequency of which she was now expected to tour that lead to a decline in quality or a lapse of imagination remained to be seen. 2012’s MDNA Tour, which was launched with a spectacular performance at the Super Bowl Halftime Show, was visually a vast improvement on Sticky & Sweet, but some felt that the show suffered thanks to Madonna’s insistence on showcasing her latest album – in this case, not her strongest effort. As well as the lacklustre new material, reinterpretations of older hits such as Like A Virgin and Hung Up also fell flat. Supporting an album she was genuinely invested in has always brought out the best in Madonna as a live performer, and 2015’s Rebel Heart Tour was a major return to form. This time, she allowed herself to reveal a warm, funny and more vulnerable side, and now seemed completely at ease with her past and present. Revisiting rarely-played hits such as True Blue, Who’s That Girl and Deeper And Deeper, as well as tracks from her best album in years, the Rebel Heart Tour proved that when it comes to putting on a show, Madonna’s immaculate connection to her audience was stronger than ever.

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At the Super Bowl Half Time Show with Nicky Minaj, February 2012

The mirrored cross from the Confessions Tour, July 2006

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Coming full circle: Madonna rocks out Eighties-style on the Rebel Heart Tour


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Madonna and Warren Beatty in the action comedy Dick Tracy, 1990

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F I L M S

WHO’S THAT GIRL SHE’S OCCUPIED BOTH ENDS OF THE CINEMATIC SCALE AND BEEN ON BOTH SIDES OF THE CAMERA LENS. FROM GOLDEN GLOBE-WINNING TRIUMPHS AND REGAL BIOPICS TO DISASTROUS REMAKES AND ROM-COM BOMBS, WE SURVEY THE HIGHS AND LOWS OF MADONNA’S ON-SCREEN ACTIVITY… R I K

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F I L M S

As New York City grifter Susan in Desperately Seeking Susan, 1985

POP_UP On the soundtrack album that accompanied Vision Quest, Madonna’s Crazy For You shared space with Dio, Journey, Foreigner, Sammy Hagar… and The Style Council

ASIDE FROM

her 13 studio albums and mammoth touring schedule, humanitarian work and general extra-curricular activities, Madonna has somehow found time to add just short of 30 full-length feature films to her on-screen CV. In fact, there have been very few years in her career thus far in which she hasn't been involved in a movie in some way or other. And while she invariably divides both critical and audience opinion, it goes without saying that even the finest stock Hollywood has to offer has felt the sharp end of the critic’s pen at some point or other – and by no means all said A-listers have been vindicated with a Golden Globe. Still, notwithstanding her successes on screen, Madonna seems perpetually imprisoned by – and denigrated for – her failures. In many cases, she’s forced to carry the can for an entire production’s failure, regardless of her role within it. In reality, when appointed to the right role, she’s an actor who can shine. And in one particular case she had some pretty big shoes to fill… It’s telling that Madonna’s aspirations towards film stardom were buy no means a late addition to her portfolio. In fact, her first starring role was very early on in her career and ran in tandem with her music. Released in 1985 (but filmed far earlier in 1979), A Certain Sacrifice was a gritty low-budget independent shot on Super 8, and one from which Madge took home a mere $100 to cover her rent. She would come to regret her participation in that particular roughshod indie, likely in part down to the

treatment of the film’s sexual content (and the brutal rape scene). When the film was eventually released – no doubt a deliberate move to capitalise on her fame in the wake of second album Like A Virgin – she attempted to buy out the director, Stephen Jon Lewicki. When he declined, she tried (without success) to get the film banned. She aired her indignation in no uncertain terms as she exited a pre-release screening. Even so, her resolute ambition to someday walk the red carpet was plain to see. Turn back the clock to the end of the Seventies and the young New Yorker was desperate to land a role. She had written a threepage letter to Lewicki in response to his newspaper ad scouring the city for a female lead: “I was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan where I began my career in petulance and precociousness,” it began, offering a chucklesome glimpse into the character we’d all come to know inside-out. “By the time I was in the fifth grade, I knew I either wanted to be a nun or a movie star. Nine months in a convent cured me of the first disease.” It’s a revealing read. A brief cameo as a club singer in rite-of-passage movie Vision Quest (Crazy For You in the UK) followed, but her first taste of real success came later in the year when she landed her first major role in the Eighties classic Desperately Seeking Susan. Co-star Rosanna Arquette was cast as a bored housewife who becomes obsessed with a grifter named Susan, a felicitous role for Madonna. Not only did the film introduce her acting potential to the world, but it also brought pop masterstroke Into The Groove to its ears.

NOTWITHSTANDING HER SUCCESSES ON SCREEN, MADONNA SEEMS PERPETUALLY IMPRISONED BY – AND DENIGRATED FOR – HER FAILURES

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Desperately Seeking Susan took almost $30 million at the box office and made it into The New York Times’ Top 10 films of 1985. Not bad for a rookie. The following year came the George Harrisonproduced flop Shanghai Surprise, notable only for the fact that Madonna stars opposite newly-wed sweetheart Sean Penn. Billboard described her performance as “unbearable”; the less said, the better. Moving swiftly on to an item of far greater interest to movie fans, the screwball comedy Who’s That Girl, despite failure at the box office, was a vast improvement. With Madonna cast as a streetwise delinquent, it proved once again that the singer had a flair for comedy timing – albeit without the captivating naivety seen in Desperately Seeking Susan. Madonna was singled out by The New York Times as one of the film’s saving graces, even though the majority of critics turned their noses up: “The question posed by the film’s title was ‘Who’s that girl?’” said Rolling Stone. “The answer provided by the box-office receipts was, alas, ‘The same one who appeared in Shanghai Surprise and bored us to death’.” Madonna took a Golden Raspberry for Worst Actress yet the soundtrack flew off the shelves, selling over six million copies. In 1989 her upward trajectory was slighted by yet another dud. She received another Razzie nomination for Worst Supporting Actress in the period comedy Bloodhounds On Broadway – a film that cost $4 million but only scraped in $44,000 in ticket sales. Many began to advocate she stick to music and give the movie business a wide berth. Madonna’s film career is inconsistent, to say the least, and the Nineties were no different. Dick Tracy was a hit to get the decade off to a flying start. Warren Beatty’s adaptation of the Thirties comic strip featured Hollywood heavyweights Al Pacino and Dustin Hoffman, and Madonna herself put in a confident turn as Club Ritz songstress Breathless

Armed and dangerous as ex-con Nikki Finn in 1987's Who’s That Girl?

Mahoney – an embodiment of the quintessential sassy blonde, with a fine stock of suggestive comebacks. The film premiered at the Walt Disney World Resort in Florida and went on to enjoy the third-highest opening weekend figures of the year with well over $160 million taken worldwide. Dick Tracy was nominated for seven Academy Awards, three of which it won. While none went to Madonna per se, her performance was generally well received. The plaudits continued with the 1991 Blonde Ambition Tour documentary In Bed With Madonna (Truth Or Dare in the States), a cinematic triumph that’s both eye-opening and funny. This pop-umentary offered a candid glimpse at behind the scenes operations on the road with one of the world’s most celebrated pop stars. It became, at that point, the highest-grossing documentary of all time, and further prompted some to suggest that Madonna’s best role was in fact that of Madonna. Woody Allen’s Shadows And Fog did nothing to change their minds. Brooding, claustrophobic and shot in black and white, this Kafkaesque neo-film noir depicted the search for a murderer over a single night. Filmed on the largest set ever built in New York, it boasted an equally sizeable cast that included such names as John Cusack, Jodie Foster, Mia Farrow, Lily Tomlin, John Malkovich and Allen himself. Alas, size isn’t everything and unlike much of Allen’s output, the film proved to be a little too arduous for most. Something more light-hearted was required, and 1992’s baseball comedy A League Of Their Own was just the ticket. It also revealed Madonna could stand up to any one of her big name co-stars – Tom Hanks, Geena Davis and Lori Petty. From home run to universal ridicule, the erotic misfire Body Of Evidence that followed, complete with cringeworthy candle wax sex scene, was nominated for no less than six Golden Raspberries (Madonna won Worst Actress).

POP_UP A League of Their Own has been preserved by the Library Of Congress, who praised the movie as “a fascinating, under-reported aspect of American sports history” and “both funny and feminist”

Shanghai Surprise

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Dick Tracy

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POP_UP Over Evita’s complicated 20-year gestation the role of Eva Perón had been linked with Barbra Streisand, Elaine Paige, Liza Minelli, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Meryl Streep

F I L M S

EVITA-DREAM OR NIGHTMARE? Evita was fated to be – quite literally – a bumpy ride. Firstly, huge crowds of screaming fans shadowed Madonna’s every move – “I have bone-crushing entrances and exits whenever I go out,” she declared in a revealing diary commissioned by Vanity Fair. As a result, she referred to her hotel room as “my prison cell” and chose to sleep in a smaller room on the floor above to avoid the constant noise outside her suite. To add to that, just as filming commenced, she fell pregnant. While some keen-eyed cinema-goers noticed the odd change from scene to scene, she got away with it. Regardless, pregnancy was the least of her worries: the protesters were everywhere. On the way to her hotel she’d spied vicious graffiti: “Evita lives, get out, Madonna”. The world’s press was relentlessly negative throughout, and the local papers supported the Perónist protesters. “I’ve got to stop reading the papers,” she stated. “I am portrayed either as a stupid c*** who doesn’t deserve to play Santa Evita or a spoiled American movie star who has no interest in the truth… I sometimes think my phones are tapped, and wonder if every employee in this hotel is on the take,” she went on. “There are camera lenses trained on me at every window.” She even mentions that certain factions of the Argentinian press tried to frame her for murder in a staged car accident. When many would throw in the towel, Madonna was unshakable. “None of this discourages me,” she declared defiantly. In reality, Madonna’s laborious research and all-round dedication to learning everything there was to know about Eva Perón meant that, by the time filming began, she probably knew more about her quarry than the majority of her detractors. On March 20th 1996 Madonna finally stepped out onto the infamous balcony of the Casa Rosada in front of thousands of people and sang Don’t Cry For Me Argentina. “I raised my arms and looked into the hungry eyes of humanity, and at that moment I felt [Eva] enter my body like a heat missile, starting with my feet, travelling up my spine, and flying out my fingertips, into the air, out to the people, and back up to heaven.” Bravo.


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Experimental film-within-a-film Dangerous Game – a co-billing with Harvey Keitel and James Rosso – was cued up next to try and recover what was left of Madonna’s reputation. Perhaps it was fear of further ridicule that got the better of her, but having seen the final cut she didn’t attend the premiere, and bad-mouthed the film pre-release. Director Abel Ferrara blamed her for its failure; “Madonna killed it,” he commented. Yet another lemon for the list, and perhaps the reason why two non-committal roles followed: a singing telegram girl in comedy Blue In The Face and a bit part in Spike Lee’s Girl 6. Despite this run of box office mediocrity, Madonna’s dream role was just around the corner. When word reached her camp that a cinematic recreation of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s epic musical Evita was in the offing, she was quick to act. She put pen to paper yet again in an eight-page letter that assured her suitability to director Alan Parker. “Madonna promised me from the very beginning she would give her all,” said Parker. “And she has kept her promise.” It was a role she was born to play, perhaps because, as two powerful women, they both possessed a strong sense of aesthetics and an irresistible charm. It seems Parker had been right to have faith where others would not. Despite protests in Argentina that Evita would tarnish Perón’s almost saint-like image, it was Madonna who made the breakthrough. After several failed attempts to gain permission to film on the iconic balcony in Buenos Aires’ Plaza De Mayo, it was she who managed to persuade the Argentinian president. “I think up until that point, all he had to go on was hearsay,” she told Roger Ebert. “The stage version of the musical portrays a very one-dimensional version of her. It doesn’t show her in a very humane way; it doesn’t show any vulnerability, it doesn’t explain her past. Alan Parker had the chance to do that in a movie, and I explained that to the president.”

The Next Best Thing

A League Of Their Own

With relentless negative press and constant protests overshadowing the film, Madonna made sure her groundwork was thorough. “An Argentinian journalist whom I met in London has agreed to meet me in [Buenos Aires] and arrange interviews with people who knew or worked with Eva, as well as some antiPerónists,” she wrote in Vanity Fair. “Most are very old and I’m sure a good number will be suspicious of me. I can hardly blame them if the me they know is the one they’ve read about in newspapers. I am prepared to disarm all and get them to share their deepest, darkest secrets about Eva.” Aside from interviews, meeting historians and immersing herself in Eva’s life, Madonna even went as far as trying Eva’s favourite meal and visiting her grave. She took two years away from music to focus on the role, and it showed. “I’m in a state of shock,” she wrote when filming was over. “I think it will take me months to recover and a very long time before I’m able to digest all that has happened to me these past five months… My life will never be the same.” Eva Perón was without doubt a defining role for Madonna and it would go a long way to restoring the public’s opinion of her abilities. “It’s a relief to say that Alan Parker’s film… is pretty damn fine, well cast and handsomely visualised. Madonna once again confounds our expectations,” wrote Time magazine. “Love or hate Madonna-Eva, she is a magnet for the eyes.” Evita grossed $141 million worldwide, far exceeding its budget, and Madonna bagged a Golden Globe for Best Actress. From the sublime… to 2000’s comedy-drama The Next Best Thing, a major financial and critical disaster that’s best forgotten – as was an ill-fated project made with husband/director Guy Ritchie, 2002’s horror-show remake Swept Away, a rom-com that has tarnished the star’s credentials ever since. “Striking a pose is not the same as embodying a person, and a

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role like this one requires the surrender of emotional control, something Madonna seems constitutionally unable to achieve,” came the death toll from The New York Times. Five Golden Raspberries followed. The Noughties continued with more misfires, a cameo in a Bond film, another documentary, two films (and relative success) as Executive Director and her directorial debut – but for music fans, 2005’s I’m Going To Tell You A Secret was the one. This second documentary followed the Re-Invention World Tour, with her spirituality (Kabbalah) very much in focus. From auditioning dancers through to shows in Israel disrupted by protests, it’s a compelling production. Next came two projects that occupied polar opposite ends of the spectrum. For 2006 animation Arthur And The Invisibles, Madonna took on the voice of Princess Selenia, before raising awareness about HIV in Malawi via 2008’s I Am Because We Are, a documentary that depicted the lives of orphans in the country. “Madonna the documentary-maker came, saw and conquered the world’s biggest film festival yesterday with a powerful polemic on the effects of disease and poverty on Malawi,” praised The Guardian. Later that year she was in the director’s chair for the first big film production to come out of her Semtex Films company. Despite a cast that included Richard E Grant and several British soap stars, Filth And Wisdom – a comedy romance that portrayed three flatmates trying to make ends meet in London – was slammed. “Madonna would do well to hang on to her day job,” sneered The Telegraph.

To her final film thus far and her second as director. 2011’s W.E. is a biopic that told the story of the relationship between American socialite Wallis Simpson and King Edward VIII. Wallis was another woman to whom Madonna could clearly relate; “She was a powerful woman,” she told Harper’s Bazaar. “So it makes sense that people would make things up about her. When women are perceived as powerful and doing something they aren’t supposed to be doing, they are often portrayed as sexual predators.” The comparisons were obvious. Several promotional outings for W.E. preceded the Venice Film Festival premiere and a full-scale US release followed a few months later. But despite dedicating all of her energies to the film and burning up $18 million in the process, W.E. received a lukewarm response. At one end of the spectrum, The Daily Telegraph’s David Gritten’s non-committal review called it “a bold and confident story about an American woman’s obsession with the Windsors”, while at the other, The Guardian’s Xan Brooks skewered it as “a primped and simpering folly, preening and fatally mishandled”. Ouch. It’s hard to fathom why Madonna gets such a hard time for her flirtations with film when almost every actor she’s starred alongside has made a turkey or two in their time. Not only has Ms. Ciccone put in one profoundly moving performance and some rock solid supporting roles when at her finest, but she’s not afraid to take on challenging projects – and for that we applaud her. Let’s just hope the next shoe fits…

WHEN AT HER FINEST, MS. CICCONE HAS PUT IN ONE PROFOUNDLY MOVING PERFORMANCE AND SOME ROCK SOLID SUPPORTING ROLES

POP_UP Madonna has a further directorial (co-)credit: a 17-minute short film from 2013, secretprojectrevolution, aiming to tackle human rights issues via a social media project, Art For Freedom. See it on YouTube

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Madonna’s crowning role as Eva Perón in 1996’s Evita

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2000 For the film The Next Best Thing Madonna opted to cover Don McLean’s hippie opus American Pie in swirly, chiming Orbital fashion. Although her (much shorter) version made UK No. 1, she endured plenty of criticism for taking on such a sacred anthem – or perhaps it was all that shameless flirting with co-star Rupert Everett in the video. Tucked away on the same soundtrack was a William Orbit/Ciccone contribution, Time Stood Still. Again demonstrating Madonna’s strength as a proud purveyor of melancholy, it was elegant and poignant, with lyrics that literally recited the film’s plot… so no need to endure her Golden Raspberrywinning role again.

Time Stood Still

2015 This item is only to be found on the super deluxe edition of Madonna’s most recent Rebel Heart album… because a mere deluxe edition simply can’t cut the chart mustard these days, right? A Capri disco-like setting provides the musical landscape for a clutch of Ms Ciccone’s most profound lyrics, serenely detailing her “stupid flaws”. That unapologetic language might actually be thanks to songwriter Rick Nowels, previously her co-composer on some of the more moving tracks on the Ray Of Light album. This hidden gem does suffer a tad from languid production when sleek and Chic-esque might have worked wonders. Nevertheless, Beautiful Scars is tender, heartfelt and features a plaintive vocodered male voice over the soft synth strings that close out the track. It didn’t make the cut of the Rebel Heart album proper, which for many was truly a criminal offence.

Beautiful Scars

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BONUS ON JAPANESE RAY OF LIGHT ALBUM

1998

Has To Be

2008 UNRELEASED

Like An Angel Passing Through My Room

BONUS ON REBEL HEART SUPER DELUXE EDITION

2015

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Beautiful Scars

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GET PAST THE CHART MAINSTAYS, THE NEAR MISSES AND THE DARKER BROODING ALBUM TRACKS ABOUT HER MOTHER, HER FAME, OR BOTH AND THERE STILL REMAINS AN ARRAY OF UNCONVENTIONAL MADONNA TRACKS THAT ONLY TRUE BLUE DEVOTEES MIGHT BE AWARE OF – AT LEAST, UNTIL NOW…

MADONNA SONGS YOU’VE (PROBABLY) NEVER HEARD

1998 This empyrean bonus track, initially found on the Japanese edition of her Ray Of Light opus, might well have been Madonna reimagining herself as Björk’s older, more knowing sister. Master Orbit’s knobtwiddling does its best to steer the track into the leftfield, yet his efforts are fortuitously defeated by a resplendently dreamy, sweetly-sung pop chorus. Restrained and impressively refined, Has To Be’s subtle charms were later noticed by the powers that be and the song was selected as a very appropriate B-side for Ray Of Light’s eponymous second single – so that not only Japanese fans could wallow in its gloom.

Has To Be

2008 Never officially released, this soaring lullaby to the finality of life, love and light leaked – oddly enough – on Madonna’s 50th birthday, leading some to suggest it was fondly intended as a birthday present from the Queen of Pop to her fans. Not to be confused with her other two big “like” hits, this one is an ethereal cover of the song that holds the dubious honour of being Abba’s last-ever album track. William Orbit littered his usual library of beeps, bleeps and strings all over this eerie ballad, steering it confidently between contemplative and futuristic. Madonna is in fine vocal form with those Evita lessons paying dividends years after her first, and to date solitary, acting Golden Globe. We can but pray one day Madonna issues what still stands tall as her “other” Abba track.

Like An Angel Passing Through My Room

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1984 Surprisingly, there are only a handful of unreleased tracks by Madonna that have publicly seen the light of day over the last four decades, such has been the creative control the Material Girl exerts on her own material. An early example is the post-disco swirl of Ain’t No Big Deal, recorded in her early days, remixed in 1984 and finally released in 1986 as a fan curiosity on the B-sides of both Papa Don’t Preach and its successor single, True Blue, as if it deserved revisiting twice. Another lesser find is Your Honesty, a demo-like track from the 1994 Bedtime Stories session that her thenmanager remembered fondly, and she encouraged her star client to include it on 2003’s somewhat slapdash Remixed & Revisited EP.

Ain’t No Big Deal

1999 Not yet done with William Orbit as her in-house producer, Madonna was desperate to eek out the mileage from Ray Of Light’s success. Somehow she found a few spare hours in her busy schedule to write and record a duet with the biggest star in the world at the time, Puerto Rican heartthrob Ricky Martin. With Ricky’s popularity surging across the globe courtesy of Livin’ La Vida Loca, Madonna pushed Orbit to venture into Latin-tinged territory for this sexy Spanglish collaboration that will almost have you believing the two stars were making out while they recorded it. Mooted as a single, it was blindsided by record company politics and in its place Ricky’s dated duet with Swedish singer Meja, Private Emotion, barely managed to scrape into the top 40. Be careful what you wish for, indeed…

Be Careful

1986 It’s 1986 and Madonna is at the peak of her millionselling powers. What does she do in her spare time? She uncovers a hot British male model called Nick Kamen and with writing buddy/ drummer ex Stephen Bray, hands him a hit single. Listen to Madonna’s almost identical version from the True Blue sessions and also to Kamen’s 1988 single Tell Me, with vocals from the boy toy’s gal pal and production by Patrick “Like A Prayer” Leonard.

2005 Music and American Life producer Mirwais Ahmadzaï snuck one track onto Confessions On A Dance Floor – Future Lovers, used as the opener for her 2006 Confessions tour, thrillingly intertwined with Donna Summer’s I Feel Love. Two of his creations were deemed unsuitable: one was Fighting Spirit (a bonus track on the limited edition), but the one to cherish is Superpop, probing the perils of pop culture years before Gaga tried and failed with Artpop while nodding musically to Daft Punk and lyrically to Frida Kahlo.

Superpop

FAN CLUB DOWNLOAD ONLY

2005

Superpop

UNRELEASED DEMO

1986

Each Time You Break My Heart

SWEET RELIEF II: GRAVITY OF THE SITUATION

1995

Guilty By Association

B-SIDE TO PAPA DON’T PREACH & TRUE BLUE

1984

Ain’t No Big Deal

A VERY SPECIAL CHRISTMAS ALBUM

1987

Santa Baby

RICKY MARTIN

1999

Be Careful

THE NEXT BEST THING SOUNDTRACK

2000

Time Stood Still

Each Time You Break My Heart

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1995 Madonna’s brother-in-law, alt-country singer/songwriter Joe Henry, is the bright spark who penned the backbones for two of her more enduring, if less glitzy hits: 2000’s Don’t Tell Me and 2006’s Jump (which also sneaked its way onto the The Devil Wears Prada soundtrack). One of her rare duet partners alongside Prince, Britney Spears, Ricky Martin and Stevie Wonder (for 2017’s Prince TV tribute), Joe cajoled his in-law into joining him on a Vic Chestnutt song for the lo-fi charity album Sweet Relief II: Gravity Of The Situation, aiding musicians in need of health care. Arguably the closest Madonna has yet come to country music, the aptly named Guilty By Association attests to the fact she can genre-hop with the best of them – because she is the best of them.

Guilty By Association

1987 The A Very Special Christmas charity album featured some unlikely festive cheer such as Bryan Adam’s stomping Run Run Rudolph, Stevie Nicks getting her gospel on for Silent Night and Bruce Springsteen’s cloying Merry Christmas Baby. Madonna opted to record Eartha Kitt’s naughty girl Christmas anthem Santa Baby, and with a hint of Marilyn Monroe in her helium-nuanced delivery it’s joyfully dippy and unlike anything she’s recorded before or since; perhaps the closest is Supernatural, a spooky item from the Like A Prayer sessions that ended up as B-side to 1989’s Cherish single. The Queen of Pop’s version of Santa Baby was recorded virtually note-for-note two decades later by none other than the Princess of Pop, Kylie Minogue.

Santa Baby

CAUSING A COMMOTION THE QUEEN OF MTV WAS ONE OF THE FIRST TO CREATE A VISUAL IDENTITY AS SIGNIFICANT TO HER LEGACY AS HER MUSIC. WITH OVER 70 MUSIC VIDEOS TO HER NAME, MADONNA HAS USED HER VIDEOGRAPHY AS A PLATFORM TO EXPRESS HERSELF LIKE NO OTHER M A R K

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A classic still from Papa Don’t Preach

POP_UP The wider public’s first glimpse of Madonna – sliding her sunglass down her nose in Lucky Star – was a nod to Sue Lyon in Lolita and Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast At Tiffany’s

IT’S HARD TO

imagine, given the sheer magnitude of Madonna’s iconic videography, that when she started out she was regarded as a faceless dance act with no videos and no photographs on her record sleeves. Her early anonymity could have understandably led anyone listening to ask – to quote one of her most famous hits – “who’s that girl?” Soon, though, that question would be rendered null and void, as within a matter of months that girl was MTV’s First Lady, a natural star who was seemingly born to be in front of the camera. A simple clip, shot in grainy black and white, of Madonna lowering her sunglasses at the beginning of the Lucky Star video heralded the arrival of the woman who would come to define the video age. As Burning Up and Lucky Star swiftly became MTV mainstays, Madonna’s in-your-face attitude and streetstyle already saw her rivalling Prince and Michael Jackson for airtime. By Borderline, she was a walking billboard for her graffiti artist friend Keith Haring’s fashions, the achingly hip downtown diva who embodied the essence of New York cool. Directed by Mary Lambert, Borderline’s heavy rotation on MTV fuelled the song’s success, delaying the release of Madonna’s second album. During the interim, Madonna and Lambert collaborated on a pair of videos that would cement her ascension into superstardom – the girl-on-agondola romp of Like A Virgin, which debuted her infamous “wanton bride” persona, and the wry pastiche of Marilyn Monroe’s Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend in Material Girl. By the time Madonna returned in 1986 with a sleeker new look, she had made the transition into films with Desperately Seeking Susan, an experience which altered her view on video making. As her music was becoming more issue-led, she began using

her videos as narratives to elevate the messages contained within her music. In Papa Don’t Preach, the first of her “mini-movies”, she was compelling as the vulnerable pregnant teenager. It was a similar story with True Blue’s other videos, the sexually-charged peepshow performer of Open Your Heart and the Latin love story of La Isla Bonita. Following a further detour into film with Who’s That Girl, the media began questioning why a star so dynamic in her videos was unable to replicate that onscreen presence to her film roles. 1989’s Like A Prayer, once again directed by Mary Lambert, was by far her most controversial to date, with a racially motivated murder, stigmata, Madonna kissing a black saint on an altar and dancing in front of a field of burning crosses among the scenes the media picked up on. “Badonna”, as they called her, had gone too far. The video was banned around the world and cost Madonna a huge sponsorship deal with Pepsi. The video may have hit Madonna financially, but it was very lucrative in what it taught her about the music business and the media. The acreage of free publicity she received from the Like A Prayer debacle instilled in her the controversy-equals-currency ideal – something she implements with great success to this day. Whether intentional or not, Like A Prayer signalled the most interesting, subversive period of Madonna’s career. For the next five years, her videos marked her out as a true maverick, constantly delivering bold, fearless videos designed to provoke reactions, good or bad, and incite discussion on matters important to her. As the medium of the music video had evolved into a major promotional opportunity, a whole new generation of talent was emerging as a host of talented creatives battled to make their marks as videomakers. As the biggest, most daring star in the world, Madonna had her pick of the bunch.

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Lucky Star

Like A Prayer Take a Bow

Express Yourself,, David Fincher’s futuristic fantasy, examined the place of women in society and cast Madonna in a variety of roles, from the power-crazed businesswoman to the enslaved sex object chained to a bed. Costing a cool $5 million, it was the most expensive video ever made at the time. She worked again with Fincher for Oh Father, a haunting video in which Madonna relives her childhood and the death of her mother with devastating poignancy, while her close friend, photographer Herb Ritts, provided some light relief with his natural video of a playful Madonna frolicking in the surf of Malibu beach with a bunch of mermen for Cherish. Shot in black and white, Ritts’ fashion-photo-come-to-life directly influenced the aesthetic David Fincher used for the Vogue video. Just as the song celebrated Hollywood’s golden age and icons of the past, the video did the same, directly referencing vintage films and the photographs of Horst P Horst. While Vogue had landed Madonna a partial MTV ban and was only played after 9pm due to her wearing a completely sheer shirt without a bra, it was nothing compared to the controversy generated by her next video, Justify My Love, containing S&M, group sex and a lesbian kiss. It all added up to Madonna’s biggest controversy since Like A Prayer. Citing hypocrisy, sexism and homophobia, Madonna continued to explore those themes in her Erotica video, a 35mm-shot kinky kaleidoscope of footage filmed by Fabien Baron as she shot her notorious Sex book. In the midst of a severe media backlash due to the book, the Erotica era saw Madonna at her most fearless. She explored the dark decadence of disco in the Warholian sexuality of Deeper And Deeper, Fever saw her cast by Stéphane Sednaoui as a “provocative Saint” immortalised in silver body paint, the slick Far Eastern futurism of Mark Romanek’s Rain remains


SPOTLIGHT: JUSTIFY MY LOVE Having already encountered a great deal of controversy when she teamed up with French director Jean-Baptiste Mondino for her Open Your Heart video in 1986, Madonna once again enlisted his services to helm the sexually-charged Justify My Love in 1990. “I didn’t have any concept, except the idea that she was arriving in the hotel tired, broken; and when she was going to leave, she was full of life, she was full of energy, full of everything,” Mondino told Rolling Stone. Shot in a slightly soft-focus black and white, the video featured a Parisian hotel, playing host to an array of sexual play, referencing S&M and group sex with Madonna making love to her thenboyfriend Tony Ward and kissing model Amanda Cazalet… the scene that instigated the global ban. “Why are people willing to go and watch a movie about someone getting blown to bits for no reason at all, and nobody wants to see two girls kissing and two men snuggling?” Madonna fumed during the US news programme Nightline. She went on to have the last laugh, though, releasing it as a video single, whereupon it became one of the biggest-selling music videos of the year.

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Beautiful Stranger

Hung Up

POP_UP Most people, it seems, are agreed on what is Madonna’s greatest-ever video: Billboard, Rolling Stone and numerous websites all lay the prize at the feet of Vogue

Ray of Light

one of her most beautiful videos, while Bad Girl Girl, David Fincher’s cinematic masterpiece, is her most underrated video. Starring Madonna as an alcoholic businesswoman with an appetite for casual sex, her antics are watched over by a guardian angel (played by Christopher Walken) who delivers a kiss of death before she is finally strangled by a one-night stand. 1994’s Bedtime Stories found a performer that was mellower but just as captivating, delivering a set of equally boundary-pushing clips. Melodie McDaniel’s black and white video for Secret cast Madonna as a Harlem nightclub singer; the lush romanticism of Michael Haussman’s Take A Bow pictured a Forties-set love story between the singer and a matador; Mark Romanek took a surrealistic, painterly approach to Bedtime Story, a tech-assisted masterpiece which transported Madonna into various surreal scenarios with astonishing results; and Human Nature, her first collaboration with Jean-Baptiste Mondino since Justify My Love, was an S&M-inspired kiss-off to Madonna’s detractors. She spends the clip in a latex catsuit being forced into a box before emerging free at the end to deliver a defiant “Absolutely no regrets” straight to camera as if speaking directly to her critics. Following a period in which she achieved success with Evita and became a mother, a rebranded Madonna emerged in 1998 with Ray Of Light, the confrontational provocateur having been replaced by a serene, spiritually-sound Madonna. Her stunning comeback video Frozen saw her team up with Chris Cunningham for a stark, gothic piece in which, almost unrecognisable and dressed entirely in black, she mutates into a rabid dog and a pack of ravens. In complete contrast, Jonas Åkerlund’s visionary genius was in peak form for Ray Of Light which featured a golden-hued Madonna dressed in a simple indigo denim jacket performing the song as the

transcendental rat race raged around her, while Walter Stern’s Drowned World perfectly captured the paranoia and loneliness of celebrity. It also caused controversy due to scenes of Madonna in a car being chased by paparazzi being eerily similar to those surrounding Princess Diana’s death. The Power Of Goodbye and Nothing Really Matters, a Memoirs Of A Geisha-inspired clip completed Ray Of Light’s run of faultless visuals. After the emotional intensity of Ray Of Light, Madonna released two comedic videos. Brett Ratner’s Beautiful Stranger was a hilarious face-off between Madonna and Mike Myers’ Austin Powers character, while Music, a send-up of hip-hop’s “ghetto fabulous” culture, saw her bedecked in a fur coat, sipping champagne and visiting strip clubs in a limo driven by Sacha Baron Cohen’s character Ali G. After the simple Americana of the beautiful Don’t Tell Me video, Madonna released a spate of videos which seemed predominantly violence-led. Guy Ritchie’s What It Feels Like For A Girl featured Madonna staging robberies, joyriding, blowing up a petrol station, mowing down pedestrians and deliberately crashing her car into a lamppost. This streak continued with Die Another Day, directed by Swedish outfit Traktor. Costing $6 million, the video saw Madonna under interrogation in a prison, with depictions of violent beatings and fight scenes which referenced the 2002 James Bond film from which the song came. With the war in Iraq playing heavily on her mind, Madonna chose to release an anti-war video to launch her American Life album in 2003. However, the graphic depictions of the horrors of war and an easily-misunderstood message forced her to withdraw the video prior to release. The move derailed her entire album campaign; instead of being led by one of her greatest artistic statements, it was led by one of her worst – a hastily put-together video of Madonna

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Turn Up The Radio

singing in front of a backdrop of changing flags. Her second video from the album, Hollywood, a satire of the beauty industry, fared much better, featuring the singer in a variety of glamorous set-ups inspired by fashion photographer Guy Bourdain. So accurate were Madonna’s reinterpretations, in fact, that she was sued by his estate for copyright infringement. Having learnt her lesson, Madonna donned her leotard and kept the inspiration on the right side of homage for Hung Up, which presented a modern take on disco, fusing nods to the Saturday Night Fever and Perfect movies and Olivia Newton-John’s Physical with breakdancing and parkour. The Johan Renck video stood up among Madonna’s best and helped put her back at the top of the charts around the world. As the music industry has changed in recent years and videos have become less prominent, the glory days of four or five videos per album have long gone, with the now-accepted norm being a great lead video followed by two or three will-this-do? efforts, as seen with Confessions On A Dancefloor. 2008’s Hard Candy fared even worse. While the Justin Timberlake collaboration 4 Minutes received the big budget treatment, it bore none of the brilliance of the past, while the album’s other offerings aren’t worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as her classics. In recent years great Madonna videos have been slim pickings with her best videos featured as installations in her live shows. MDNA’s Give Me All Your Luvin’ was a fun celebration of her Super Bowl performance, while Girl Gone Wild (the first music video by fashion photographers Mert and Marcus) was a stylised homage to her early Nineties Erotica era. The apocalyptic, poignant Ghosttown was an overlooked gem while Bitch I’m Madonna was an unexpected delight and by far Madonna’s best video since Hung Up. Vibrant, unapologetically fun and packed with attitude, it captured the very essence of Madonna that we fell in love with 35 years ago.


SPOTLIGHT: AMERICAN LIFE Having filmed a video with a strong anti-war sentiment in February 2003 for the title track to her American Life album, Madonna – for the first time in her career – cancelled a release, feeling that it was too graphic, taking into account the political climate of the time. The video was directed by Jonas Åkerlund, who also worked with Madonna on Ray Of Light and Music, and was set at a fashion show with models dressed in military fatigues while screens behind them depicted the horrors of war. Madonna bursts into the fashion show in a Mini Cooper and douses the audience with water hoses, while at the end of the video a lookalike of George W Bush is seen with a hand grenade which he uses to light his cigar. “I am not anti-Bush. I am not pro-Iraq. I am pro-peace,” Madonna said. “I have written a song and created a video which expresses my feelings about our culture and values and the illusions of what many people believe is the American dream – the perfect life. As an artist, I hope that this provokes thought and dialogue. I don't expect everyone to agree with my point of view."

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DRESS YOU UP FROM SAVVY STREET URCHIN TO DESIGNER’S DREAM, MADONNA’S SHAPESHIFTING SENSE OF STYLE HAS SET TRENDS, BROKEN BOUNDARIES AND PROVOKED DEBATE. BOLD, FEARLESS AND ALWAYS IMMACULATELY TURNED OUT, MADONNA’S FASHION EVOLUTION IS AS INTEGRAL TO HER LEGACY AS HER MUSIC… L I N D O R E S

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she scored a smash hit with the song by which she would most often be referred to, the Lacy layers and Material Girl had already inspired exposed midriff: the a generation of wannabes to Virgin tour, 1985 emulate her functional-rather-thanfashionable style. Borne of poverty, Madonna’s early style consisted of crop-tops, rubber bracelets, cut-off tights, baggy sweatshirts, a rag in her hair and any other thrown-together garments that she wore to dance class – and she was therefore rendered shell-shocked when her legions of fans began copying her look. “It totally tripped me out to see people dressing like me,” Madonna told MTV. “I’d been dressing that way for years and then, suddenly, it became this fashion statement. Those things always happen by mistake – you can’t premeditate something like that.” While her second album, Like A Virgin, was a giant leap musically, Madonna’s image also evolved considerably thanks to the input of her friend Maripol, a jewellery designer and stylist who conceived Madonna’s wanton bride look, dressing her in lace, lingerie, crucifixes, pearls and her infamous Boy Toy belt. “I told her that with a song called Like A Virgin

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POP_UP Designer Maripol was the queen of bangles and necklaces. “She just puts a lot of junk on your wrists until you’re decorated like a Christmas tree,” praised Madonna in 1985

By the time

the most shocking thing she could do was to be as unlike a virgin as possible!” Maripol recalls. Madonna’s fashion struck a major chord with her fans, who saw her as the perfect foil for their own burgeoning teen rebelliousness and emulated her flirtatious and playful style. Such was the demand for Madonna-inspired trends that Macy’s dedicated an entire floor to her called Madonnaland, selling sexy lingerie (sales of which increased 70% after Madonna began sporting it as outerwear) and Maripol’s own range of jewellery. While teenage girls had traditionally gravitated towards male acts in the past, Madonna was the first female phenomenon and her status as a trendsetter matched her music. Always one step ahead fashion-wise, and an inherent individual, Madonna had undergone a major transformation by the time she released her True Blue album in 1986. By now married and living in LA, where she immersed herself in Hollywood’s glamorous heritage, Madonna had moulded herself into a Monroe-esque platinum blonde in ultra-feminine, Fifties-style prom dresses – though she had given the look a twist by incorporating items such as the leather biker jacket and faded Levi’s jeans which had been associated with tough male screen idols such as Marlon Brando and James Dean. “I got sick of wearing tons of jewellery – I wanted to clean myself off,” Madonna explained to the New York Times. “I see my new look as very innocent and feminine and unadorned. It makes me feel good. Growing up, I admired the kind of beautiful glamorous women – from Brigitte Bardot to Grace Kelly – who don’t seem to be around much anymore. I think it’s time for that kind of glamour to come back.” With Madonna’s makeover garnering almost as much attention A punky Madonna with Sean Penn just as her musical output, it was after the release of the beginning of a career-long True Blue, 1986 fascination with her evolving style,

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which has often been described as a premeditated effort of reinventing herself. “Everyone always accuses me of ‘reinventing myself’, but the truth is that I just get a new haircut every year, which is something I think everyone should do,” Madonna later told MTV. “It’s really good to change. It’s really good for the head, not to get stuck into one way of thinking, like ‘this is how I look’, ‘this is my image’. It sort of wakes you up and makes you dress another way, think another way and carry yourself another way.” On the subject of hair, by 1989 Madonna had gone back to her roots figuratively and literally with the release of her stirring, confessional opus Like A Prayer. Sporting cascading natural brunette curls and minimal make-up in the video, her stripped-back, natural look was the perfect visual for her deeply personal new album. Her style was soon switched again though as Madonna landed the role of Breathless Mahoney in Dick Tracy, requiring her to reach for the bleach to play the vampy torch singer. Although she begged director and co-star Warren Beatty to change the character to a brunette, he insisted she went back to blonde. “Being blonde definitely is a different state of mind,” Madonna said. “I can’t quite put my finger on it but the artifice of being blonde definitely has some sort of sexual connotation.” Madonna’s theory went some way to explaining why her style became much more bold and sexual at the dawning of the Nineties. Newly blonde, newly divorced and newly liberated, Madonna released Vogue, a dancefloor classic with a suitably stylish black and white video and hit the road for her groundbreaking Blond Ambition Tour, sporting costumes by Jean-Paul Gaultier. Madonna’s corset and conical bra instantly became one of her most iconic looks, exemplifying the burgeoning synergy between music and fashion. The costumes made Gaultier a household name, even with people who otherwise didn’t know one iota about fashion, such was their far-reaching influence. As the decade progressed and Madonna explored more sexual avenues in her work with the Justify My Love video, the Erotica album, risqué magazine spreads and the Sex book, people began to comment more on what she wasn’t wearing. Feeling misunderstood, Madonna explained that she was inspired by a European art-house sensibility where

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“Everyone accuses me of reinventing myself, but the truth is that I just get a new haircut every year, which is something I think everyone should do”

Crucifixes and a wedding dress on the Virgin tour, May 21, 1985

Maripol As a struggling artist in New York, Madonna relied on her close friends to help her create the image which would capture the imagination of the world. With performances booked at New York city’s hippest nightspots, the way Madonna looked was as important as her sound. Luckily, close friends such as Keith Haring and Maripol were on hand to customise Madonna’s outfits for photo shoots and performances. Famed pop artist Haring would paint on Madonna’s clothes, while Maripol would accessorise her to the max, with rubber bracelets, crucifixes and that infamous “Boy Toy” belt buckle. “My source of inspiration was always the street, which was why I did the industrial jewellery,” says Maripol. “We were in the middle of punk at that time, and the crosses looked great with the chains and the safety pins. Then, around the release of Like A Virgin, I was hired as her stylist.” The pair worked together for the next two years, with Maripol designing Madonna’s jewellery and stage costumes for The Virgin Tour, the 1984 MTV Awards performance and advised on Madonna’s wardrobe on Desperately Seeking Susan and even launching her own Madonna-inspired jewellery range which was sold at Madonnaland in Macy’s department store in New York.

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“The fact that people believe a woman is not allowed to express her sexuality past a certain age is proof we still live in an ageist, sexist society”

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The Gaultier red kimono from the Nothing Really Matters video and the 41st Grammys

Jean-Paul Gaultier “The first time I saw Madonna was on Top of the Pops,” recalls Jean-Paul Gaultier. “She was singing Holiday, and she had a fabulous look – I actually thought that she was English because she was so stylish. She was into the same things that I was doing at the time, like crosses, oversized jewellery, and fishnets. She couldn’t care less what others thought of her, and I also saw how powerful she was. I was a real fan.” Madonna wore one of Gaultier’s dresses at the American Music Awards in 1985, and after seeing the Who’s That Girl Tour in Paris in 1987, he told her he could have done a better job with her outfits and gave her some sketches. Two years later, Madonna called him to ask him to dress her for Blond Ambition. The union changed the relationship between music and fashion completely and Madonna’s infamous corset and conical bra became one of her defining looks. “The Blond Ambition Tour was a real collaboration, friendship, and complicity,” he says. “She was frightened of nothing, and our vision was in complete harmony and symbiosis. It is the greatest collaboration of my career.”

sex and nudity wasn’t a taboo. In demand as the body that all designers wanted to dress, she was a regular at Milan and Paris fashion weeks, supporting designers such as Dolce & Gabbana, Gianni Versace and Gaultier, for whom she walked the catwalk barebreasted in one of his most outrageous creations. Offstage and off the catwalk, Madonna’s style was now becoming more reserved and took on an androgynous feel, favouring trouser suits, berets and her latest accessory, a gold tooth. Her visits to the fashion capitals turned out to be partly business as well as pleasure as she announced that Dolce & Gabbana would be designing the tour wardrobe for her Girlie Show Tour in 1993, putting the Italian duo firmly on the map. By the mid Nineties, Madonna adopted a more luxurious, elegant style, a concerted effort to soften her image in a bid to land the coveted role in the film version of Evita. Appearing in ads for Versace (complete with Donatella-style platinum hair extensions), championing the newly-appointed Tom Ford’s debut collection for Gucci at the 1995 MTV Awards and dressing in classic Chanel for her Take A Bow video, she sent a copy of the video to Andrew Lloyd Webber with a letter explaining why she should get the part. The plan worked, and in 1996 she landed on the cover of US Vogue in character as Eva Peron in her sumptuous Christian Dior finery. Movie success and motherhood behind her, a very different Madonna re-emerged into the public eye in 1998 with her Ray Of Light album. The material girl-turned-ethereal girl was singing about spiritual enlightenment and had a brand new wardrobe to match, courtesy of avant-garde designers such as Olivier Theyskens, Miuccia Prada as well as old friend Jean-Paul Gaultier. In a departure from her previous attention-grabbing looks, Madonna switched from a simple indigo denim jacket and tank top in the award-winning video for Ray Of Light’s title track, to the extravagant gothic glamour of Frozen to the Geisha garb she sported at the Grammys. Millennial Madonna saw her embracing the cowgirl aesthetic for her Music album, thanks to Dolce & Gabbana, who dressed her in rhinestone-embellished chaps, shirts and her infamous slogan t-shirts, on which she emblazoned the names of her fellow pop princesses Britney Spears and Kylie Minogue, as well as her newborn son Rocco. Expanding on the cowboy

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The ever-fearless Madonna at the Met Gala, New York, 2016

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theme for her Don’t Tell Me video, Madonna enlisted Dean and Dan Caten of DSQUARED2 to make her a leather cowboy shirt and mud-spattered effect jeans. Following Madonna’s move to the UK and her marriage to Guy, her style took on an uncharacteristically conservative tone. For American Life, she dyed her hair dark and sported Jeremy Scott military fatigues, while floral Prada tea dresses were the order of the day for promoting her first children’s book, The English Roses. Off duty, she was constantly photographed in Adidas tracksuits and tweed flatcaps, the nadir of Madonna fashion as seen in her cringe-inducing GAP ads. By 2005, Madonna was back in her groove, premiering Hung Up at the MTV Europe Awards in Portugal. Emerging from a giant disco ball in a purple leotard and leather jacket, with Farrah Fawcett-inspired hair, it was a glorious return to form. Throughout the Confessions On A Dancefloor era and tour, Madonna’s dazzling style was the perfect accompaniment to the album. In Diane von Furstenberg wrap dresses, D&G cropped bomber jackets and mink eyelashes, she could have stepped straight off the dancefloor of Studio 54. The ultimate glamour girl, Madonna also returned to Versace and starred in their Spring/Summer 2005 ad campaign. Madonna had once again been bitten by the fashion bug and in 2006, after two decades as a fashion icon, she made her first foray into designing when she created a clothing line for Swedish high street store H&M. In recent years, Madonna has continued her passion for fashion, continuing to star in ads for such names as Versace, Dolce & Gabbana and Louis Vuitton. She has also launched a clothing line for teenage girls with her daughter Lourdes, Material Girl, as well as her MDNA skin care range and her Truth Or Dare perfume. More recently, her wardrobe choices have occasionally hit the headlines for the wrong reasons. The 2015 Brit Awards saw Madonna suffer a humiliating wardrobe malfunction when a tie on her Giorgio Armani cape failed to open and instead of revealing Madonna’s matador-inspired outfit, her dancers pulled her off the stage. Meanwhile, Madonna is always the most eagerly anticipated arrival, and the most talked-about star, at the annual MET Ball in New York-fashion’s biggest night of the year. Recently she has attended the

event in scene-stealing, often very revealing red-carpet outfits from Marc Jacobs, Jeremy Scott and Riccardo Tisci for Givenchy. Challenging stereotypes and The respectable pushing what is considered author in tasteful acceptable for a woman in her Prada, 2003 fifties, Madonna is today using her clothing as a means of provoking discussion and making a statement on ageism, having been continually criticised in recent years for not dressing in a manner considered to be age-appropriate. In 2016, her appearance was lambasted after she wore a dress which revealed her breasts and her ass. “When it comes to women’s rights we are still in the dark ages,” Madonna wrote on Instagram in her defence. “My dress at the Met Ball was a political statement as well as a fashion statement. The fact that people actually believe a woman is not allowed to express her sexuality and be adventurous past a certain age is proof that we still live in an ageist and sexist society. I have never thought in a limited way and I’m not going to start. This is what a 57-year-old ass looks like. Deal with it!”

POP_UP The 2016 Met Gala dress, by Riccardo Tisci for Givenchy, was partly inspired by the kinesiology tape Madonna wears to help muscle fatigue on tour

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F A S H I O N

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PROVOCATIVE, TENACIOUS AND BRUTALLY HONEST, MADONNA HAS SPOKEN OUT ABOUT EVERYTHING FROM MISOGYNY TO SEXUALITY AND RELIGION…

“I know I’m not the greatest singer or dancer, but that doesn’t interest me. I’m interested in being provocative and pushing people’s buttons.” On motivation “I always felt like I was a freak when I was growing up and that there was something wrong with me, because I couldn’t fit in anywhere.” On childhood “Everyone probably thinks that I’m a raving nymphomaniac, that I have an insatiable sexual appetite, when the truth is I’d rather read a book.” On her sex life

“I think my biggest flaw is insecurity. I’m terribly insecure. I’m plagued with insecurities 24/7.” On her weaknesses

“IF I CAN’T BE DARING IN MY WORK OR THE WAY I LIVE MY LIFE, THEN I DON’T REALLY SEE THE POINT OF BEING ON THIS PLANET.” ON TAKING RISKS

F L Y N N

“When I’m hungry, I eat. When I’m thirsty, I drink. When I feel like saying something, I say it.” On being outspoken, to Los Angeles Times, 1994

R I K

“I don’t think sex is bad. I don’t think nudity is bad. I don’t think that being in touch with your sexuality and being able to talk about it is bad. I think the problem is that everybody’s so uptight about it and have turned it into something bad when it isn’t. If people could talk about it freely, we would have more people practicing safe sex, we wouldn’t have people sexually abusing each other.” On the backlash surrounding her Sex book, 1992

“THERE IS NOTHING REBELLIOUS ABOUT TODAY’S SOUNDS, AND MUSIC NEEDS TO BE REBELLIOUS.” TO HITS DAILY DOUBLE, 2000 “I think that everyone should get married at least once, so you can see what a silly, outdated institution it is.” On marriage

“I don’t see how a guy looking at a naked girl in a magazine is degrading to women. Everyone has their sexuality. It’s how you treat people in everyday life that counts, not what turns you on in your fantasy.” On pornography

“I couldn’t get my mind off the fact that a man gave up the throne for a woman. From my perspective, men since the beginning of time have fought to get on the throne. Men are power-seeking animals, so why would this man run away from power?” On Edward, Duke of Windsor after the release of her directorial debut, W.E.

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“I SOMETIMES THINK I WAS BORN TO LIVE UP TO MY NAME. HOW COULD I BE ANYTHING ELSE BUT WHAT I AM HAVING BEEN NAMED MADONNA? I WOULD EITHER HAVE ENDED UP A NUN OR THIS.” ON HER NAME, VANITY FAIR, 1991 “Being blonde is definitely a different state of mind. I can’t really put my finger on it, but the artifice of being blonde has some incredible sort of sexual connotation. Men really respond to it. I love blonde hair but it really does something different to you. I feel more grounded when I have dark hair, and I feel more ethereal when I have light hair. It’s unexplainable. I also feel more Italian when my hair is dark.” On the power of image, Rolling Stone, 1989

“Be strong, believe in freedom and in God, love yourself, understand your sexuality, have a sense of humour, masturbate, don’t judge people by their religion, colour or sexual habits, love life and your family.” On her mantra “I want to be like Gandhi and Martin Luther King and John Lennon – but I want to stay alive!” On greatness, Sirius Satellite Radio interview, 2007 “Poor is the man whose pleasures depend on the permission of another”

“I WON’T BE HAPPY UNTIL I’M AS FAMOUS AS GOD.” ON WORLD DOMINATION

“I want to make a lot of love. I don’t think about money. It just gets there. Up until a year ago I was still broke and living on the street. But I still feel the same way. Money will never be a problem for me. If you worry about it, it’s a problem.” On money, to Island magazine, 1983

“THE BIGGEST REASON I WAS ABLE TO EXPRESS MYSELF AND NOT BE INTIMIDATED WAS BY NOT HAVING A MOTHER… MOTHERS TEACH YOU MANNERS. AND I ABSOLUTELY DID NOT LEARN ANY OF THOSE RULES AND REGULATIONS.” ON HER LACK OF INHIBITION

“I AM MY OWN EXPERIMENT. I AM MY OWN WORK OF ART.” ON HOW SHE SEES HERSELF “When I was growing up, I was religious, in a passionate, adolescent way. Jesus Christ was like a movie star, my favourite idol of all.” On religion

“I’M A SHOWGIRL. AFTER 20 YEARS IN SHOW BUSINESS, I’VE LEARNED TO ROLL WITH THE PUNCHES.” ON EXPERIENCE “Better to live one year as a tiger, then a hundred as sheep.” On her life philosophy, Spin, 1996 129

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CLASSIC MOMENTS

There have been so many seismic moments in the life of Madonna, it’s sometimes hard to keep track. From her initial unschooled transmission to the UK via the grubby Haçienda dancefloor through to her record-breaking, super-polished Super Bowl show last year, the list, as they say, goes on. Any one of those myriad moments would do the job here, but to close out this special celebration of the Queen of Pop we’ve chosen a moment that – in many ways – outstrips them all. When Madonna was awarded Billboard’s Woman Of The Year, she delivered a truly compelling speech that decried ageism in the music industry… perhaps the final cultural taboo left undisturbed. In a year when the world’s press had relentlessly attacked the star for her choice of clothes, her body and even her very existence, forever referencing the number of years she’d been on the planet, she rose above with words that silenced them all. Watch it, it’s inspirational.

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Classic Pop Special Edition Madonna 2017

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