Marea Stamper, better known as The Blessed Madonna, is one of the world’s most popular DJs. An incredibly bankable and unbelievably fun performer, it comes as a complete surprise when, early on in our conversation, she describes herself categorically as “boring”.
“I’m 46,” says the star, who has close to 8 million monthly listeners on Spotify. “I’m a law-abiding citizen who goes to bed at 10 o’clock. I don’t take drugs and I don’t drink very much at all. I’ll never go to an after party.”
She’s been fun in the past, though, she’s keen to stress. “I’m extremely pro drugs,” she says. Although she thinks “cocaine is disgusting… I have a respect for psychedelics, even though I do not take them.”
Stamper has worked with a whole host of illustrious names: Dua Lipa, Kylie Minogue, Jacob Lusk, Missy Elliot and the actual Madonna. Who’s the druggiest, I ask. “I would never, I could never, say who! It’s like asking which Roman emperor was the most vulgar.”
Who does she dream of collaborating with? “You have to say Chappell Roan,” she answers, after a beat. Charli XCX? It turns out that she talked to the creator of Brat about appearing on Edge of Saturday Night, the first single from her debut album, Godspeed, out on October 18. The singer declined, “but she was very gracious about it,” Stamper hastens to add. “Charli’s the bomb, you know?”
Stamper is the bomb too. She’s been helping sell out festivals across Europe for the past 10 years; a resident at Chicago’s legendary Smartbar and a guest star at iconic venues like Berghain in Berlin.
She was named DJ of the year by Mixmag in 2016, but this is the first time she’s putting out a whole album from the studio: and as such, she is among the few DJs big enough to do so with a big-name label (Warner).
Stamper has long enjoyed a niche and dedicated audience – but since remixing Dua Lipa’s bestselling album, Future Nostalgia, in 2020, she has crossed over into the mainstream and found an even more devout following.
Judging from the success of her new album’s lead single (a top 20 hit in the UK – surprisingly rare for a dance track, even in the era of Brat), the new project is set to be a club sensation throughout the autumn.
To support the album, Stamper’s going on tour – and dials in today from Australia. She is slumped against the bedframe in a cream-hued hotel room. She’s tired. Everybody thinks being on tour means “somebody’s jumping out of a cake every night,” she says. “It’s all confetti and champagne! In reality, you have to fit normal life around it.”
Stamper was born in Jackson, Kentucky – where vice presidential nominee JD Vance’s family is also from. “JD Vance is an enormous piece of shit,” Stamper says. “I come from a real specific part of the country, and it’s a part of the country that other people like to make fun of. To see somebody try and put on a costume, to be folksy and to weaponise the opioid crisis to his benefit…” She speaks uneasily.
“I lost a step-parent to the opioid crisis. The idea that anyone would use that as some sort of real estate on which to get down with the people…” Later on, Stamper stops just short of putting an outright curse on Donald Trump, saying instead that she wishes the former president would “f*ck off to Mar a Lago forever”. She adds, “He doesn’t even want to be President!" she adds. "He just doesn’t want to go to jail.”
Stamper has not shied away from political confrontation in the past: she once heard hers and Fred Again’s song, We’ve Lost Dancing, in a video by the Conservative Party when Rishi Sunak was Prime Minister. “For the record,” she tweeted, “I’d rather hear my own death rattle echoing in my ears, as I plunge happily into the void than hear the sound of my voice in an ad for the Tories”.
Beneath such bravado, though, is a shyer, more studious person. Perhaps it’s no surprise, as Stamper’s family is one of “teachers, writers and poets” rather than party animals; as a selector, her approach is quasi-academic – a skill that’s taken her from Kentucky to Chicago, from Lost Village to Glastonbury.
Stamper has set up shop in Leyton, having fallen in love with London after she came over for a 13-week residency at XOYO in Shoreditch in 2017. She never left. “London is the best city in the world,” she says. “You can take your dog to the pub. Americans can’t even grasp that.”
Where’s her favourite spot for a bite? Olenka on Brick Lane (“I love it because it reminds me of my mother in law’s food”). For a drink? The Perseverance on Broadway Market. For a boogie? Anywhere she’s performing.
Stamper lives with her husband of 12 years, who she met at “one of the many afterparties” on which she’s now turned her back. She describes him as “being from space” and “the adorable little tummy on the cover art for Godspeed”.
“He builds modular synthesizers and is writing a baseball game simulator right now.” He’s also her biggest supporter. Stamper remembers praying to God during their courtship (“Let this man marry me!”). “I feel like, if there’s a God,” she says, “then he really heard my petition from the depths.”
At other points during our chat, Stamper expresses more certain belief. Raised Catholic, she was brought up to recognise the deep value of helping others. Today, she is an ambassador for the refugee charity Choose Love. “There’s a reason that, in every major religion, among the top five sins is to treat a stranger among you poorly,” Stamper says. Her Catholicism is of the tolerant rather than stringent kind.
It was also the reason behind her original stage name, the Black Madonna – a European icon of the Virgin Mary – which she changed in 2020 after a petition on Change.org called her out for being “racially insensitive”.
Back then, she likened the feeling of persecution and being forced to change her moniker to Christ’s agony in the Garden at Gethsemane, prior to his crucifixion (“you know what’s coming, you know it’s going to suck, but it’s the right thing to do”). Which sounds grandiose, but the Stamper I meet today is a more hesitant speaker, punctuating her sentences with long, drawn out “ums” and “errs”. Is this hesitancy a consequence of being quasi-cancelled in the past?
Maybe; maybe not. Anxiety has been a constant throughout her life: no doubt compounded by the trauma she experienced at school. Stamper, who today identifies as bisexual and non-binary, goes by she/her as well as they/them pronouns, was mercilessly bullied for her androgynous appearance. “I got the shit beat out of me on a regular basis,” she says.
People would send taunting letters and packages to her home address: “There was nothing anyone could do to stop it.” Our conversation turns to cyberbullying. Stamper says she can’t imagine what it would have been like for her if people had been able to use apps and different platforms to target her further. Does she support a ban on social media for teens, as some schools in the country are looking to do? “I’m not sure that being anybody’s nanny is the right way to go about it,” she replies.
Stamper left school at 16 to forge her path in music, attending the sorts of parties she says would be “impossible” to put on in today’s more regulated climate.
She agrees that parties these days are over-policed (“I am hugely in favour of spaces where there are no parents, no rules: spring break forever!”). I ask her for her thoughts on Labour’s planned smoking ban. “I’ve never smoked a cigarette,” she says, “and the idea of never having to smell one again sounds great – but I’m not a huge fan of over-parentalisation… Freedom,” she says, “is risk”.
