Last week, as she celebrated her 65th birthday, Madonna announced the start of her rescheduled Celebration tour, which will kick off at London’s O2 Arena on 14 October. The greatest hits show commemorates the 40th anniversary of the release of her self-titled debut album, and four decades as one of the most vivid, confrontational and imaginative female artists in the music industry.
Seven weeks ago, there were rumours Madonna’s tour might be cancelled when, on 24 June, in the final stage of rehearsals, she was taken into intensive care for five days with a serious bacterial infection. Those close to Madonna felt she had been driving herself too hard, and she was advised to rest. But she didn’t stay down for long.
“My first thought when I woke up in hospital was my children. My second was that I did not want to disappoint anyone who bought tickets for my tour,” she said in an Instagram post on 30 July. ‘Thank you to all my angels who protected me and let me Stay (sic) to finish doing my work!’
Determined not to slow down, Madonna recovered and is now scheduled to perform 78 shows throughout Europe and North America, finishing in Mexico City on 24 April. She has displayed that resilient strength since the start of her career, when, as an irrepressible dancer, she arrived in New York from the suburbs of Detroit, ricocheting through clubland with ambitions to become a major star.
“I was running around with her demos to the industry,” former manager Peter Casperson told me in 2018. “I kept saying: ‘She’s gonna be bigger than Blondie.’ Nobody got it. The reaction was: ‘too disco’. It was 1981, and after the disco thing.”
But by 1982 she was signed to Sire, part of Warner Records. When Casperson asked label head Seymour Stein if he liked Madonna’s music, Stein said: “I don’t know about her music but I love her look.” It was that look – a combination of East Village punk meets Danceteria club kid – that led to her dominating fledgling MTV as a video pioneer.
From the beginning she had a knack for capturing the zeitgeist. “When we heard [first single] Everybody, we thought it was just another throwaway dance diva,” writer and anthropologist Wendy Fonarow told me. “But when we saw her – unwashed, stringy dyed hair, lacy fingerless gloves, lots of bangles and scraps of clothing – we were hooked. She was dressed in the same way we were. We weren’t Madonna wannabes – it was a reflection of what was going on in our club culture.”
Many of us have grown up with Madonna and watched her evolve through a dizzying array of pop personae, from the Like a Virgin “Boy Toy” to the sculpted muscles and pink conical bustier of 1990’s Blond Ambition tour, to the pre-Raphaelite locks and techno trance of 1998’s Ray of Light album, to the scary eye-patch and reggaeton of Madame X in 2019. She has been a cultural touchstone, inspirational as a woman who stood for sexual empowerment, seemingly unaffected by the need for social approval.
She seems more relevant than ever this year in the summer of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, Beyoncé’s Renaissance tour, Taylor Swift’s Eras shows and a female-centred pop culture. In the same way there is the gleeful deconstruction of hyperreal femininity in Barbie movie, Madonna knew how to position herself within the power matrix of the music industry, assert control over her image, her music and business affairs, and critique a patriarchal narrative that regularly sidelined or ignored female musicians.
Madonna also helped set a template for women in music. Both Beyoncé and Swift acknowledge her influence. It was only this March that Swift broke the record Madonna set for highest number of people in attendance at a concert by a female artist. Madonna had 63,000 at her 1987 show at Los Angeles’s Anaheim stadium. Swift entertained 75,000 in Glendale, Arizona.
Madonna’s tour is well-timed in a peak year for live music, with record levels of gig-going after the end of the pandemic, and billion-dollar grossing tours from artists as varied as Beyoncé, Elton John, Harry Styles and Bad Bunny. Madonna had been working on a biopic about her life but became restless and shelved it in January to get back on the road. “I’m a creature of the stage. That is my happy place,” she told Variety.
The release last summer of dance compilation Finally Enough Love: 50 Number Ones showed her ability to create compulsive pop hits, but her strongest card is as a live performer. This is where you experience the full creative force of her personality.
Standout stage moments over the years include the anime-style horror of 2001’s Drowned World, where she sang Frozen dressed in a kimono with 40ft arms, or intoning Live To Tell stretched on a giant crucifix of mirror tiles on 2005’s Confessions tour, or the masturbation sequence of Blond Ambition when she performed Like a Virgin. “That number got frenetic near the end. She was simulating a climax, so I decided to have fun and help her along a bit with strobe lighting,” her lighting designer Peter Morse told me. “She laughed at that. With her, you can try anything.”
Although luminescent live, offstage Madonna is a complex feminist heroine who can be awkward in her communications. Her social media presence, for instance, is at times baffling, like the Instagram image of her last December in a black lace balaclava, chewing a riding crop. And some were confused by a crypto-world NFT image last May of her giving birth as the “Mother of Creation”, with robot centipedes emerging from her vagina.
There has been a media backlash against her cosmetic surgeries, particularly her appearance at the 2023 Grammy awards, with one unkind fan trolling online: “Madonna looks good for her age … if her age is [a] 2,700 year old vampire.” She hit back, accusing her critics of “ageism and misogyny”, ridiculing the notion that she should grow old gracefully.
Her look is at times so deliberately bizarre and extreme it becomes a radical anti-beauty statement. She has a constant urge to perform, to push and stretch herself beyond comfortable boundaries, and it is as if the flat, fragmentary world of social media cannot contain her.
Onstage, Madonna has a place for her restlessness and room to expand. It’s where she makes sense as an artist, and can be herself. A touching moment at her Madame X show at the London Palladium in 2019 was when, suffering intense hip pain, she abandoned any pretence at being the bionic woman. “I need to sit down,” she said, taking a chair and trading quips with the crowd. At that point we saw her as fallible and utterly human. It’s that ability to turn each setback into a strength that makes her a survivor, and such an enduring icon.
Lucy O’Brien’s biography Madonna: Like an Icon is out now
