“The most controversial thing I’ve done is to stick around.” Madonna, O2, London, Oct 15, 2023
Lying in an intensive care unit battling sepsis just four months ago, it’s unclear whether Madonna saw her life flash before her, but it was a spectacle afforded to us on the second night of her postponed The Celebration Tour. Given the circumstances, it feels miraculous that she was here at all. Then again, even if you had no idea what she’d had to overcome this summer, the miracle of Madonna’s enduring iconhood — four decades and counting — was a conclusion to which The Celebration might have led you anyway. “To age is to sin,” she says, near the end of this two hour show, reiterating words first uttered after she won Billboard’s Woman of the Year Award in 2016, “I think the most controversial thing I’ve done is to stick around.”
“Stick around” is a pretty low-key way of putting it when you consider that sticking around includes controversies such as taking $5 million from Pepsi to launch Like A Prayer with an ad alongside a contemporaneously released video that featured her kissing a black Christ in front of burning crosses, or the publication of her inventory of pornographic fantasies Sex, which the Vatican denounced as “morally deplorable”. And one of the core messages of The Celebration is to force home just what a superhuman triumph of will Madonna’s life has been.
That much is made clear in the first few minutes, a vertiginous montage that starts with flyers and setlists for her early shows at New York’s legendary Danceteria club. Before a backdrop of the New York skyline at night, she sings her debut single Everybody and Into The Groove flanked by her ever-present dancers, wielding torches. There are certain lines in certain songs that, were anyone else singing them, might sound banal. But when Madonna sings, “Only when I’m dancing can I feel this free,” it propels you to the centre of her founding myth; that the dance floor is a place where outsiders can converge, reinvent and start again. She momentarily chokes on a line and uses it as an opportunity to remind us that she can veer off script and stay on brand: “Have you ever swallowed your own saliva? It happens when you’re singing… or sucking on something.” Then a perfectly timed pause. “Can I say bad words? Can I do naughty and provocative things?”
She pays tribute to her early hustle, telling us that the mythical tales of living on a dollar a day in her NYC infancy are all true; that she learned to become a musician and write songs in order ensure that she never had to return to Michigan a failure. She straps on an electric guitar for Burnin’ Up and consciously channels the spirit of legendary new wave sleazehole CBGBs — a highlight in sequence of songs that ramp up the breathless joy of Madonna when she had the power to take an ok song and, by the force of her own personality, turn it into an amazing record. If this sounds like a back-handed compliment, it’s absolutely not intended to. It’s the reason why there are so few covers of Madonna songs out there. Who in their right mind would be interested in hearing Holiday if Madonna wasn’t singing it? And at the O2, Holiday — a song whose sweetness was always exquisitely salted by longing in the line “just one day out of life” — ushers in the most emotionally affecting gear shift of the evening: the lowering of a giant glitterball as a lone dancer moves with a rhythm which decelerates to mimic a dying heartbeat.
The transition from Holiday to Live To Tell pulls together all the thematic strands of this show’s story, the central one being family: the family you choose; the family that chooses you; and the family into which you’re born. Suspended in a softly illuminated encased platform, the song is presented as a tender requiem to the adopted family of New York friends, allies and inspirations whose lives would be cut short by AIDS. As she sings, images that include Herb Ritts, Keith Haring, Sylvester, choreographer Alvin Ailey and early mentor Martin Burgoyne appear in black and white, giving way to an ever accelerating rolling gallery of faces that multiply exponentially, the collateral devastation wreaked upon an entire section of society by the most arbitrary of means.
This, then, is the honouring of a promise made at the start of the show when she turns to kiss a member of her on-stage ensemble dressed as her younger self, and tells us that she always carries that younger self with her, — as we all must do. And we’re not just talking about popcorn-munching NYC Madonna, for this is the moment when the heavy Catholicism of Madonna’s childhood takes centre stage. A black shroud emerges while a bell tolls at the end of Live To Tell and Madonna makes the sign of the cross as a mirrored carousel emerges at the back of the stage, divided into sections in which Madonna’s (almost) naked dancers writhe around on crucifixes and, ultimately, each other — the perfect preconditions for a version of Like A Prayer which predictably receives a huge response from either side of the catwalk right up to the ozone-scraping heights of the O2.
When Madonna receives comparisons with other singers, it tends to be the female superstars of pop — Lady Gaga, Beyonce, Taylor Swift — who have emerged in her wake. But, as this iteration of Madonna’s story unfolds tonight, the one other singer that repeatedly comes to my mind is Bono. The parallels might not be immediately obvious, but I think they’re relevant. Two singers who lost their mothers at a young age; who struggled to earn the approval of their fathers. In the “right” circumstances a sort of nuclear fission happens when creativity moves into the space created by loss and won’t stop, even when the world finally succumbs to your pleas to stop what it’s doing and just bloody look at you. In other words, “I’m burning up / For your love.”
Years later, you get your own way and, in the case of Madonna, you’re still asking the same questions with which you started out. “Oh, mother, why aren’t you here with me?” she sings on Mother and Father, from 2003’s American Life, a song which suddenly lodges itself in your guts as she sings it accompanied on guitar by her son David Banda, in front of images of her own mother and the Malawian birth mother that David lost to AIDS as a baby. Indeed, it’s when she’s surrounded by members of her family that Madonna seems to be at her most relaxed on stage. Doting glances are directed at Mercy James as she gives it the full Arthur Rubinstein and phlegmatically reciprocates her mum’s gaze, even mouthing along to some of the words. “My children,” Madonna tells us, “they thank me for giving them a better life, and I say, ‘Thank you — you saved me.’”
Immediately after that, it’s the turn of her twin daughters Estere and Stella to emerge for Vogue — Estere at the back of the stage, working a revolving DJ console while Stella sashays the catwalk alongside Madonna’s dancers, the apparent objective for all of them being to impress Madonna and her oldest daughter Lourdes, who are perched on a stool with scorecards which read either 10 or ‘CHOP’. It certainly beats what most 11 year-olds would find themselves doing on a Sunday night before the school week begins. These five minutes might represent the most purely celebratory peak of the evening: the distillation of the Madonna message — self-determination without fear of censure is worth fighting for — rendered in a form so euphoric that no sane human would stop to unpack it until, perhaps they’re stood the queue for the last train home afterwards.
She’s scarcely less at ease around the dancers who frequently enveloped her rather like the sculptures of Khajuraho might do if they suddenly came to life around you. For a suite that takes in Erotica, Justify My Love and Fever, three boxing rings erect themselves around her, with laser beams instead of ropes, a pugilistic sexual fantasy made real with glitter boxing gloves and Madonna, a bedheaded Marilyn in thigh-length boots, interposing her body between theirs — the control, as ever, hers. As she sheds her robe, she makes her way to the bed last seen on during the Like A Virgin sequence of her Blond Ambition tour, where she commences a little light lovemaking with a latex-masked interaction of the Madonna of that era.
It’s perhaps a measure of how many taboos Madonna has obliterated along her journey that the most lingering controversy about these shows concerns the absence of live musicians. On Twitter, electronic musician Robin Rimbaud expressed concern that “Madonna’s new touring show does not set a precedent for the future of ‘live’ music… In a sense, it’s high end karaoke, using recordings.” Would these shows have benefited from a shit-hot live band? Certainly, I don’t think they’d have been any worse. But, by the same token, did we miss having a band? No more, I would say, than you miss not seeing meticulously choreographed dance routines, visual storytelling and a multiplicity of scenery changes when you go and see Bruce Springsteen or Ed Sheeran. Besides, there’s also the question of where you might put a live band. The sight of a band would have been a distraction at times. So create some sort of pit for them? Perhaps that might have been the answer.
By the same token, the absence of a band certainly has the effect of accentuating the moments where instruments are played. Added to the aforementioned instances, David Banda shredding over the end of Like A Prayer, while wearing a replica of Prince’s Herb Ritts-designed hat with the fringe of chains covering his face was a case in point. And also, arrestingly in its simplicity, Madonna at the end of the catwalk accompanying herself on acoustic guitar for a version of I Will Survive. You’d think that ubiquity would have squeezed that song dry a long time ago — and yet, here she is zig-zagging between major and minor chords, spinning your emotional compass dial, stopping only to demand an answer to the question, “Did you think I’d crumble? / Did you think I’d lay down and die?” before a rising tumult of drums and David Banda’s virtuosic flamenco guitar ushers in a version of La Isla Bonita which receives as visceral a response as anything she sings that night. As with Pet Shop Boys best-loved slice of Latin pop Se A Vida E, it feels as though the weight of life experience has freighted it with yearning for a place to which none of us can truly return.
What so much of the show implies is made explicit by the thunderous version of Don’t Cry For Me Argentina which closes the Latin-American sequence. Chants of “No fear, no fear” end a succession of monochrome portraits that include Frida Kahlo, Martin Luther King, Angela Davis, Nina Simone and James Baldwin. Are we being implicitly invited to believe that Madonna’s contribution to the 20th Century conversation stands comparison with these names? It’s hard to tell. In fact, it’s the ensuing montage of news reports that have accompanied Madonna’s perceived transgressions that make the really powerful case. We’re reminded that columnists, clerics, critics and Canadian cops have all lined up at various times to silence her for taking ownership of her own sexuality. And they might have succeeded had she not, piece by piece, created the astonishing songbook that tells that equally astonishing story. It that’s not worth celebrating, I don’t know what is.
