Words: Sarah Linney
theloopjournalism@gmail.com
Pictures: Rainbow Murray
I was getting off the tube at North Greenwich when I saw them. Women of about my age, dressed in black, with black lace headbands in their hair.
A look from forty years ago, yet of all Madonna’s looks, probably the one most associated with her, the one that means the most to people. The one that said: I’m from the streets, I’m real, I’m unpolished. I’m like you.
This is one of many contradictions about Madonna. She’s a good singer, but her vocal talents are not the reason for her superstardom. She is beautiful, but not in a conventional, Hollywood way. Some people say she’s an ordinary girl without a great deal of talent who made it big through hard work, marketing and getting to know the right people.
I have never believed this. Madonna is an extraordinary dancer – she won a dance scholarship to the University of Michigan and trained in New York with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre – an extraordinary pop songwriter, an extraordinarily hard and disciplined worker and an extraordinary person.
I have seen her live once before, in 2008. I don’t remember too much about it, except that I was miles from the stage, so that she was a tiny, faraway figure, and yet I was still awed to be in the same room as her.
This time she was much closer, and when she stepped onto the stage, I suddenly felt overwhelmed. I was beyond thrilled, and so honoured to be in her presence that I felt close to tears.
Madonna, to those of us who have followed her throughout her life and career – I have been a huge fan since Ray of Light – isn’t just a pop star. She is an inspiration, a trailblazer, a role model for every woman who was ever told she was too much, too different, too herself. To have her perform in front of you the music you have loved for all that time – to have her sing those songs, and to be singing and dancing along yourself – I can’t explain how amazing that is. But when you add in her serious illness last year, and the fact that she could so very easily have not been here, let alone able to perform, the experience takes on a whole new depth of meaning.
While it is Madonna’s personality that makes her a superstar, she is also a first-class pop songwriter. In less than two hours, she ran through 26 hits from her 40-year career, covering every era: Holiday and Everybody from her first album; Like a Virgin, Open Your Heart and Like A Prayer from the mid to late 80s; Ray of Light and Nothing Really Matters from the album that turned me into a superfan; Don’t Tell Me, Hung Up, Bitch I’m Madonna from this millennium; and many more. Whether you are a fan of her as a person or not, it is impossible to deny that Madonna has consistently produced excellent dance-pop for 40 years and has one of the strongest back catalogues of all time. I was also pleased that she performed Erotica, Human Nature, Bedtime Stories and Rain from her two early-90s albums, a period when she styled herself as a sex-crazed dominatrix, published her Sex book, and was widely held to have lost the plot. Because the truth is that she *had* lost the plot – but while she could easily try to brush over that period in her career, she doesn’t. Madonna owns her mistakes as much as her successes – something we could all do with doing a bit more of. She doesn’t try to be perfect: the Sex book happened, it was part of her journey and the Erotica and Bedtime Stories albums are still packed solidly with banging tunes.
As well as this litany of hits, there were musical interludes where she performed with her dancers or went offstage for a costume change and maybe a breather, and cover versions of I Will Survive and Billie Jean. I did not see Madonna perform at the height of her fame – I was a child – and I imagine she has slowed down since then but the energy, stamina and skill that went into her two hours of dancing and singing was still incredible. And I mean that almost in the literal sense of the word – she is 65, and almost certainly still recovering from her serious illness. She was probably fitter than almost everyone in that room – and she looked stunning, with no sign of the Wildenstein-esque puffiness that made me, always an admirer of her unconventional style, pretty sad.
Madonna doesn’t talk that much to the audience, but what she did say was important and there was very much a theme – slightly unusually perhaps for someone who has always prided herself on keeping moving, on facing forward – of looking back on her achievements, of celebrating how far she has come and, yes, the fact that she is still here. Her Bond theme Die Another Day took on a whole new level of meaning: “I guess I’ll die another day / It’s not my time to go.” She spoke briefly about her early years in New York, before she was famous, when she was “broke and anorexic”. Andrew Morton voiced suspicions of an eating disorder in his biography, but until then it was something I’ve never known her to confirm – to me, and I imagine to anyone else who has struggled with mental health, body insecurities or low self-esteem, that was a pretty major admission.
I thought I knew my Madonna lyrics pretty well, but the two gay guys in the row in front of me, who didn’t stop dancing for the whole show, knew every word – and I mean every word. I looked around at the thousands of people in that room and realised that Madonna must mean something slightly different to every single one of them, must have affected every individual in a way that’s personal to them. Some people have grown up with her, love her simply for her music and style; some, younger than me, love her newer electronic music and have no real idea of the cultural impact she had in decades past. I’ve written elsewhere about how for me, she is a role model: proof that a woman with a loud voice and a lot of opinions, a woman with a personality, can nonetheless be successful, admired and most of all, loved. For the gay members of the audience (and as Bob the Drag Queen told us as he opened the show, “Everyone is gay for the next two hours”), she represents something else: someone who championed their cause, controversially and at significant professional risk, at a time when, as she reminded us during a very emotional rendition of Live To Tell, “Being gay was not accepted in the 1980s. Can you understand that? It was not accepted.” During the song the big screens displayed photographs of people she had known, and in some cases been very close to, who had died of AIDS, including Christopher Flynn, her mentor and dance teacher, and Martin Burgoyne, her dancer and beloved friend who was just 23 when he died. For the second time during the concert, I felt tearful – and I doubt I was the only one.
What must it be like, I wondered, to stand on that stage in front of all those people, and know how much they admire you, look up to you, feel strongly about you? To know that you have touched their lives, changed something for them, maybe just a little bit, maybe a lot? In this technological age, we often ask if you can have a meaningful connection with someone who you have never met in person; for me, Madonna answered that question before the digital era even began. I don’t have to know this incredible woman personally to be inspired by her fearlessness, her determination, her work ethic, her philanthropy, her resilience, her feminism, her confidence, her unconventionality, her refusal to compromise and a hundred other things.
“And if I die tonight / At least I can say that I did what I wanted to do / Tell me, how about you?”
The Loop 