Madonna’s hits remind us why Queen of Pop still reigns

Helen Brown, The Independent

“I didn’t think I’d make it,” Madonna tells fans at the sold-out O2 Arena on the first night of her Celebration World Tour. “I forgot five days of my life… or my death.” Four months after being struck down with a life-threatening bacterial infection, the Queen of Pop returns to the stage in vigorous form, strumming a version of “I Will Survive” on her acoustic guitar and punching her way through four decades of hits, from the shimmering synths of her 1983 UK breakthrough, “Holiday”, to the cocky grind of 2015’s “B**** I’m Madonna”. She credits her children with bringing her through the illness and both her daughters appear on stage alongside her. Lourdes, 27, who recently admitted she struggles with her mother’s controlling parenting, laughs as the pair pretend to judge a voguing competition. Meanwhile, 17-year-old Mercy James perches confidently at the grand piano, splashing her classically disciplined keyboard skills over her mum’s 1992 ballad “Bad Girl”.

This show — loosely compered by Bob the Drag Queen, dressed in full Marie Antoinette crinoline regalia — was conceived while Madonna was working on her biopic. It makes sense, then, that an autobiographical theme emerges across the evening. The jumbo screen behind Madonna throws up photographs of her father and mother, the latter of whom died of breast cancer when the singer was just five. In an old interview clip, Madonna reminds us that she’d have given up all her hard-won success to have her mum back.

In light of her recent health scare, these moments can feel like watching her life flash before our eyes. I’ve sat through a couple of Madonna’s more robotic stadium shows in the past, feeling as though I was bearing witness to a seven-figure PowerPoint presentation from Brand Madonna. But at 65, the woman who once sang of wanting to “conquer and deliver and despise” the world has a renewed appetite for human connection. Between songs, she relays anecdotes of her hard-scrabble pre-fame life in the Big Apple; at one point she’d been so poor she didn’t have access to a decent bathroom and had exchanged “blow jobs for showers”. Then she plugged us back into her punk roots, recalling how she once stood on the stage of New York’s iconic music club CBGBs while thrashing out a rackety version of her 1983 single “Burning Up”. The O2’s sound system failed during the song, but the hitch — which the singer shrugged off — only added to the vintage vibe.

The show’s high point arrives courtesy of an achingly beautiful rendition of 1986’s “Live to Tell”, during which Madonna floats above our heads as the screens fill with images of the many talented gay men lost to the Aids epidemic, including Keith Haring and Martin Burgoyne. These were her dear friends — and as Mary Gabriel’s huge new biography of Madonna attests, their deaths devastated her. It is a deeply moving acknowledgement of the community in which she learned her signature moves, the same community that continues to hold her aloft today.

Admittedly, however, it is a mash-up – this one using samples from Michael Jackson – that is responsible for one of the evening’s odder moments. Madonna famously – and awkwardly – dated the late “King of Pop”. I know she’s got form mixing the groove of Jackson’s “Billie Jean” (1983) with her own “Like a Virgin” (1984) but watching Madonna’s silhouette dance with Jackson’s on the big screen feels uncomfortable. Lines about being “touched for the very first time” seem poorly chosen, given the allegations of paedophilia made against Jackson.

Tonight, Madonna offers wave after wave of hope and joy to her fans. They throw their hands in the air to the trancey “Ray of Light” (1998) and they cheer as dancers parade a sequence of the star’s iconic costumes across the stage. One embraces Madonna on a double bed wearing the Gaultier-designed conical-breasted corset during a brief sample of “Papa Don’t Preach” (1986).