FEATURE:
Madonna’s Celebration Tour
PHOTO CREDIT: Frans Schellekens/Redferns
Looking Back at the Iconic Blond Ambition World Tour, 1990
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I may do another Madonna feature…
ahead of her Celebration Tour kicking off next month. After delays - caused by illness and hospitalisation -, the extravaganza kicks off. She will be in London on Saturday, 14th October to begin one of the most anticipated tours in recent history. In many ways, Madonna has transformed the nature of Pop tours. If you think about all the modern artists now who put on these big and thematic sets. Incredible mixes of dance, theatre and cinema, so much of that can be traced back to Madonna. I wanted to use this particular feature to look at a Madonna tour that transformed the face of Pop instantly. Over thirty years after it was completed, it remains one of the most important tours in history. It ran between 13th April to 5th August, 1990. I want to mention Madonna’s Blond Ambition World Tour, as there is a similar situation now to what there was in 1990. Now, Madonna has so many eyes on her. We know that she will deliver a phenomenal production. There is always controversy around. I will come to 1990’s case. Now, there is constant talk about her looks and age. ‘Controversy’ seems to be centred around her looks and plastic surgery. At the age of sixty-five, Madonna is still getting so much disrespect from the press! What has also remained is how defiant and strong Madonna is. She didn’t let the press get to her thirty-three years ago. That is especially the case now! Maybe it won’t be to the same scale as the Blond Ambition World Tour.
There are some articles I want to source regarding that tour and its impact. To round up, I will look ahead to Madonna in a similar situation as she was in 1990. In that sense she is embarking on a tour that has already – for different reasons – gained controversy and negative publicity. She is also going to take Pop to a new level. In 1990 she was in her early-thirties and already the Queen of Pop. Now, with artists like Charli XCX, Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift and so many following her example, the OG is heading back to the stage. The Guardian looked back at the Blond Ambition World Tour thirty years later (in 2020):
“In Toronto, Madonna simulated masturbation on a velvet bed under the watchful eye of the Canadian police, who threatened her with arrest if her show went ahead. In Italy, unions called for a general strike if Madonna performed, and Pope John Paul II declared her concert “one of the most satanic shows in the history of humanity”. The Blond Ambition tour, which turned 30 years old last month, remains among the most controversial tours of all time.
It seems bizarre now that so much fuss was made over a little fake frotting and a few gyrating nuns. But this was 1990, when Kylie Minogue was still performing in straw hats, Bananarama were deemed dangerous and the gossip pages raged over Annie Lennox singing Would I Lie to You in a bra. Into this age of relative wholesomeness landed Blond Ambition Madonna, on a mission to combine fashion, rock, Broadway theatricality and performance art, to “be provocative” and “break useless taboos”. Mission accomplished. Jean Paul Gaultier’s famous conical corset has been described as a “Freudian nightmare”, a generation of teenagers asked their parents what S&M stood for, and the coy suggestiveness of the live pop spectacle was blown wide open.
PHOTO CREDIT: Michel Linssen/Redferns
The themed set-pieces – religion, German expressionism, art deco, Madge’s rubbish new movie Dick Tracy – set a new bar for confrontational theatricality that only greater shock tactics could ever challenge. Marilyn Manson’s onstage Bible shredding is straight out of the “Madonna 90” guidebook, and with her firework bras, stage blood and copious dry-humping, Lady Gaga looks as if she was conceived at a Blond Ambition gig. But the key taboo Madonna broke that summer was that of feminine sexuality as strength rather than titillation, as something owned by the artist not cashed in by the svengalis. That’s what gave us SexKylie, “zig-a-zig-AH!”, Wrecking Ball-era Miley and Nicki Minaj’s bottom-obsessed Anaconda. It’s one of the reasons female artists feel comfortable singing about sex and desire today.
Sex sells, though, and more sex sells more. Over the decades, overt sexuality became the expected – nay, contractual – pop norm. Attention-grabbing boundaries were pushed to their limits, and artists were pressured to play this new, ever raunchier game. Enter Billie Eilish, defiantly covered, mocking the uber-sexualised expectations of modern pop with a film of her stripping off beneath blackened water: “If I wear more, if I wear less, who decides what that makes me?” she intones, shaming the bodyshamers and staring out the monetisable male gaze. By asserting ownership of her body she is not re-establishing any old taboos, she’s breaking the oldest one of all – subservience. Her image, her body, her art, her rules. Which was Madonna’s point all along”.
PHOTO CREDIT: Kevin Mazur/WireImage
In 2020, thirty years after that iconic tour, many were looking back at the impact it has had on culture. When Madonna heads on her Celebration Tour, it is not rekindling our glories or trying to achieve a new benchmark in Pop presentation and the spectacular. Instead, I think that the sort of impact and buzz that 1990 tour had will be repeated in 2023. There is so much attention – whether positive or negative – about the Queen of Pop mounting a new tour, some forty years after her debut album came out. In fact, her most famous song from the 1983 Madonna album, Holiday, is forty on 7th September. It is a timely moment to think back at her early work and how she evolved from this interesting and promising Pop artist to someone who would soon be straddling the planet. Billboard had their say on the mighty and unstoppable Blond Ambition World Tour:
“Madonna asked Jean-Paul Gaultier to create more than 60 costumes for the tour, an amount which the haute couture designer admits took 350 aspirins to get through. Luckily, all this headache-inducing work paid off. The Frenchman’s conical bra creation, which was later sold at auction for $52,000, became one of the defining fashion statements of the decade. And items such as the polka-dotted blouse, clip-on ponytail and mic headset all became a part of the chart-topper’s style legacy, too.
Unsurprisingly, Madonna was just as fastidious when it came to the tour’s choreography. “Wimps and wannabes need not apply” read the call out seeking “fierce male dancers” for the tour. Led by Vincent Paterson, the chosen army of six were put through boot camp-like rehearsals in preparation for a tour that spanned 57 dates, five months and three continents. And with its large hydraulic platform and multiple elaborate sets, Blond Ambition’s staging essentially cost the same as the GDP of a small country. Simply no one else could compete, not even the King to Madonna’s Queen of Pop. A few years prior, Michael Jackson’s Bad Tour had impressed many with its slick moves and dazzling lights – even the BBC’s cult hero John Peel hailed it as a “performance of matchless virtuosity.” But Madge’s elaborative high-concept, five-act production left it for dust.
PHOTO CREDIT: Frans Schellekens/Redferns
Blond Ambition didn’t give fans a single opportunity to get bored or head for the bar. Every four minutes there was something new to digest. Take the opening ‘Metropolis’ section, inspired by the expressionist sci-fi of Fritz Lang, for example. Madonna simulates sex in that bra while performing “Express Yourself,” straddles a chair during “Open Your Heart” and belts out “Causing a Commotion” while playfully wrestling her two backing vocalists to the ground. And this was just the first quarter of an hour.
As you’d expect from an artist whose Pepsi commercial had been yanked amidst calls of blasphemy, the second ‘Religious’ section was even more attention-grabbing. Wildly rubbing her crotch in a red velvet bed, Madonna left little to the imagination on a sensual reworking of “Like a Virgin.” And on “Like a Prayer,” the track whose provocative video had caused the soft drink giants to bail, the star and her crew are kitted out as nuns and priests.
Of course, much of the predominantly Roman Catholic nation of Italy didn’t appreciate this type of cosplay. A second date at the Stadio Flaminio was called off after none other than Pope John Paul II implored citizens to boycott “one of the most satanic shows in the history of humanity.”
The controversial blend of religion and erotica also incurred the wrath of the Toronto police force, particularly the “lewd and obscene” display of “Like a Virgin.” But despite the threat of arrest, Madonna and her management team refused to bow down to authority. The star even referenced the furor during her second show at the city’s SkyDome, asking the crowd “Do you think that I’m a bad girl?… I hope so.”
Madonna famously described Toronto as a fascist state in Truth or Dare, the illuminating backstage documentary which further boosted Blond Ambition’s pop cultural cachet. Who can forget the scene where the star pretends to gag after Kevin Costner – then the biggest movie star in the world – summarizes 105 minutes of sense-assaulting, boundary-pushing entertainment as “neat”?
Thankfully, the sell-out crowds reacted to the tour with a little more enthusiasm, even the Dick Tracy section featuring several numbers that would have been unfamiliar at the time. The comic book adaptation, which co-starred Madonna as femme fatale Breathless Mahoney, hit the big screen half-way through Blond Ambition’s run. And the ever-astute star attempted to guide fans towards the cinema with a high-kicking third act dedicated to the trench coat-wearing detective.
But for sheer entertainment value, the ‘Art Deco’ segment is tough to beat. Sporting a pink bathrobe and curlers while seated under a beauty parlor hair dryer, Madonna performed the whole of “Material Girl” in a comical Noo-Yawk accent before throwing fake dollar bills into the crowd. “Cherish” saw the star take up the harp accompanied by (what else?) a troupe of dancing mermen. And following a West Side Story-inspired routine for arguably her finest pure pop moment, “Into the Groove,” she wrapped things up with a faithful recreation of the iconic “Vogue” video.
IN THIS PHOTO: Madonna on stage during the Blond Ambition Tour at Wembley Stadium, London on 20th July, 1990/PHOTO CREDIT: Peter Still/Redferns
By the time each and every crew member bids an on-stage farewell during the Bob Fosse-meets-A Clockwork Orange encore of “Keep it Together,” it’s clear that you’ve just witnessed a spectacle of ground-breaking proportions. As dancer Luis Camacho said, Madonna “wanted to give the audience an experience, rather than them just going to a concert. She set the stage for concert shows and experiences that followed.” The tour even impressed Grammy voters, who were notoriously slow to recognize Madonna’s greatness. The video of the tour won the 1991 award for best music video, long form — Madonna’s very first Grammy Award.
Sure enough, no longer were audiences content to watch their pop idol simply play the hits. Elaborate production values and strong narrative arcs soon became just as integral to the superstar tour as the music itself. You only have to look at Michael Jackson’s Dangerous shows, complete with catapult stunts and ghoulish illusions, two years later to recognize the immediate impact Blond Ambition had. And it has continued to inspire pop’s A-listers ever since. Without Blond Ambition, it’s unlikely we’d have the gravity-defying acrobatics of P!nk, the candy-colored razzmatazz of Katy Perry or the formidable conceptual journeys of Beyoncé. And it goes without saying that its footprints were all over the various balls staged by Lady Gaga.
Madonna herself has refused to rest on her laurels, going even bigger and bolder on the likes of 1993’s The Girlie Show, 2004’s Re-Invention and 2008’s Sticky and Sweet. But nothing has ever changed the game quite like her extremely blond and incredibly ambitious 1990 world tour”.
PHOTO CREDIT: Kevin Mazur/WireImage
As many artists in the past thirty years have been inspired by the Blond Ambition World Tour, the artist they look up to and admire is back on the road with, I’d say, her most important tour since then. Madonna will play the big hits. There will be a lot of set changes and different costumes. There are going to be similar aspects to the Blond Ambition World Tour - though I feel technology and its possibilities will make it an even bigger and more interactive experience. Given the fact Madonna has released so many albums since 1990 means that there is a broader setlist there. I am not sure what she has planned for her set. She almost limitless possibilities in terms of its scope! I think there will be political moments. An artist who always speaks out and highlights atrocities and corruption, there will be a calling out of politicians and the evils of the modern world. L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ celebration and inclusiveness. Provocative moments that shows she has lost none of her spark and edge! It is going to be a relief to see her on stage after she was so close to death fairly recently. With a tour that extends into next year, it will be tiring and demanding. What it will be is a chance for fans who followed her way back – and may have been there to see her in 1990 at the Blond Ambition World Tour – and new listeners. A cross-generation celebration of a Pop icon. If you think that she put on this amazing and hugely influential tour just over thirty years ago, I think that she will rewrite and redefine the rules in October. It will be a chance for Madonna to prove why there is nobody in music…
WHO can match her.