Pop music’s ‘Material Girl’, Madonna is certainly set to live up to her name – when she finally Strikes A Pose on an Irish concert stage for the first time, this month.

For the enduring Music megastar is due to rake in a whopping £1.35m profit for herself, from one night’s work at Slane Castle!

Unusually, her chart career is in an uncharacteristic slump after her last studio album, 2003’s American Life flopped – struggling to sell one million copies worldwide.

But on the concert front, Madonna’s Re-invention tour is a massive success – expected to gross an estimated £70m from its 56 shows, in front of 920,000 people – ending with shows in Ireland, France and Portugal.

In spite of justifiable criticism about sky-high ticket prices and ridiculous sums for tour merchandise – anyone want a t-shirt for £40? – her commercial clout remains the envy of many in the music world.

The woman, born Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone in Bay City, Michigan, celebrated her 46th birthday last week – an age traditionally associated with acts well past their chart sell-by date.

Yet, in the youth obsessed pop rock business, Madonna survives and thrives – wryly watching wannabes such as Kylie, Britney, Janet and Christina nick her old naughty ‘navel manoeuvres’ and publicity-grabbing shock tactics.

She plainly is in A League Of Her Own – in terms of her record breaking chart career – putting her firmly in the top-selling artists of all time history books, alongside The Beatles and Elvis Presley.

Since her first UK success with Holiday in January 1984 Madonna has scored 60 UK Top 20 hits – including 10 Number Ones, and sold more than 250m albums, worldwide.

Significantly, while Eighties’ superstar rivals, such as Michael Jackson, Prince and Whitney Houston, have lost substantial sales and their sanity, Madonna has handled the pressures of fame and fortune with a cool, glacial disdain.

Her headline-grabbing personal life and provocatively sexual image has dominated many people’s perception of her career.

But the often neglected bottom line with Madonna, is that she has created some of the finest ‘snap, crackle, pop’ music to grace the worldwide charts.

From the Minnie-Mouse-on-helium-voiced dance joy of Holiday and Into The Groove, vintage mid-period songs such as Like A Prayer, Open Your Heart and Vogue – to mature Madonna output such as Frozen and Music – her understanding of the components of accessible, attractive pop is inestimable.

She has spectacularly fallen from favour before – especially when her ill-judged 1992 projects, the Erotica album and Sex book , rightly landed her with accusations that she was an over-the-hill ‘slut in a rut’.

But the magnificent reflection on maturity, mortality and life in the goldfish bowl of fame on 1997’s Ray Of Light, and the timely synthesiser sparkle of 2000’s Music made her a megastar all over again.

However more recent collaborations with French producer/writer, Mirwais – mixing awkward electroclash sounds with dour acoustic guitar-driven ballads on American Life – has reinvigorated the recurring debate on whether Madonna is past it.

Although reviews for her Re-invention show have not been uniformly positive, the buzz from the two-hour, 23-song, hits-packed spectacle, is that Madonna’s ability to stage a truly spectacular event shows no sign of abating.

The Queen Of Pop may no longer be, like the words of one her biggest hits, ‘all shiny and new’. But her Irish concert debut should prove that ‘Her Madge-jesty’ will reign supreme at Slane Castle in 2004. What comes afterwards though, is anyone’s guess.

Article by John McGurk
Source: Sunday Life