A Completely Happy Birthday…
Madonna‘s a funny gal. She clearly has never got her head around how birthdays are meant to work. You see Mads, August 16th means people you like get to give you presents, not the other way round!
August 16th 2006 saw a busy Madonna earning her keep, playing her eighth and final London Confessions Tour show at the Wembley Arena, adding the pressure of live filming for the live DVD/CD set which would document the tour. As with each other night, Madonna invited a select group of her pals along to watch her perform. Now, being the nice polite girl that she is, she gave them some of the best seats in the house, but as it was her birthday, she got the UK branch of her record label to knock her up a little surprise birthday gift for those who helped her celebrate.
Snappily titled ‘The Complete Collection‘ the lavish box set she presented to her very closest friends was a 17-CD box set containing the following CDs :
Madonna (Remastered)
Like A Virgin (Remastered)
True Blue (Remastered)
You Can Dance
Like A Prayer
I’m Breathless
The Immaculate Collection
Erotica (Dirty)
Bedtime Stories
Something To Remember
Ray Of Light
Music
GHV2
American Life
Remixed & Revisited
Confessions On A Dance Floor
I’m Going To Tell You A Secret
This almost complete set of Madonna’s works was held in a lovely embossed cardboard box and there was a clever little black box taking up the room for two more CDs space so that the whole lot just fit perfectly in place. Quite why Madonna and Warner UK didn’t fill that gap with the CDs of Who’s That Girl and the complete Evita soundtrack, thus completing the set, is unknown but probably related to their status as ‘Original Soundtracks‘ rather than ‘Madonna albums‘ per se.
Warner’s batch pressing appears to be a mimimum of 100 units and a full set of 100 boxes were made, far more than the handful that Madonna gave to her best pals and kept for herself and staff. A couple were given away by the label for charity auctions and the rest have subsequently hit the collector’s market, where, depending where you shop, they have sold for £750!