“The Person that is going to take the Stage looks incredible, sounds incredible, performs incredible”
In a long interview, Confessions on a Dance Floor producer Stuart Price tells the BBC‘s Mark Savage how he became the musical director for The Celebration Tour and what we should expect when Madonna takes the stage at the O2 Arena in London on Saturday night.
“When she announced the greatest hits tour I called her just to say, ‘Congratulations, I think this is a great idea’,” Price explains. “And she said, ‘I was just thinking about you, and I thought you’d be the perfect person to work with on this’. So two weeks later, I went to New York.”
Stuart tells the BBC that Madonna’s first ever greatest hits tour will be a documentary through her vast career that includes more than 40 songs, adding that the it will draw on four decades of archive footage and studio recordings to tell the story of the Queen of Pop.
A greatest hit doesn’t have to be a song. It can be a wardrobe, it can be a video, or a statement.
Explaing how you finalise a set-list for an artist who’s in the charts since 1984, Price, who talked to the BBC from his studio on a break before the final week of rehearsals for the tour, said:
“That was the big challenge. In two hours, can you get all of it in? That’s hard. But every great moment she’s had, we took a bit of it.”
When Stuart joined her on the show, Madonna had been working on a movie of her life story for several months, and she had a really highly evolved storyline for The Celebration Tour: “(it) reflected on her career, from being a young woman in New York and learning the scene, all the way through to motherhood, spiritual awakenings, and all the ups and downs. The storyline was just really, really compelling.”
This means that fans attending the opening night in London in just two days should expect a ballpark figure of 25 songs to be performed, with elements of 20 more appearing in some form, some interpolated into other songs, and some to be used as links between acts.
“One of the Madonna’s skills is that she’s able to cross-pollinate ideas between different projects,” Price tells the BBC, explaining that the biopic project also gave The Celebration Tour the potential for having a documentary aspect to it by drawing on news footage, classic costumes and music videos.
Stuart Price will also take to the next level a work on the Madonna original multi-track recordings that he started several years ago and that he already incorporated in the shows he musically directed for her. He will be extracting “a vocal take where there’s a car going by in the background” or “a solo from a guitarist who’s no longer with us”, recapturing the original spirit of the tunes. Therefore, for the very first time on a Tour, Madonna will not be joined by a full live band on the stage: “there are live musicians that perform at different parts of the show, but what we realised is that the original recordings are our stars. Those things can’t be replicated and can’t be recreated, so we decided just to embrace that.”
This also gives little space for an acoustic section, with different tracks to be rotated into the playlist every night, like the request songs that Madonna performed on the Rebel Heart show: “Madonna’s reputation is for being highly precise and highly rehearsed across all departments. When you look at a tour of this scale, it has so many moving parts, so many elements, that everything has to be highly fixed. But there’s one thing that’s always dynamic, and that’s Madonna herself. Her personality is so strong, her interaction with the audience is so strong, that it creates opportunities for variation from night to night.”
About working again with Madonna, Stuart says:
“It sounds very spiritual – but a lot of the ideas we have about music are inferred or non-verbal. There’s just an understanding of feeling.”
“With Madonna, everything is always about recontextualising stuff, finding ways to take strong original messages and see how they resonate in the era that we’re in now. A lot of the powerful moments [in this show] are to do with where the music intersects with something that society was going through, especially something emotional, like the Aids crisis. Those moments are incredibly powerful.”
When Madonna was forced to take a break following her health scare, the pause created an opportunity to further enhance the show. “I’m sure the opportunity to focus on being 100% well was greatly received as well,” Price explains. “Madonna has very high expectations of how much hard work people will put into something.It’s very uncompromising – but she’s equally as hard on herself.
The person that is going to take the stage looks incredible, sounds incredible, performs incredible
Click here to read the full interview by Mark Savage on BBC.com.
