by Lucy O'Brien
They were granted one brief photo opportunity on December 21, the day of baby Rocco’s christening at Dornoch Cathedral. Dressed in a three-quarter-length cream coat, her hair in a chignon, Madonna gave a regal wave on the steps before disappearing into a waiting car. She and Guy weren’t seen again until after Christmas, but news of the wedding filtered out regardless. That she wore a strapless £30,000 ivory silk dress designed by her maid of honor, Stella McCartney. That he was kitted out in a kilt of the finest Macintosh plaid. That she had around her neck a thirty-seven-carat diamond cross, and a quarter-million-dollar 1910 diamond tiara on loan from Asprey & Garrard. That four-year-old Lola walked down the grand Skibo staircase, as a flower girl, tossing rose petals in her mother’s path. That Rocco was dressed in a miniature kilt cut from the same cloth as Daddy’s. That the bride wore Gaultier at dinner, and Versace at dancing. That guests, including Gwyneth Paltrow, Sting, Trudie Styler, Rupert Everett, Matthew Vaughn, and Ingrid Casares, were to dance the night away to jigs, reels, and—oh, joy!—Madonna songs. That the wedding cake was three feet high and stuffed full of profiteroles.
The grand affair struck the public imagination, probably because the media blackout gave it a mysterious, deeply romantic air. Her emotional father gave Madonna away. “My God, just look at you,” Tony said before the event, his voice trembling. Finally, it seemed, they were reconciled, and any awkwardness between them had disappeared. The prodigal daughter had returned. Reverend Susan Green, the only female rector of a Scottish cathedral, presided over the ceremony, while Madonna, keeping her feminist credentials to the last, promised to “cherish, honor, and delight in family” rather than “obey.” The only warning note was her row with Guy before the wedding, when he went shooting with his mates rather than help her with the arrangements, and she admonished him for “murdering small birds.” This was a prelude to a much deeper conflict that would develop later, but for now, the couple were harmonious and happy.
AFTER THE New Year, the honeymoon (at Sting’s Wiltshire estate) was over, and Madonna was back in work mode. Plans for her world tour were getting serious. “I’m finally going to fucking drag my ass into a rehearsal studio,” she said. “I don’t see the point of doing a show unless you offer something that is going to mind-boggle the senses. It’s not enough to get on the stage and sing a song. It’s all about theater and drama and suspense…. I’m looking forward to it, but I’m also nervous.” In March 2001, anticipation of the tour was stoked with a very public open call for auditions for her elite dance troupe. Hundreds of hopefuls queued for hours in the biting cold along Manhattan’s Lafayette Street. Twenty-one-year-old dance student Janelle Gilchrist had spotted an ad in the New York magazine Back Stage. “I was like, Ohmigod, I gotta go,” she gushed to MTV reporter Rob Kemp. Another applicant was less relaxed. “This is as bad as it gets,” said twenty-one-year-old Mollie Black. “Usually it’s fifty or eighty people. Obviously every dancer wants to dance for Madonna.” Her friend Cherilyn Caulfield agreed: “It’s more of a media event than anything else.”
In the end, of Madonna’s ten-strong Drowned World troupe, only Ruthy Inchaustegui from The Girlie Show had danced with her before. The musicians were new recruits as well, with her musical director a hip twenty-two-year-old DJ/composer Stuart Price. Otherwise known as Jacques Lu Cont, the London-based artist had his own cult electronic act, Les Rhythmes Digitales, and later became part of dance/rock band Zoot Woman. Before he took the call from Madonna’s management, Price was used to making records that sold maybe five hundred copies. He described his 1996 album Darkdancer as “club house music with 80s production values bleeding through.” This obviously appealed to Madonna, but Price was shocked when he received the summons early in 2001.
“I wasn’t expecting it,” he told me in 2003. “I was doing promo in Cologne, staying in a hotel room so small that the door opened out into the corridor. I was hired first just to play keyboards, but there was a certain direction she was looking for, and she put me in control of making music the right side of cool. For me it was an opportunity—there’s no other major artist on that level who’d take the risk of having someone like me, not well-known, control the music. I didn’t have a burning desire to be a musical director, but with her it was different. Her style of working was different.” On the song “Holiday,” Price suggested that she drop part of an obscure Ibiza bootleg of Stardust’s “Music Sounds Better with You” into the middle section. “Madonna said, ‘Yeah, fuck it, let’s do it.’ You don’t see Whitney or Tina Turner doing that.”
Band rehearsals began in Los Angeles that spring at Culver City Sound studios. For the first month, Price, guitarist Monte Pittman (who was also Madonna’s guitar teacher), percussionist Ron Powell, and drummer Steve Sidelnyk concentrated solely on the music, putting in thirteen-hour days, five days a week. “After finishing a rehearsal at ten p.m., I’d go to the production studio and get ready for the next morning. I’d get a few hours sleep, then get up to go to rehearsal again,” says Price, who claims not to have minded the rigorous schedule. “Madonna’s a notorious hard worker, but she’s also good fun. She’s hardworking and hard-laughing! I felt relaxed, which made me feel useful.”
Once the first stage of rehearsals was done, Warner Records announced dates that were due to start in Cologne that June, claiming that her tour would be “the most extravagant stage spectacle of her illustrious career.” The global box-office frenzy was unprecedented, with tickets selling out within hours. Meanwhile, the second month of rehearsals took place at the L.A. Lakers’ Stadium, where Madonna worked out the nuts and bolts of the stage show in an arena context. “With the massiveness of it all, there were so many things we had to achieve, and things just ran over,” Price recalls. With a show that was using over a hundred tons of equipment, including giant TV screens and a mechanical bull, there were bound to be teething problems. Madonna’s traveling entourage came close to two hundred people, and eight juggernauts had to transport equipment from venue to venue, including a stage that covered 4,900 square feet. Inevitably, the first German dates were canceled due to “technical problems.” The queen of pop did not seem overly apologetic, so some German fans threw away their Madonna CDs in protest.
The delay was soon forgotten, after the grand opening night at the Palau Sant Jordi arena in Barcelona on June 9. Here she unveiled a set that was more performance art than greatest hits, sending Warner executives into a spin. Madonna was adamant, however, that this was to be a personal statement, focusing on the new musical direction she’d taken with Ray of Light and Music. “Her music for that moment was really kind of introspective and dark, so the tour had to reflect that phase,” said the tour director Jamie King. “I thought it was really important that Madonna didn’t sell out and that she didn’t just do the hits, but she did really cover her new material because that was who she had evolved into and…who she was.” A former dancer with Michael Jackson, King was also a protégé of Prince. His anarchic, energetic style was suited to Madonna’s new direction. “Madonna for so many years has been…about beauty, great light, powerful, positive images. So it was interesting to see her transformed into this sort of darker character. It was really intriguing,” he said.
The set designer Bruce Rogers created a vivid, apocalyptic backdrop for the show. He claimed his inspiration lay in his West Texan childhood. “I grew up in an area known as the ‘oil patch.’ The weather there was as much a part of life as anything. We had thundering rainstorms with lightning and tornadoes, windstorms, mud storms, flash floods, hailstorms,” he said. “We had such large skies I sometimes felt that I was in the midst of God’s theater.”
Lighting director Peter Morse was a little skeptical at first. “She took on Jamie King as a new director. He has very bizarre ideas—‘this is a dark show with a dark feel.’” But then Morse understood that what was important was the unseen, what symbolized the unconscious. “It’s not so much about the notes that make the music, but the space between them. I kept in a lo
t of shadow and not much direct light, to keep it mysterious.”
Like a cross between commedia dell’arte and high-end Las Vegas spectacle, Drowned World was a deliberate challenge to concertgoers. The first section featured a rather clichéd reference to punk nihilism, with Gaultier-designed bondage gear, cyberpunk gas masks, and Madonna dressed in a 1977 punk-style kilt. She cursed at the audience and played guitar Stooges-style, funneling her rebellion into the “anti-fame” tracks like “Substitute for Love” and the grungy “Candy Perfume Girl.” According to Oasis guitarist Gem Archer, who saw the show at London Earl’s Court, she was a passable guitar-player. “I thought, Yeah, get on there, you’ve learned a few chords. But it looked like the barre chord still hurts.”
It was a quirky opening, but the show really got into gear with the Geisha section, where for the song “Frozen,” Madonna appeared onstage in black wig, kimono, and forty-foot sleeves. For “Nobody’s Perfect,” she turned into a hobbling geisha girl, suppliant and submissive before her male oppressor. In an echo of the long-ago fight with Sean Penn, when he had threatened to cut off her hair, the samurai swordsman hacked off her ponytail and held it aloft like a trophy, while Madonna fell to the ground. She moved into “Mer Girl Part 1,” an atmospheric piece about the death of her mother, which was interrupted by the spectacular sequence of “Sky Fits Heaven,” where dancers flew Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon–style from one end of the stage to the other. Turning into the vengeful female warrior, she slit the samurai’s throat with ostensible satisfaction. Then, with “Mer Girl Part 2,” she pulled off her wig and shot him dead. Projected behind her was a ghostly Madonna, chalk-white, with blue bruises and blood seeping out of her nose. She has the avenging air of Goddess Kali, and the terrifying intensity of Japanese horror films like Ringu. Against a Moroder-style backbeat, this section of the show concluded with violent manga-like cartoons and dark, pornographic imagery.
It wasn’t an easy ride. It looked beautiful, and it had elegance and fragility as well as lurid color. At her London show, while many people in the audience were spellbound, just as many chatted in the aisles, waiting for her to sing the hits. For those involved, it was an artistic and technical challenge. “It was extremely hard to choreograph, because of the different martial arts,” recalls choreographer Alex Magno. “Madonna and the dancers had to be trained. All the flying was very dangerous. ‘Frozen’ took us two days to work out, but ‘Sky Fits Heaven’ took two weeks.”
Morse found this section a tricky one to light. “I didn’t want to follow people as they flew, I just wanted to accent their flight. They had to get their timing right. And Madonna wanted to highlight these kanji characters from the ancient Japanese alphabet. I managed to make the symbols appear on those forty-foot-long sleeves. It was so perfect I couldn’t believe it. That was one of those magic moments.”
And Magno had to be inventive with the choreography, because Madonna wanted to sing with a mike. “She had Rocco, he was very young. She hadn’t performed for eight years and she needed to get back into shape. She didn’t want to dance so much, she wanted to sing live and sound good. She didn’t want to wear a headset—she wanted to hold a wireless mike and sing everything live. I found that very limiting. She’s always asking, ‘What’re the words?’ She’s very picky about that. It’s not just the music, she’s like an actor saying, ‘What’s the word here?’ She remembers all those songs with the steps.”
The song “Frozen” is a personal favorite of Magno’s, so he was delighted to be asked to choreograph it. He loved the video—“where she’s in black with henna tattoos and birds flying. Brilliant, the strings and the lyrics. It was, OK, here’s a goddess. That music makes her a myth.” But faced with the forty-foot arm-span, Magno was stumped. “In the video her hands move so beautifully, like a ballet,” he says. “But with those huge long sleeves she wasn’t able to use her hands. You want to move the hands. So I had to make it with the movement of the slaves and the dancers.”
What he also found testing at times was getting his instructions from Jamie King. “Madonna would communicate with Jamie and then he’d communicate with me. Sometimes there were misunderstandings. It was hard, but we survived!” King was a hard taskmaster. Dancer Jull Weber said, “He is very demanding. He likes everything to be done quick and precise. He also has an amazing eye for error, so he can detect anything that goes wrong. He deserves all the success he’s had.” King was the perfect foil for Madonna, creating a show that was like “a well-oiled machine.” This time around, she needed to delegate; she was in a different place from when she had done The Girlie Show eight years earlier. “Madonna had changed a lot as a person,” recalls Magno. “For The Girlie Show tour she was much more involved. She knew every detail, even the guy that was cleaning the floor. Then I had a direct connection with her. She was consumed by her work.”
By the time of Drowned World, she had shifted focus. “Her work was her husband; he was her lover, her everything. She was much calmer as a person, more sensitive. She was still a perfectionist, but more forgiving. The mother side came out.” Although forcing her to divide her time between work and family, becoming a mother had given new emotional depth to Madonna’s live show. “I feel between The Girlie Show tour and Drowned World she evolved immensely as an artist,” says Magno.
This calmness was apparent in the third segment of the show, where Madonna transmuted into the cowgirl. Sitting comfortably on a couple of haystacks, in a Stetson and diamante, playing guitar and singing “I Deserve It,” she smiled widely at her screaming fans as if to say, “Look, I can sing and play guitar at the same time!” It was an engaging moment. With the Americana section, Madonna was fully at home. She did a line-dancing hoe-down for “Don’t Tell Me” and sat astride a bucking mechanical bull for the defiant “Human Nature.” Quite what country-and-western fans would have made of her stereotypical renditions is anybody’s guess. But Madonna was determined to have her fun. By the time she sang the song “Secret,” the psychodrama was complete. Behind her were projected images of spiritual awakening—from Melodie McDaniel’s baptism film to shots of Jews praying at the Western Wall. Here, for a moment, was a reference to her own religious conversion.
Then Madonna shifted gear once more to early 80s New York Danceteria, with a triumphant version of “Holiday.” The neo-disco of “Music” provided a celebratory finale, as she spun on a giant revolving seven-inch single, while a huge screen behind her projected image after image, from Material to Geisha Girl. For Stuart Price, this was a personal high point. “A big part of the rhythmical structure of ‘Music’ is taken from Kraftwerk’s ‘Trans-Europe Express,’ so we decided to re-create it wholesale and make it the intro to the live song. It’s basically one note played a million times—it can sound minimal on your kitchen stereo, and it can be massive in a stadium. I found it really exciting as the climax of the show.”
Right to the end of the show, she was a stickler for detail. Peter Morse remembers the opening night of the U.S. leg of the tour, in Philadelphia. By then he had an assistant who took care of the lighting, but Morse decided to visit the venue that night. “There’s a point during ‘Holiday’ when she and the girls go down in an elevator, and the spotlight shines on her face. The guy was an instant too late, just half a second. ‘That’s nothing!’ he said. ‘It’ll be big tomorrow,’ I told him. And it was. ‘Peter Morse, you fucked that up.’ ‘I was just visiting…!’ We were always on the edge of our seats with her. We didn’t dare disappoint her, or she’d kick your butt.”
ALTHOUGH MANY people talked about a kinder, gentler Madonna since her interest in Kabbalah, some close to her felt she had changed, and not necessarily for the best. That, ironically, the more compassionate her outward persona became, the more businesslike she was with some of her oldest friends. During this tour, Niki Haris, in particular, noticed a rift developing. “There’s what you’ll do at twenty-two, and what you won’t put up with at forty. Madonna was my friend, this amazing girl from Michigan,
someone I was doing a gig with,” Niki told me.
Problems arose when Niki expressed disapproval of the costumes and creative direction of the songs. “I remember it was hard for me to tell her after the ‘Like a Prayer’ video, ‘It’s tough for me to see you dancing in front of burning crosses.’ Then she was so understanding, but for Drowned World she didn’t seem to like me voicing my opinion.
Over her years with Madonna, Niki had shared a lot as a friend. She had also been given more responsibility on the live tours. “By The Girlie Show, she was letting me help with choreography. And on Drowned World, I was doing the girls’ numbers with Jamie and singing her parts during sound-check to save her voice. She relied on us for a lot of things.” But Niki saw her status subtly change.
“There’s a time in an artist’s life when they just want to be around their fans. I kept it real with her. I’m not going to sugarcoat it ’cause you’re Madonna. But there comes a time when if all the people are saying ‘yes’ and there’s this one voice saying ‘no,’ well, you’re no longer a friend. All I do is frustrate her.” Although Niki felt uneasy about the atmosphere surrounding Madonna, she bit the bullet and continued with the tour. And the show was shaping up to be a hit.
Drowned World was Madonna’s most complex piece of musical theater yet. It elicited a passionate, if mixed response. In the United Kingdom, the Mirror’s Kevin O’Sullivan dubbed the show “An immaculate misconception…tedious nonsense.” The Daily Mail hyperventilated over how much money she was earning from the London shows (£27,000 a minute), but said: “There’s plenty of material in the old Material Girl yet.” In the United States, she did a grand slam of thirty dates, determined to beat the younger competition. USA Today praised her for still being “the canniest provocateur in pop,” while the New York Daily News raised the old chestnut “42-year-old mother-of-two,” yet celebrated a show that “doesn’t stoop to the corn and contrivance of Vegas.” Although she was focused on the show, Madonna made sure that her family traveled with her on as many dates as possible. That is why she always tours in the summer, so her children can come too. At this point, she and Guy were in post-wedded bliss, and the latter didn’t mind too much that he was playing the supporting role to her career. It wasn’t until her ReInvention tour three years later that his resentment began to emerge.