Evolving from the Whore of Babylon to the Squiress of Wiltshire, Madonna's ability to work the media and the music industries means she's here to stay, writes Brian Boyd
Slane is proud to welcome the Whore of Babylon. This is what the banners should have read this August when Madonna is widely expected to bring her world tour to Lord Henry Mount Charles's back garden. Most unfortunately, the singer's management talked her out of using such a provocative title and the tour has now been renamed "re-Invention".
The advance publicity for this tour, which opens in the US in May and comes to Europe in July/August has been unprecedented - even by Madonna's media saturation standards.
We already know that the show will begin with the stage darkened and that Madonna will enter from stage left singing Bedtime Story. The atmosphere will be dark and broody, portraying the singer as if in a decadent dream world as she tries to discover who she really is. As the songs progress, Madonna will come out of this crazy dream world and back to reality.
She will be wearing clothes by Jean Paul Gaultier throughout as she brings us on a journey through her life. Featured songs will include Skin, Justify My Love, Hollywood, Live To Tell, Vogue and Nothing Really Matters.
There'll be a lot of song medleys as she tries to cram in the hits. She will sing all the songs live with no use of pre-recorded vocals and will be playing both electric and acoustic guitars on stage.
She has filmed two video interludes for the show, to be played during her costume changes - the songs on the videos are Like A Virgin and I'm So Stupid.
Madonna will be joined on stage by a small army of dancers - but don't expect them to be too lively by the time the tour is expected to hit Ireland. Even last month, during rehearsals in New York, they were already loudly complaining that they have been rehearsing six days a week from 7.30 a.m. to 9 p.m.
There'll also be a Scottish bagpiper on stage, Calum Fraser, who had to cancel work at weddings and functions in Scotland to join the tour.
How do we know all this? Easy. The tour has hundreds of employees.
Thousands of media outlets want to know about the tour, so they go to the hundreds of employees to find out "exclusive tit-bits". Print, radio, TV and the Internet go into a small tizzy with every new "revelation". Expect bagpiper Calum Fraser to fetch up on the couch of GMTV any day now.
By the time the tour is actually on our doorstep, we'll know more about it than we do about ourselves. Competitions, front covers, tie-ins, promoter spots, "behind the scenes" documentaries, backstage menus and interviews with various spear-carriers. Paul McCartney and The Rolling Stones have played Ireland with considerably less fuss, and considerably more musical talent, than this about-to-be-confirmed appearance. The music is not the point here, though. Madonna's pan-generational, global-spanning appeal lies in her thorough knowledge of both the music and the media industries. In box-office terms she is an "event" - that rare commodity that generates huge interest regardless of the primary musical product.
With record sales topping 130 million, she is the most successful female performer in musical history. Over her 20-year career, the 45-year-old has evolved from bubblegum pop to cutting-edge dance - managing to not only preserve her original fan base but add on whole new swathes at each musical turn.
Born Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone in Michigan in 1958, her mother died of breast cancer when she was six, leaving her car engineer father to raise a family of six. It was a strict Catholic upbringing with the children not even allowed to watch television.
According to legend, she arrived in New York in 1978 in search of fame with only $35 in her pocket. She took dubious "modelling" roles to begin with before dyeing her dark hair platinum blonde and emerging as a "material girl". Her attitude overrode her ability (still does, at times) and she became a mainstream pop star by dint of workable tunes, provocative videos and fantastic media awareness.
A simultaneous acting career has been largely forgettable, save for her role in Alan Parker's Evita. On either acting or musical front, when things begin to dip, she can up the ante on product Madonna by releasing erotic photo books such as Sex or making a documentary about her life - In Bed With Madonna.
She even managed to get critics on board for the first time in 1998 on the release of her Ray Of Light album - easily her best work - which saw her drop the "pop" in favour of strong, beat-led club music. Seeing, before anyone else, how the music producer was becoming more important than the artist, she enlisted some of the best producers in the business (William Orbit, Mirwais) to work on her albums, ensuring she kept a contemporary feel to her work.
Her personal life has kept Hello! and OK! magazines in front covers: she was once married to actor Sean Penn before having a child (Lourdes) with her fitness trainer, Carlos Leon. She has another child (Rocco) by her marriage to English film producer Guy Ritchie.
Despite her media-savvy ways, she is touchy about those who have tried to delve into her past - particularly the early New York years. When Princess Diana's biographer, Andrew Morton, started digging around while researching his biography of the singer, she went "haywire" according to a source.
"He really went through my Rolodex [address book of friends] and that part was really annoying," she said when the book came out. "I even sent him a book of philosophy - The Power of Kabbalah [the mystical Jewish faith Madonna adheres to] to try and dissuade him from continuing - it's a beginner's crash course in what it's all about - that eventually in some way, shape or form it would come back round to him - but he either didn't read it or didn't care."
Her past is now, literally, another country. She mainly lives in a country pile in Wiltshire and, by her own admission, she probably has more in common with Camilla Parker Bowles than with Kylie Minogue. She has developed a taste for shooting wildlife for sport - and for food. "You have a lot more respect for the things you eat when you go through or see the process of killing them," she said recently.
True to her country squiress image, she has just got involved in a dispute between countryside ramblers who claim "right to roam" privileges across her estate. The singer is concerned that ramblers (and paparazzi) can now legally get within 100 yards of her Grade II-listed Georgian mansion.
She'll be putting the gun down and taking the Burberry off for the "re-Invention" tour. No abdication yet for the Queen of Pop.