all about Madonna

The BBC telethon Children in Need has raised more than £17.2m during the annual fund-raiser.
The total is slightly higher than last year and is expected to grow to more than £30m when all donations are in.
Live performances from Madonna and Girls Aloud helped kept the public digging deep into their pockets throughout the 26th fund-raising extravaganza on Friday night.
A specially-written Doctor Who scene boosted the total even further as the seven-hour television marathon, hosted by familiar favourite Terry Wogan with Natasha Kaplinsky and Fearne Cotton, built to its crescendo.
Every penny raised goes directly to children and young people in need across the UK.
Liberty X kicked off the celebrations in the studio just after 7pm with the official BBC Children in Need single A Night to Remember, while a host of famous acts including Status Quo and Girls Aloud performed at a concert at RAF Brize Norton.
The appeal raised a record £34.2 million last year, £2.8 million more than in 2003.
source : ap

Madonna has spoken for the first time about her terrifying horse-riding fall and revealed: “My whole skeleton collapsed”.
The singer broke her collar bone, ribs and hand in last August’s accident.
Mum-of-two Madge, 47, fell after a friend persuaded her to ride a polo horse at her Wiltshire estate on her birthday. “I said I didn’t really know how to ride a polo horse but my friend said: ‘He’s so tame’.”
Madonna, with husband Guy Ritchie and friends, had only been riding a few months.
She added: “So I go on, and he went crazy and I went down. I was thinking ‘I’m graceful, I’m a dancer, I’m going to land, I’m going to roll and it’s going to be fine’.”
Instead, she fell heavily on the hard ground. Madonna told US show Primetime: “I tried to stand up and my whole skeleton collapsed on me and I fainted.” The accident nearly derailed Madonna’s new album Confessions On A Dance Floor. She said: “I cried a lot, mostly from pain. When you can’t set bones it’s painful.”
source : mirror.co.uk

Video captures from MTV Making Of Hung Up video are added to the gallery.

A Belgian songwriter has won a court battle against pop star Madonna after accusing her of plagiarising one of his songs for her 1998 hit single, “Frozen”, his lawyer said on Friday.
Salvatore Acquaviva’s lawyer said a court in the southern Belgian town of Mons had ordered the country’s music stores to withdraw the record from their shelves within the next 15 days.
The court also ordered radio and television stations to stop playing the song, he said.
“(They) cannot broadcast the work ‘Frozen’ … under pain of a 150,000-euro fine,” he told the local radio network, RTBF.
It was not immediately clear if damages were awarded to Acquaviva.
The single comes from Madonna’s “Ray of Light” album of the same year.
source : reuters

Madonna will join a host of stars to help raise money for BBC Children in Need on Friday night.
The singer will perform live during the seven-hour telethon, which hopes to beat the record total of £34.2m raised last year.
The evening also features a special broadcast of Doctor Who and performances by Craig David and Texas.
Presenter Terry Wogan said: “It’s another show jam-packed with money-raising madness.”
The evening will be co-hosted by newsreader Natasha Kaplinsky and Top of the Pops presenter Fearne Cotto
As usual there are a number of events taking place around the country including Status Quo opening a fundraising show headlined by Girls Aloud in RAF Brize Norton and the Sugababes performing live from a concert in Wrexham.
The fund-raising begins with Liberty X performing the Children in Need charity single A Night to Remember.
Every penny raised goes directly to children and young people in need across the UK.
The casts of Casualty, EastEnders and Emmerdale are also taking part.
BBC news presenters including Natasha Kaplinsky and Dermot Murnaghan will perform rock band Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody on the night.
The BBC Children in Need Appeal begins at 1900 on BBC One.
source : bbc.co.uk

Where next for the shape-shifting pop diva Madonna? That is the perennial question. The material girl turned lady of the manor probably even surprised herself with the stability of her latest role as loyal wife and mother espousing the joys of filthy rich domesticity from the battlements of her English country estate. For a while, it looked like there were no more albums on the cards, that her work in music was done, that she would just bask in her status as eternal pop icon. But it seems she has been able to wring out a few more tunes. So what has Madonna done next? She has made a Kylie album.

Twenty years on from Into the Groove (still her most immaculate, hypnotic and vacuous statement of intent to date), she has decided to spin that mirrorball relentlessly with an album entirely dedicated to sleek nouveau disco sounds that won’t upset the rhythm of the night too much with anything crazy like new ideas or individuality. Even the superior Ray of Light and Music albums were not as uniformly pitched at the dancefloor as this self-styled “non-stop, all-dance tour de force”.

Non-stop it is, with every track slamming directly into the next like a readymade mix tape. Confessions was written and recorded mainly with her current musical director Stuart Price who, in his former incarnation as Jacques lu Cont of Les Rhythmes Digitales, displayed a talent for unapologetically grave-robbing 1980s electro (his rather compelling Jacques Your Body track was recently resurrected as the soundtrack for that dancing transformer car advert). Together, they have created a seamless dancefloor reverie, but one which lacks Madonna’s usual force of personality on many of the tracks.

The unimaginative use of the Abba sample on current hit Hung Up is a lazy substitute for an original hook. Its instant familiarity makes it, and not Madonna, the focus of the track, which could almost be mistaken for any number of those production line dance hits presented by an anonymous troupe of dancers on Top of the Pops. In that respect alone, Madonna has produced a thoroughly representative modern dance pop track, and one which was obviously insidious enough to put her back at the top of the charts, where it could easily be followed by the recycled electro disco of Get Together and Sorry without a bat of a fake eyelash.

She plays the blatant rip-off game again on Future Lovers, which brazenly pastiches Donna Summer’s I Feel Love and the patented synthesiser sound of 1980s A1ber-producer Georgio Moroder. Written with her Music collaborator Mirwais Ahmadzai, it is an artless copy, bordering on the inane – and pushes all the requisite buttons to make it a massive club hit. Forbidden Love is even more vacuous and trance-like, a song to get lost in on the dancefloor, or doing the housework. Pay it any more attention than that, and it sounds more like album filler than dancefloor filler.

The singalong celebratory likes of Beautiful Stranger is absent here. No-one expects songs conceived to get the listener shaking his/her booty to contain much in the way of lyrical poetry, but surely Madge can do better than “I don’t like cities/but I like New York/other places make me feel like a dork … if you don’t like my attitude/then you can f*** off/just go to Texas/isn’t that where they golf?” (from I Love New York). Apart from the unconvincing disclosure that Madonna could ever feel like a dork, is her hood these days not privileged rural England? Somehow, a paean to grouse-beating and clay pigeon shooting might not work in the context of a disco song.

It transpires that How High is the only hint of confession we are going to get on Madonna’s dancefloor, and her banal musing that “I spent my whole life wanting to be talked about/I did just about everything to see my name in lights/was it all worth it and how did I earn it?” rings curiously hollow. Like it or Not is an even blander exhortation to like or lump her because you’ll never change her. Maybe in the future, she will be prepared to drop the carefully manicured faA

Madonna was once again #1 on TRL. Click here and keep voting for Hung Up.

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