all about Madonna

Check out the backstage section of the Confessions Tour site for a great interview with Dave, the man who takes care of everything that is floating above your head during the show. You saw his face in the H&M ad? Time to get to know more about him and his brilliant work! Click here to read the interview.

A new survey has revealed that Britons listen to Holiday by Madonna and Vivaldi’s Four Seasons the most when going away on holiday.
The poll by Gatwick Express also found that Led Zeppelin’s Stairway To Heaven, Madonna’s Get Together and Abba’s Gold were popular with travellers.
Pop and classical music appear to be equally preferred by holidaymakers, followed by rock and jazz.
“Although some of the obvious favourites were mentioned, such as Cliff Richard’s Summer Holiday and the Isley Brothers’ Summer Breeze, we had no idea that the top choice would be split between pop and classical,” said Gareth Jones, commercial manager at Gatwick Express.
In addition, the survey discovered that most travellers listen to music on the journey to their destination. Few people seemed to prefer listening to music while on the beach or by the pool.
And mp3 players and the radio were found to be the music-playing devices of choice, with some respondents admitting to still using cassette players.
source : justtheflight.co.uk

Anyone searching for the elixir of life should go straight to the queen of pop Madonna, for a new poll has found that nearly 60 percent of people believe she looks much younger than she really is.
According to Contactmusic, 56 percent of the readers of In Touch magazine thought that the singer, who recently celebrated her 48th birthday this month, was only in her early 40s.
37 percent of them also thought that the ‘Hung Up’ singer, who is currently on the German leg of her ‘Confessions’ world tour, was in her late 30s, with only 7 percent of those taking part in the poll voting that the singer looks her age.
source : ani

Johan Renck was having a crazy enough day as it was, trying to shoot an H&M commercial with Kate Moss just hours after a photograph of the model cutting up lines of cocaine hit the tabloids’ front pages.
Fighting off paparazzi that were climbing a fence for a shot of the scandalized beauty, Renck was at the end of his rope when out of the blue he got a call on his cell from Madonna. The two had collaborated in 1999 on her geisha-inspired clip for “Nothing Really Matters,” and now, six years later, the singer wanted to work with the Swedish director again now. “She was desperate,” Renck said.
Madonna had planned to have photographer/filmmaker David LaChapelle direct her video for “Hung Up,” the first single from Confessions on a Dance Floor, and the pair had worked out a concept that involved incorporating all types of dance techniques from around the world including the krumping style featured in LaChapelle’s documentary “Rize.” But then the two had a falling out and couldn’t come to terms creatively and Madonna was locked into a deadline to “get this thing going, immediately,” Renck recalled. She wanted to know if Renck had heard the song, and since he hadn’t, “she told me to be in the parking lot by the stage in 45 minutes.” Madonna sent a record-label rep over in a truck to play the song for him, then called back to ask again, would he do this?
“I was like, ‘Sure,’ and she said, ‘OK, I have a grain of an idea for this, can I e-mail you the idea?’ ” Renck said. “And then she asked if I could go to Los Angeles to meet with the stylist and choreographer. Mind you, I’m still in the middle of chaos with Miss Moss, so I said, ‘Well, I’m kind of shooting today.’ ‘Good, you can go tomorrow.’ It was all very abrupt.” (Ironically, H&M dropped Moss soon after and later picked up Madonna for an ad campaign).
“I kind of liked that we didn’t have time to over-think this and be too clever,” Renck said. “I like being out on a limb and not know what we’re doing and why. Just deal with it, the mayhem, you know?”
Thrown into the middle of Madonna’s whirlwind, Renck had to hit the ground running, just like many of the dancers cast for the clip. Madonna wanted to use a few performers from her tour, such as Daniel “Cloud” Campos, Miss Prissy from LaChapelle’s “Rize” crew and traceur Sebastien Foucan, a practitioner of parkour, a philosophical French sport that involves moving via uninterrupted motion, whether over, under, through or around objects. “It’s not about the music, but the bodily expression,” Renck said. “We wanted to show the whole spectrum, be it krumping, breakdancing, jazz or disco.”While they couldn’t exactly shoot all over the world, Madonna wanted the video to have an “omnipresent feel,” with the middle section of the song generating a sense of congregation. Renck suggested that they have the boombox be the tool to unite everything, “since that’s the way street dancing started.” So while some setups are meant to take place in London, Paris, New York, Los Angeles, Shanghai and Tokyo, the actual shoots only took place in London and L.A. A London suburb stood in for the Parisian suburb most known for parkour, a restaurant in London’s Chinatown stood in for Shanghai and Compton stood in for the Bronx. “If Mohammed can’t go to the mountain, the mountain has to go to Mohammed,” Renck joked.
All of the dancers’ scenes were shot in early October 2005 in half a day, for a total of six days of shooting, while Madonna’s solo dance number inspired by the John Travolta film trifecta of “Saturday Night Fever,” “Grease” and “Perfect” only took three hours to shoot (Madonna has said the video is “really a tribute to dance and John Travolta”).
Considering that the singer was still recovering from breaking her ribs, collarbone and hand just weeks earlier in a horseback-riding accident, “she was such a trooper,” Renck said. “She just fell off a horse!” When Renck and choreographer Jamie King would say they couldn’t even tell she was injured, Madonna would tease them, ” ‘If you were a real dance choreographer, you could tell I can’t lift my left arm higher than this’ and it was like, what, a 20-centimeter difference?” Renck said. “But when she said it ‘hurts like f—,’ she’d take a break and sit down for two minutes. ‘I have broken ribs, remember that!’ I just can’t imagine dancing like that. Talk about priorities.”
Madonna’s priorities extended to sitting in on the edit so she could help shape the finished product. “She was my edit supervisor,” Renck laughed. “She’d leave me alone for a few days, and then come back and say, ‘Let’s do this and this, get rid of that, do that.’ And then she’d be there all day, more or less. I think she likes the process, how it starts to unravel in front of your eyes.”
Since Madonna had done more videos in her career than Renck, he welcomed her input. “It’s not, ‘My nose doesn’t look good,’ ” he insisted. “She wants her dance to look the way she wants it. She wanted it to be a little more raw, like a documentary feel, which was fine, because it let me portray her realistically, rather than how she’s usually polished and stylized.”
But while Madonna certainly could have made more demands her right, her video, Renck said she was willing to bend a bit. “She says, ‘I’m not a director, that’s why I have a director,’ and she gives you a lot of slack,” he recalled. Not that she lets anything go by uncommented. “She’s a very good client, but she’s tough. I can’t say it’s not tough. But she’s good.” Her toughness paid off to the tune of five MTV Video Music Award nominations, including Video of the Year (see “Shakira, Chili Peppers, Madonna, Panic! Lead List Of Nominees For MTV Video Music Awards”).
Making “Hung Up” was such a “massive undertaking,” Renck said, that he feels like it was a little hard for all involved to come back to reality once it was finished. “It’s like you form this little family that’s flourished and prospered for the month, and then you chop it down like a tree,” he observed. “You come out with a sense of yearning and longing, like, ‘Can we just do that again? Please?’ ”
source : mtv

Scissor Sisters star Ana Matronic has accused Madonna of starting a sickening trend in stick-thin, model-type pop stars strutting their stuff in bikinis and barely-there outfits. Catty Matronic urges her young pop peers to spend their money on singing lessons and an education and not the latest fashions as they try to copy Material Girl Madonna. She says, “I think Madonna had a lot to do with this. On the one hand, she made it OK for women to be sexual and still be taken seriously. “However, it’s now expected for every woman to be pictured in a bathing suit or her underwear. “I’m so tired of seeing skinny-assed hot whore b**ches in their underwear. Get your f**king clothes on, take some classes, read some books, and learn something.”
source : contact music

This week Madonna is featured in AOL Music’s ‘Famous Concert Quotes’ gallery…it spotlights her saying:
“Don’t make me stop this car. Come on, you lazy f*ckers! SING!” in Sunnydale, CA. link
Thanks to Jessie

British singer Robbie Williams is afraid he will remain single forever, because no girl can ever live up to his ideal woman – Madonna. The Feel singer admits he is jealous of the Material Girl’s film-maker husband Guy Ritchie. He says, “I’ve been in bed with somebody that I’m having a very romantic mini-break with, a couple of weeks relationship with, and then I watch the late shows in America and there will be a girl on there I’d rather be with. “Madonna is the ultimate in our day and age of the grass being greenest. Guy Ritchie is a lucky man. “I do happen to fancy Madonna. She rehearses her a**e off. Goes to the gym every day. She does all that stuff to get it spot-on and then she delivers. I’m in awe of her drive.”
source : contact music

Paris Hilton takes a copy of Madonna’s 1990 album The Immaculate Collection wherever she goes, but she always loses the record when she’s on the road. The hotel heiress has to keep buying new copies of the greatest hits CD because she can never remember where she put it. She says, “I’m so mad about The Immaculate Collection by Madonna that I must’ve bought it about 10 times over. “I love it so much that I take a copy everywhere I go, but I keep losing it, so I have to go out and buy another one.”
source : contact music

Madonna insists she meant no disrespect to the Catholic Church by beginning her concert near the Vatican on Sunday night by rising to the stage on a mirrored cross, wearing a crown of thorns.
It wasn’t the only religious symbolism of the performance.
Two dancers with a Star of David and a Muslim crescent painted on their torsos embraced and held hands during their routine.
Religious leaders snubbed the “Confessions Tour” concert, but fans seemed thrilled and wildly cheered the pop diva’s entrance.
One fan wearing a T-shirt with an image of Madonna on the cross said that if authorities allow the stage show, they must also play by her rules.
source : reuters

Madonna staged a mock crucifixion in the Italian capital on Sunday, ignoring a storm of protest and accusations of blasphemy from the Roman Catholic Church.
In a sold-out stadium a mile from Vatican City, the lapsed-Catholic diva wore a fake crown of thorns as she was raised on a glittery cross during the Rome stop of her worldwide Confessions Tour.
The singer performed the song Forbidden Love between two dancers, with the Star of David and the crescent moon, a symbol of Islam, painted on their bodies in a clear message to the escalating conflict.
Then, in a sold-out stadium not far from Vatican City, the lapsed-Catholic diva wore a fake crown of thorns as she was raised on a glittery cross.
The Vatican had accused her of blasphemy and provocation for even considering staging the sham crucifixion on its doorstep, anger Madonna further enflamed prior to the show by inviting Pope Benedict to come and watch.
The self-styled Queen of Pop went on to pepper her two-and-a-half hour show with more controversial imagery, at one point showing photographs of the Pope after those of former Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.
“Did you know two miracles have taken place in Rome?” the star, dressed in skin skimming black, later joked with the crowd. “Italy won the World Cup and the rain stopped before my show.”
The 70,000 fans, crammed into the Olympic Stadium, shrugged off the scandal, by dancing, singing and jumping as she performed songs from her latest album Confessions on a Dance Floor and classics, such as Like a Virgin.
Yet, the cheering lulled when she was raised on the cross and some fans from predominantly Roman Catholic Italy confessed their disappointment.
“The crucifixion was unnecessary and provocative. Because this is Rome, I wish she’d cut it out. But it’s Madonna, she’s an icon, and that balances out her need to provoke,” said 39-year old Roman, Tonia Valerio.
It is not the first time Madonna, whose father is a Catholic Italian American, has caused religious anger for her controversial religious and sexual imagery.
Catholic leaders condemned as blasphemous her 1989 video for hit song Like a Prayer, featuring burning crosses, statues crying blood and Madonna seducing a black Jesus.
In 2004, a Vatican group warned that her latest religious belief Kabbalah, a mystical from of Judaism, was a potential threat to the Roman Catholic faithful.
And she looks likely to face another storm when the tour reaches Moscow in September, where the Russian Orthodox Church has advised its followers to boycott the show because of the crucifixion stunt, agency Interfax reported on Saturday.
source : reuters