- Mark Savage
- BBC News music correspondent
Upcoming concerts could break Madonna’s record for the highest-grossing tour by a female artist
Madonna is celebrating the 40th anniversary of her hit single, Holiday, by kicking off her first ever headlining tour.
The pop icon will perform songs from her entire career, from her eponymous debut album in 1983 to 2019’s Madame X.
The 35-day Celebration Tour will also see her return to the arenas following Madame X’s 2019-2020 performances.
Some of those shows were canceled after the star suffered knee and hip injuries. Then the last ten shows in Paris were canceled due to the spread of the Covid-19 epidemic.
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Madonna’s 1989 Blond Ambition tour rewrote the rules of pop concerts, with high-quality stage performances and unforgettable costumes.
When and Where you will sing Madonna?
When announcing the new tour, the star said, “I’m excited to perform as many songs as possible, hoping to give my fans the show they’ve been waiting for.”
The tour will kick off in Vancouver, Canada, in July, with shows in New York, Barcelona, Paris, London and Stockholm before concluding in Amsterdam on December 1.
Tickets for the Celebration Tour will go on sale at 10:00 local time on Friday, January 20, with fan club pre-sales starting on Tuesday 17 (North America) and Wednesday 18 (Europe).
When choosing the track list, the 64-year-old singer-songwriter will have no shortage.
She has scored 63 Top 10 hits in the UK, including 13 hit singles, from Into The Groove (1985) and Like A Prayer (1989), to Vogue (1990) and Hang Up (2005).
Speaking to the BBC in 2017, the star explained why she sometimes shunned those classics on previous outings.
She said, “I’m tired of doing some songs and I don’t want to.”
The Reinvention tour, which Madonna held in 2004, is the closest to her next tour, as it contains some of her most famous songs.
“I’m not thinking of stopping.”
In 2008 and 2009, her Sticky and Sweet Tour became the highest-grossing tour by a female artist of all time, with $411 million in revenue.
Speaking to V magazine in 2021 about her injury during Madame X shows, the star said she was determined to complete that tour.
“I didn’t have any cartilage left in my right hip, and everyone kept telling me, ‘You have to stop, you have to stop,'” she said.
She added, “I said I will not stop. I will continue until everything falls.”
Big hit on Tik Tok
Madonna has also seen her music resurgence on TikTok over the past year, with songs like Frozen and Material Girl going viral and getting a new rock.
Even an unreleased, leaked decade-old song called Back That Up To The Beat resurfaced on TikTok in September, prompting thousands of videos to be shared to the tune.
This success prompted Madonna to officially release the song last December. (An completed, but completely different, version of the song was included as a bonus track on Madame X.)
Last year also saw the release of an album featuring Madonna’s greatest hits, including dance music remixes of her most famous songs, entitled Finally Enough Love. Twenty songs on the album were rare recordings and received their first official release.
The album was the first project under Madonna’s 2021 deal with Warner Music for a “wide-ranging series of catalog releases over the years that will revisit the groundbreaking music that made her a global icon”.
