Music sounds better live! Part IV

The most recent Madonna tour experiences I have are from the Sticky & Sweet Tour, both legs of it. I saw the show four times in the two years Madonna was touring - in Frankfurt and London in 2008 and in Tallinn and Helsinki in 2009.

Part 1: The Sticky & Sweet Tour 2008

The Frankfurt show was the first Madonna show where I went with my mum. It was her first time seeing Madonna live despite being the one to accidentally introduce me to her music through In Bed With Madonna and Blond Ambition back in 1992. The concert took place at Commerzbank-Arena on September 9th and it didn't have special Golden Circle tickets, meaning that, like in Amsterdam, with enough queueing, you could make it into the Circle anyway. This was what we were planning on doing.

We arrived in Frankfurt the previous evening and spent the first night at our favourite airport hotel in Hahn before catching the bus into the city the following morning. We'd booked into a hostel in the Red Light District as we'd only be staying for one night and the hostel happened to be close to the railway station, which was practical as we'd have to catch a train to the show as well as back to the airport the following morning. My mum is not a hostel kind of person but she'd agreed to stay at one as I was a poor student still. Well, what do you know, after this experience she'll most likely never want to give hostels a try! When we got to the hostel, we were told that there'd been some sort of leak on the floor where our room was supposed to be and that they were sorry but we didn't have a room. I got furious! We were in a hurry to go to the arena and start queueing, and now this! They offered to transport us to somewhere they couldn't tell us where it was for accommodation and it all got so suspicious that my mum just decided to book us another room at a real hotel around the corner. Phew! Really, my only bad hostel experience! So anyway, once we'd left our stuff at the hotel, had a look around in Frankfurt and had something to eat, we left for the venue.

What to say about Commerzbank-Arena...Well, we got into the Golden Circle easily so that was good. But the sound was just so bad! There was a bad echo going around throughout the show and it ruined the atmosphere pretty badly. I was mostly annoyed because you just couldn't hear anything properly, it was all a big blur! I don't recommend this place for shows, so if you can, pick to see your favourite artist somewhere else. Anyway, Robyn was the supporting act, which was nice as I hadn't seen her live before. She sang Be Mine! and I was happy :).

And on to Madonna...sadly, I don't remember that much about the show as I was just so annoyed at the sound. Madonna didn't look too pleased, either, so my guess is she wasn't impressed with the sound at all...After all, she tends to be a perfectionist when it comes to these things. I think my mum got a bit of a bad impression of Madonna live as even though she could see her really well and everything, the experience just wasn't what it is when everything works the way it's supposed to. Also, because of my 2008 experiences of Sticky & Sweet, I was of the opinion that it wasn't such a great tour - until I saw the second leg in 2009, after which I thought Sticky & Sweet was among the best Madonna tours ever! But well, the best bits in 2008 were the following, and they were just as amazing right from the start as they were a year later:

1) The entrance! Very cool! Candy Shop, with Madonna as a sort of female Willy Wonka, on a huge throne. Loved it! One of my favourite songs off Hard Candy, too, so I thought it was a great pick for the opening song. This is from the official DVD, shot in Buenos Aires...

2) Into The Groove, with Madonna skipping rope with Keith Haring artwork in the background, also skipping rope. Loved it, loved it, loved it!! Truly!!

3) The video interlude for Rain/Here Comes The Rain Again and Devil Wouldn't Recognize You straight after. Too beautiful! Very powerful and emotional, too, if you're me.

4) Like A Prayer, mashed up with Meck's Feels Like Home - a slice of heaven!!! With the words "You shall not hate in your heart" all over the screens, the song absolutely hit home for me. A truly ecstatic moment!

But yes, all of these songs were much better in the 2009 shows I went to, even if they were good to begin with, so I don't know what was wrong with 2008. Maybe I just went to the wrong shows, who knows. Oh, and unfortunately I don't have any pictures from Frankfurt as my camera was elsewhere back then, travelling with my ex-partner at the time. We met up in London the day after the Frankfurt show, though, and went to the concert at Wembley Stadium on September 11th together.

We had standing tickets, so no Golden Circle for this show. We did start queueing pretty early but there was no point as the queues were ridiculously long even then and there was just no chance of getting anywhere near the stage. On top of everything, we got into a huge fight (yes, there's a reason why the person in question is and was an ex) and just went even further back because of that. Oh well. It was a different experience as I'd never stood anywhere that far from the stage before. It was quite fun to dance like crazy and have lots and lots of space all to yourself, but definitely not one of my best Madonna experiences. The sound was brilliant, though, but you just couldn't see a thing. Also, apparently after the show, there'd been a chaos involving people getting stuck at Wembley as because Madonna was so late, they missed their last train home. We avoided the chaos and got back to our hostel just fine, but there were lots of headlines about the incident the following day.

Anyway, another fun bit about this trip was us going to see Guy Ritchie's pub (back then also owned by Madonna), The Punch Bowl. We both felt too embarrassed about actually going in as it would've been so obvious we (or I) were just Madonna fans taking a sneak peek, so we stayed a bit further away and just took a couple of pictures. Now I don't even want to go in as Guy isn't among my favourite people in the world. But, the pub was featured in Madonna's documentary film I'm Going to Tell You a Secret, which is about The Re-Invention Tour, and Madonna and Guy had actually spent the evening of September 10th there for Guy's birthday. So, pretty cool!

Me somewhere close to The Punch Bowl.

 

On our way home, Antti Tuisku (a Finnish singer born in 1984, and a Madonna fan, too) was on the same flight from London to Tampere with us, apparently coming home from the same Madonna show we went to :D. He was singing "my sushi is raw, my sushi is raw" with a friend of his when we were queueing for passport control, and I was annoyed as in my mind, no one (apart from me) is supposed to have their own Madonna inside jokes...yes, I'm horrible and horribly jealous of Madonna. Glad they'd had fun, too, though :D!

End of part 1, to be continued...