Yes, Madonna is singing live tonight. And yes, Madonna is definitely by now somewhere in Bangkok, after photos showing her arrive at the airport on Sunday night popped up online, enough for her “children” across Thailand to swoon. As you read this, just take a moment to get this fact registered in your head the Queen of Pop is actually here on the same soil as the rest of us, breathing this same polluted Bangkok air. She could be queuing up for some moo ping for breakfast on the streets, or on the back of a motorcycle to Platinum in search for new looks, we don’t know.
What we know for sure is she’s singing live for the first time in Thailand tonight at Impact Arena, and tomorrow night too. As we all know, tickets were sold out immediately when released in October last year. The only chance left to be in her presence is tomorrow’s additional show. If the 2,000 baht tickets are sold out, chances are a handful of 16,000 baht ones are still around (it’s worth noting that the tickets to Madonna aren’t the most expensive in our live performance history; that honour went to Andrea Bocelli’s show here last year, with the top-tier seats going at 25,000 baht).
Following her 13th studio album Rebel Heart, the Rebel Heart Tour is the 10th worldwide concert tour by the 57-year-old American pop icon. The 64-city tour started last September in Montreal, continuing to the rest of North America, Europe, Asia before it concludes in Sydney this March. Bangkok, along with Taipei, Louisville, San Antonio, Tulsa and Nashville, are new destinations for her. Before she came here, she played Taipei. After Bangkok, she will continue on to Singapore and the Philippines.
She could begin the show tonight with the usual “Hello, Bangkok!” or just “Hi, bitches, I’m Madonna”, none of us can tell. But we can speculate on the songs she might play by looking at a set list obtained from the show at the Verizon Center in Washington, D.C. last September. Featured were Illuminati, Devil Pray, Holy Water, HeartBreakCity and Bitch I’m Madonna from her latest album and there are of course her best known tunes like Music, Like A Virgin, True Blue, Burning Up, etc. At her concert in Taiwan last week, she performed the global hit Take A Bow live for the first time — so let’s see if she’ll repeat the feat in Bangkok tonight.
No, the 57-year-old may not be quite the force she was at the peak of her career. Yet, for the Rebel Heart Tour in particular, the feedback couldn’t have been more favourable, with Will Hodgkinson from The Times giving the shows at London’s The O2 a five out of five star rating while Peter Robinson from The Guardian rated it four out of five. For fans in Thailand, whether or not the Queen still has it is hardly the point. The point is, be it the rising star of the 80s or the icon that she is in her late 50s, Madonna is still Madonna. And wouldn’t it be nice to be able to tell everybody: “Yes, I once saw Madonna live”, even if it is just a mere speck of her body in some cases.
This source first appeared on Bangkok Post Lifestyle.