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The Confessions Tour

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By Stephen M. Deusner

Pop/R&B

Warner Bros.

February 23, 2007

Recorded at a 2006 show in London, The Confessions Tour is Madonna's second concert CD+DVD set in eight months. The first, I'm Going to Tell You a Secret, supported her American Life album and had the distinction of being both the first live album of her quarter-century career and her greatest musical fiasco. While similar in staging, this new set supports a much better album, 2005's stronger Confessions on a Dance Floor , and that alone makes it the better of the two. Viewed together-- their quick succession makes it impossible to assess them separately-- this pair of releases signals the beginning of a new stage in Madonna's career, one in which director Jonas Åkerlund has become more crucial than musical producer Stuart Price, and music has become secondary to the dizzying, dazzling, slightly nauseating spectacle of her live show.

That spectacle has eclipsed music in the Madonnaverse is readily apparent on the Confessions tracklists. The DVD contains a full concert, with 21 tracks running more than two long hours. The CD has a mere 13, including two versions of "Sorry" and several of Stuart Price's instrumental interludes, which demand visuals to explain what the hell is going on. Instead of "Live to Tell", the CD contains songs like "Confessions", during which Madge's dancers describe life-changing experiences. One tells of an abusive father, another of her belief in angels, the third of his "decision to gangbang." Without the performers' hyperactive and not unimpressive moves, the song sounds aimless and exploitive, group therapy set to music.

Instead of presenting herself as the art-school activist of Secret (which was recorded during an election year, after all), on Confessions Madonna plays the part of a self-help guru-- Tony Robbins with a Farrah 'do and an ugly leotard. The recurring theme is self-empowerment, which she means to be universal, but which ultimately is specific to Madonna. On the lively "Jump" she extols the virtues of self-motivation and sisterhood. She confidently masters the simplest guitar riffs on "I Love New York" and "Drowned World" and doesn't care what you think of her clumsy dances moves.

Granted, empowerment is easy when you've got thousands of fans applauding your at every turn. And why shouldn't they? Madonna has the power to put on a ludicrous, obscenely expensive stage show-cum-counseling session year after year, as well as the brand name to make Confessions one of the top-grossing tours of 2006. She has the body of her much younger self, so she can still rock a leotard or a feathered collar, no matter how ill-advised such wardrobe choices may be. And her voice has aged surprisingly well. She can't sell the girlish giggle of "Lucky Star" or "Like a Virgin", but she's got a deeper, heartier range that works best on ballads like "Drowned World/Substitute for Love" and "Paradise (Not for Me)". We are left, however, to imagine how commanding Madonna would sound on a good ballad, like "Oh Father" or "Something to Remember". "Live to Tell" might have fit the bill here, but she delivers it perched uncomfortably on a mirror-covered cross, which limits her breathing and phrasing as well as our ability to take her seriously.

Let's talk about that disco crucifixion. Nothing says "I've got a messiah complex" like performing on a cross, and this notorious routine, which begins as a comment on the travails of fame, sure enough turns into a plea to end AIDS in Africa. That's a serious issue, and it deserves better than this confused, self-aggrandizing pitch. Nevertheless, this segment will likely be a selling point for many fans and bystanders alike: It was cut from the original NBC broadcast of the show following the expected avalanche of Catholic uproar and outraged punditry.

But it's a polite curtsy compared to what happens when Madonna's politics go global. During "Forbidden Love" two male dancers appear with symbols of Islam and Judaism painted on their abdomens, locking arms stoically in a choreography that makes them look like two children fighting in the backseat. But that's just silly, not insulting. The show's nadir comes during "Isaac". Centerstage stands a giant cage in which a burqa-clad dancer twirls and gyrates. When the gate lifts, her cage dance becomes a striptease. From one oppression to another...

As always, Madonna is at her best when the stakes are low and the music frivolous, an approach that seems natural for the frothy disco of Confessions on a Dance Floor . The live show's best-- and consequently most meaningful-- moments come during the closing disco-kitsch set, which begins with a mash-up of her underrated single "Music" and the Trammps' "Disco Inferno" and closes with a medley of "Lucky Star" and "Hung Up". Despite the tacky travel-agency brochure vibe of "La Isla Bonita", these songs achieve the sort of gaudy pop transcendence that justifies the month's-pay ticket price.

Still, it's too little too late to salvage Confessions , which, with Secret , feels like a failure of imagination. Åkerlund gives you everything you don't want from a concert film: incessant quick cuts that you give you no sense of space or stage, overdubbed music and vocals that give you no sense of performance, and only a few shots of the audience to gauge their excitement. But Madonna herself is mostly to blame. On stage, she draws from a deep well of amazing pop songs and has the money and power to reinvent this sort of traveling circus. So why not try to break down the wall between performance and audience and hold a gigantic rave? Or, better yet, launch a small-club tour and share the spotlight with some musical collaborators. Work with Timbaland or even Xiu Xiu. Let other people write songs for you. Reinvent yourself for real this time. Until Madonna comes up with something completely new and makes her shows as exciting to watch as they are to perform, her spectacle will never be as fun or as world-changing as her music.

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Madonna: The Confessions Tour

The Confessions Tour is the second live album by American singer and songwriter Madonna. It was released on January 26, 2007 by Warner Bros. Records. Directed by Jonas Åkerlund, the album ch... Read all The Confessions Tour is the second live album by American singer and songwriter Madonna. It was released on January 26, 2007 by Warner Bros. Records. Directed by Jonas Åkerlund, the album chronicles Madonna's 2006 Confessions Tour. It was recorded at Wembley Arena during the Lond... Read all The Confessions Tour is the second live album by American singer and songwriter Madonna. It was released on January 26, 2007 by Warner Bros. Records. Directed by Jonas Åkerlund, the album chronicles Madonna's 2006 Confessions Tour. It was recorded at Wembley Arena during the London dates of the tour, and was released in both CD and DVD format. The DVD contains the ent... Read all

Dago Gonzales
Jonas Åkerlund
Steven Klein
Stuart Price
Steve Sidelnyk
13 User reviews
1 Critic review

Madonna at an event for Madonna: The Confessions Tour (2006)

Self - Keyboardist
Self - Drummer

Self - Guitar Player
Self - Backing Vocals
(as Donna De Lory)

Self - Vocals
Self - Dance Captain
(as Addie Yungmee-Schilling-George)

Self - Dancer
(as Charmaine 'Charm' Jordan)

(as Leroy 'Hypnosis' Barnes Jr.)

Self - Traceur

(as Sébastien Foucan)
Steven Klein (backscreens)
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Trivia The "Live to Tell" performance contains an uncredited sample from the song "Tears" by Giorgio Moroder , taken from his album "Son of My Father" released in 1972.
Connections Featured in Somewhere Over the Rainbow (2014)
Soundtracks Future Lovers/I Feel Love "Future Lovers" written by Madonna and Mirwais Ahmadzaï "I Feel Love" written by Donna Summer , Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte Performed by Madonna

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Jul 14, 2017
What show date did Madonna not talk about George Bush during ILNY?
How many times does Madonna play the guitar on this tour?
November 22, 2006 (United States)
United States
Madonna: The Confessions Tour Live from London
London, England, UK
Black Dog Films
Semtex Films
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Runtime 2 hours 1 minute

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Listen for the Music, Look for the Muscles

By Ginia Bellafante

Nov. 24, 2006

Will Madonna ever get old? She may acquire more gravitas, continue to mature emotionally and find greater meaning in her work with kabbalah, but will she ever come to look arthritic, puffy, menopausal? This increasingly seems doubtful. Madonna no longer reinvents, she maintains.

It is the sheer spectacularity of her physical form, the near menacing force of it, and largely that alone, that sustains your attention in “Madonna: The Confessions Tour, Live From London,” the two-hour film of a concert she gave at the Wembley Arena in London this past summer, which was broadcast on NBC Wednesday night and will be shown on Bravo next week.

With each tour Madonna has embarked on in recent years, her deltoids appear to have grown more regally expansive, robust and winglike. Toward the end of the Wembley show, part of a worldwide tour pegged to her album “Confessions on a Dance Floor,” Madonna sings one of the hits from it, “Hung Up,” a song about a woman who migrates between boredom and agony as she waits for a man to call. But who could this man possibly be? Unless Madonna is expecting a call from Wladimir Klitschko about meeting him in the ring, the sight of her singing a song like this, in a leotard no less, leaves you feeling as you might if you were forced to watch Ethel Merman trying to impersonate Chet Baker.

The show pays tribute to Madonna’s current and former selves and does so with dizzying jump cuts and all the spectacle — the acrobatics, playground sets, endless costume changes — that have become the hallmark of her concerts.

Today, Madonna, who is 48, is a concerned citizen of the world. She has made African AIDS orphans one of her causes and wants to adopt a child from Malawi, causing some controversy. At one point in the concert, she sings “Live to Tell” against the backdrop of images of children in Africa and a speeding tally of the number who have been left parentless. But here again, her perfect musculature produces a kind of dissonance. Madonna doesn’t have an altruist’s body, she has a denier’s. What you’re tallying in your head when you watch her dance with the strength and agility of a 19-year-old are the number of hours she spends each day practicing Ashtanga yoga, running hills and bench-pressing the weight of a Regency table. You are tallying all the calories that Madonna is not eating.

In addition to keeping up her legendary physical regimen, Madonna now also rides horses on her country estate in England. Some critics have seen this as another aspect of her Anglophilic pretensions, but what is really surprising is that it took her so long to cotton to a sport so steeped in the dynamic of submission and control. Madonna the equestrian seems the most inevitable Madonna of all. Perhaps realizing that on some level, she opened her Wembley show looking as if she were about to ride in a reimagining of Ascot. She danced around, directing men on all fours before she rode an apparatus meant to look like an electric horse.

Madonna travels backward in the show to the beginning of her career, the time before she was encumbered with the need to do good. The documentary “I’m Going to Tell You a Secret,” which follows her on her 2004 world tour, reveals a Madonna who wants to learn all the time, who hugs her assistant and dancers, who wishes she’d been nicer to people when she was young. Perhaps she knows that many in her audience miss the Madonna of so many Madonnas ago, the one who refused refinement and probably thought Oxford was just an insurance company.

“The Confessions Tour” gets deeper and deeper into her early disco years as it progresses, with Madonna getting in and out of a “Saturday Night Fever” tuxedo and Jane Fonda-esque aerobics gear before it’s all over, as if to tell us that sometimes, yes, she misses herself too.

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Confessions Tour

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The Confessions Tour was the seventh concert tour by American singer-songwriter Madonna . It supported her tenth studio album, Confessions on a Dance Floor . Madonna confirmed the possibility of going out on a tour as early as November 2005. Jamie King, Madonna's longtime collaborator, was then hired on to direct. The set list consisted of mainly songs from the supporting studio album and rehearsals started during 2006. As with many of her prior tours, the Confessions Tour did not go to Australia, prompting Madonna to release an apology statement on her website.

Background [ ]

In November 2005, during an interview with The Guardian , Madonna confirmed that she was going out on tour in 2006 and it would likely be named either the Confessions Tour or the Confess Your Sins Tour. Jamie King was next hired on as the director of the tour. During an interview with MTV in February 2006, Madonna explained that she wanted to play first at small venues like Roseland Ballroom in New York or the Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles, then move out to perform at stadiums and arenas. That way she deduced that she would not feel bored during her performances. King clarified,

"A typical Madonna show is quite produced, [...] She likes things large, she likes things theatrical, but this time, being that Confessions on a Dance Floor is an intimate album, we want to try to make people have an intimate experience as well as a big produced theatrical experience. So look for us doing some small venues, some smaller venues. [...] I would like to put her as close to her people — her fans, her dancers, her fellow supporters — as possible,"

King also confirmed that the set list for the tour consisted mainly of songs from the supporting album, with few of Madonna's old hits making the cut. Some of the dancers from the music videos of "Hung Up" and "Sorry", both singles from Confessions on a Dance Floor , were signed to perform on the tour as well. [3] In March 2006, Madonna, along with her then-husband Guy Ritchie and with their kids, moved to Los Angeles, to begin rehearsing for the tour. [4] In the summer of 2006, Madonna's manager Guy Oseary announced that her Australian leg to the tour had been dropped. Her official website released the following statement:

To my fans in Australia, Please forgive me. I really did hope and expect to come to Australia during the Confessions Tour and asked my managers to try to include some shows there. I have fond memories from previous tours. Unfortunately, the logistics just didn't work out this time around. We looked into going from Japan to Australia and ending the show there but I have to get my kids back into school in England and they are, as you can understand, my most important priority. The important thing to remember is that I'm not retiring anytime soon and I am gonna get to Australia as soon as I can. You remain in my heart and Thank you for your continued love & support. Love, Madonna

Setlist: [ ]

Act I: Equestrian 1. " Future Lovers " / "I Feel Love" 2. " Get Together " 3. " Like a Virgin " 4. " Jump " Act II: Bedouin 5. Confessions (Video Interlude) (contains elements of " Live to Tell ") 6. " Live to Tell " (contains elements of Tears) 7. " Forbidden Love " 8. " Isaac " 9. " Sorry " (Pet Shop Boys Remix) 10. " Like It or Not " Act III: Glam-Punk 11. "Sorry" (Remix) (Video Interlude) 12. " I Love New York " 13. " Ray of Light " 14. " Let It Will Be " (Paper Faces Mix) 15. " Drowned World/Substitute for Love " 16. " Paradise (Not for Me) " Act IV: Disco 17. "The Duck Mixes The Hits" (Video Interlude) (contains excerpts from " Borderline ", " Erotica ", " Dress You Up ", " Holiday " and "Disco Inferno") 18. Music Inferno (contains elements of "Disco Inferno" and excerpts from "Where's the Party") 19. " Erotica " (remixed version based on the unreleased demo "You Thrill Me") 20. " La Isla Bonita " 21. " Lucky Star " (contains elements of "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)" and excerpts from " Hung Up ") 22. " Hung Up " (contains elements of "Lucky Star")

List of concerts, showing date, city, country, venue, tickets sold, amount of available tickets and gross revenue

1 Ray of Light Photoshoot
3 Guy Ritchie

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Madonna: The Confessions Tour

Confessions on a Dance Floor (2005) was Madonna’s heralded return to club music. Not only did the album resuscitate her record sales, debuting at #1 on the Billboard 200 and topping charts worldwide, its singles (“Hung Up”, “Jump”, “Sorry”, and “Get Together”) were among the most infections club hits of Madonna’s 25-year career. Altogether, Confessions on a Dance Floor proved that Madonna, approaching 50 years-old, is a vital force in the ever-expansive landscape of popular music. Buy that album. Her latest release, however…

The Confessions Tour follows on the release of I’m Going to Tell You a Secret (2006), which was a documentary about Madonna’s “Re-Invention” tour. Like its predecessor, The Confessions Tour is a lavish CD/DVD package. Instead of a documentary, the DVD on this set presents a full-length concert directed by Jamie King from Madonna’s Wembley Arena date. The CD contains 13 highlights from the show. Aside from over-saturating the market with three Madonna releases in two years, there’s a fundamental problem with the release of The Confessions Tour .

Experiencing recorded dance music in a club and hearing it rendered live in concert on a CD constitutes two very different experiences. The 4/4 beat that stimulates the body to dance sounds less dense in such a massive space like Wembley. This works against the The Confessions Tour since most tracks have a fast beats-per-minute count. If the beat is a bone, so to speak, there isn’t a lot of muscle cushioning it. The aural clarity and seamlessness of the songs on Confessions on a Dance Floor are also butchered on The Confessions Tour by zealous audience reactions. Enjoying propulsive tracks like “Hung Up” and “I Love New York” is difficult because of interminable vamps that are dotted by annoying hoots and hollers. Just what is everyone yelling about at the 00:42 mark during “Sorry”?

Such curiosities are answered on the DVD of The Confessions Tour . Whereas the CD is a superfluous “value add”, the DVD is thrilling entertainment, particularly for Madonna fans. Since Madonna is among the few artists to successfully and consistently exploit the visual medium to her benefit, it should surprise no one that The Confessions Tour is a stellar visual experience. Each song is dramatized and choreographed to within an inch of its life; therein lies Madonna’s most indispensable and enduring talent — dancing. The limbs that gave birth to a million “Madonna Wannabe’s” are stronger and more sinewy than ever. On The Confessions Tour Madonna is joined by a dozen or so dancers who narrowly escape injury during remarkable acrobatic dance sequences. Even more amazing is that Madonna breathlessly keeps pace with every one of them.

The stage design of The Confessions Tour gives Madonna and her “children” a decadent playground to frolic about. The moment she enters the stage inside a gargantuan mirror ball, understatement ceases to exist. Most notorious among Madonna’s grandiose gestures is her entrance from the stage floor cuffed to a gigantic crucifix posed like Jesus Christ, replete with a crown of thorns. After singing “Live to Tell”, Madonna descends the cross and warbles “Forbidden Love”. Accompanying her are male dancers who stand side-by-side in two’s, intertwining their arms and hands in obvious defiance to the cross. It’s an effective tableau .

Following a static-fueled montage of vintage Madonna videos, a DJ announces, “All right boys and girls, it’s time to get your dance shoes on. You’re listening to K UNT. (Get it?) It’s all Madonna, all the time”. The familiar bass line of “Disco Inferno” by The Trammps explodes with a chorus-line’s worth of disco dancers and roller skaters. Madonna emerges in a three-piece white suite à la John Travolta and sings “Music” over the sampled track. It’s gloriously fun, feckless, and tacky.

Less so are Madonna’s cold rearrangements of “Like a Virgin” and “Lucky Star”. The soulless Eurodisco beat fails to match the charm of the originals. The melodies are basically sung over chord progressions that bear little resemblance to the original arrangements. “Lucky Star”, for example, is paired with the track to “Hung Up”, itself a sampling of ABBA’s “Gimmie! Gimmie! Gimmie! (A Man After Midnight)”. The match is not made in heaven, though Madonna’s skin-tight, ABBA-esque jump suit is an amusing intertextualization.

But even the most rabid anti-Madonna listener or cynical music lover would find elements of The Confessions Tour impressive, whether the jaw-dropping talent of Madonna’s B-boys and girls, the awe-inspiring diligence of her lighting and sound crew, her rock-chick pose on “I Love New York”, or the audacity of her massive “fuck you” to George W. Bush, Tony Blair, Osama Bin Laden, and Condoleezza Rice on “Sorry”.

The oversaturation of recent Madonna product is ultimately what precludes The Confessions Tour from being wholly satisfying to anyone but the die-hard Madonna fan. How many people actually care to hear Madonna lead the audience in a three-minute call-and-response contest to the “Time goes by so slowly” refrain from “Hung Up”? Clocking in just under four hours, Madonna might as well be referencing the The Confessions Tour package.

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