Nick Grimshaw and Annie Macmanus got an inside scoop from BBC News correspondent Mark Savage who spoke to Madonna’s musical director Stuart Price about the singer’s tour.
In the latest episode of Sidetracked with Annie and Nick, Mark reveals there would be about 45 songs played during the show, and no band on stage for the first time in Madonna’s career.
“The great thing about Stuart Price is he knows this show inside out,” Mark tells Nick and Annie. “He wasn’t going to give away all of the big secrets but he gave me an idea of the shape of the show.
“The thing that really fascinated me is he said, ‘When you talk about greatest hits for Madonna, a greatest hit isn’t necessarily a song. It’s a look, it’s a video, it’s an award show performance, it’s a costume she wore.’ And so this is going to be a concert that takes all of that, all the Madonna music, the social history that it intersects with”
Mark also reveals that there won’t be a band on stage with Madonna, which he thinks is for the first time in her career.
“What they’ve done is they’ve gone back to the original multi track recordings of all of these songs, 72 I think, top 40 hits in the UK, and they’ve deconstructed them. He said they’ve gone back to the original vocals where you can hear New York police sirens going past when she was recording Into The Groove in the 1980s. And they’re using all of that original and really evocative music as the backing track,” Mark says.
Also in this episode of the podcast, Nick and Annie recall an interview they recorded with Taylor Swift in 2009 and they discuss Drake’s new album and his comments around his relationship with Rihanna.
This episode of Sidetracked with Annie and Nick is available on BBC Sounds.