Get into the groove ... for £160. Madonna
performing at the MTV Europe Music Awards
in 2005. Photograph: Anthony Harvey/PA
Times must be tough at Madonna's house. Maybe she's finding the cost of living in Britain to be higher than expected, or she's been making too free with £4-per-bottle Kabbalah water.
Anyway, she obviously needs cash, because what other reason can there be for the richest (or so we thought) woman in pop to be charging £80 for the cheapest seats on her forthcoming "Confessions" tour? And if you don't want to be stuck in Row ZZ for the shows at Wembley Arena and Cardiff's Millennium Stadium, you'll be paying up to £160 for a better view.
To put this in some sort of perspective, £160 is nothing compared to the £750 top price the Kirov Opera intends to exact when it stages Wagner's Ring Cycle at the Wales Millennium Centre next autumn - and only slightly more expensive than the Rolling Stones, whose top price for their summer tour is £140 for a so-called "gold circle" seat (which, despite the name, is nothing more than an ordinary seat toward the front). But it's still a vast amount to pay to see a show, and even pricier than her 2004 Reinvention tour, where a then-unprecedented £150 got you into the front row.
Tickets are limited to four per person, but, as ever, there will be those who somehow manage to come by more than their share, and will be only too happy to flog their spares on eBay for several times the face value. They'll have little trouble recouping their outlay - having reignited her career with the Confessions on a Dance Floor album, Madge's popularity is at a 10-year high.
The explanation that's always proffered in cases like this is that it costs a fortune to tour, and that the extravagant performance will justify the money. The Madgemeister is promising a "spectacular" show, with Gaultier costumes and, no doubt, the usual array of hello-sailor male dancers and other money-gobbling incidentals. Maybe she'll be shot out of a cannon, too. But the cost-of-touring excuse doesn't hold water. Big tours recoup their costs through merchandise such as the T-shirts and baseball caps on sale at the venue. Ticket money is just the icing on the cake. Funny how it's always the richest acts who expect their fans to dig the deepest.
