Kylie Minogue turned up in the middle of Madonna’s Graham Norton interview dressed as a barmaid and handed her a grapefruit cocktail. It was a tidy way to bring up an old confession. “I was actually a little bit jealous of you,” Madonna told her.
The reason, she said, was Guy Ritchie. “I think my ex-husband at the time had a crush on her, and I was like, ‘I’ll never be as beautiful as Kylie’.” The scene came 26 years after Madonna wore a bedazzled “Kylie Minogue” tank top to the MTV Europe Music Awards in Sweden. Kylie said there was “no warning” and that she “probably stopped shy of fainting.”
The almost hour-long interview aired on BBC One and covers her forthcoming album, Confessions II, a return to the dancefloor. “I was a dancer. Dancing is in my DNA,” she said. Dancing, she added, “just creates community – and sometimes relationships.” She also admitted that “nobody ever wants to dance with me,” because she gets carried away. “I just go crazy. I think I irritate a lot of people.”
A hint about Glastonbury
Madonna was widely rumoured to be headlining Glastonbury in 2024 before talks collapsed. Fans have waited since for her to take the Pyramid Stage. Asked about touring, she suggested 2027 might be the year. “I think I’ll do promo tours for a while, then in the summertime something bigger,” she said.
“Oh, that sounds really exciting and good,” Norton replied. “I think I know what you’re talking about.” The two held a long look, and then he pressed her for confirmation. “It could be,” she said. “Why do I have to tell you everything?”
Lola, and a brother
The album includes a first duet with her eldest daughter, Lourdes “Lola” Leon, who is 29 and works as a model, musician and performer. The song deals with strains between them. Madonna said Lola made the first move. “She’s been very reticent to work with me. She doesn’t want to be perceived as my daughter taking advantage of her privilege,” she said. Then one day Lola told her she was holding on to something, maybe resentment, and suggested writing a song together as a “very healing experience.” Madonna’s answer: “OK, you’re on.”
Another track, Fragile, mourns her brother Christopher, who died of cancer in 2024. The two had fallen out after she picked the choreographer Jamie King over him to direct her Drowned World tour, and Christopher’s 2008 tell-all book made it worse. They reconciled before he died. Madonna said she wrote the song after he phoned her in the studio. “He was in a lot of pain, on the phone, and he was not in a good place. I knew it was close to the end. And then I went upstairs and wrote a song.” Of writing it, she said: “It’s like an exorcism.”
Songs and a missing outfit
The first taste of the album, her 15th, arrived in April with lines from One Step Away. Producer Stuart Price told Norton the lyrics came “in a flash of light”: at the end of a session, Madonna asked him to switch on the microphone and delivered the whole vocal in one take. “The ideas come when I don’t try too hard,” she said.
Danceteria was more carefully built. It is named for the New York club where she persuaded DJ Mark Kamins to play her debut single, Everybody, and it name-checks her then-roommate Martin Burgoyne, doorman Haoui Montaug and actress Debi Mazar. Madonna called the club the “Mecca of music and dance and fashion” but felt out of place there. “Everybody was cool. I wasn’t cool.” She made her fishnet gloves from rags and cast-offs. “Hunger was the best sauce,” she said.
At Coachella in April she joined Sabrina Carpenter on stage, wearing the same boots, corset and jacket she had worn 20 years earlier. Afterwards the outfit and other archive pieces went missing. Indio Police said they were last seen on a golf cart on the festival grounds at 01:30 local time on Saturday. Madonna told Norton the costume “hasn’t come back.” She was “very disturbed by it for a couple of days. They’re historical.”
Sources
- Madonna was 'jealous of Kylie' – and other things we learned in her Graham Norton interview
- Madonna was 'jealous of Kylie' – and other things we learned in her Graham Norton interview
