It is not very often Graham Norton is disarmed. On his Friday night chat shows, he is the ringmaster – corralling conversations and egos with unfazed poise. During his many years on the radio, he was agile and hilarious. On his podcast, Wanging On, he is more sly and savage than anywhere else.
He is never off his guard. Most of us consider him one of the best broadcasters of his generation and a superlative interviewer – his talents only brought into starker relief when Claudia Winkleman launched a chat show just like his and it turned out to be a flop. Norton is someone you seldom see under anyone else’s control. Which made his “world-exclusive” interview with Madonna a little unnerving.
Next week, Madonna releases her 15th album, Confessions II – the follow-up to 2005’s Confessions on a Dancefloor. That record – structured like a DJ set and leading with the sensational ABBA-sampling “Hung Up” – was a phenomenon. It was both a reinvention after 2003’s concept album American Life and a return to her nightclub roots as well as confirmation that no matter how many decades into her career, she would not stop shapeshifting. She probably never will. In 2023, she did a theatrical and quite mad world tour, Celebration, that celebrated her legacy and explored her life’s work. Now, she is returning to the dancefloor and, to mark it, she offered a special interview with Norton.
But only a fool would expect to meet a Madonna who is relaxed, easygoing and unfiltered. She has always been a strange and otherworldly proposition. She was born to be a celebrity – she is not on this planet nor trying to be – and she has never been desperate to be relatable, warm or understood. Even with Norton, a fan and sort of friend – or at least trusted enough to be granted this access – she is intimidating, her expressions rigid and delivery serious and straight-faced.
In a series of conversations about her life, London and this album, from Koko in Camden – the first London dancefloor she performed on – to a recording studio to a fake bar (with a pointless cameo from Kylie Minogue, serving cocktails) she is reluctant to smile, teeters between playful and combative, and frequently speaks with her eyes closed or fluttering in that superior, drawling way. She’s not unfriendly, exactly – she just won’t be moved.
And yet: she might say it with unemotional detachment, and it might be crowded out by promotional fluff, and she might not volunteer follow-ups, but there are a few suggestions of something deeper.
The first concerns her Coachella appearance with Sabrina Carpenter. Earlier this year, Madonna offered a reward for the return of her vintage costumes stolen after the festival. Norton asks if she’s had them back and her hands begin to shake. “It’s very naughty,” she says sadly. As the atmosphere grows uncomfortable, he says uneasily, “I feel like I’ve stumbled over an area of darkness, let’s move on.” But she continues, “somebody helped themselves”, and he finds himself reassuring her that they will come back. “I was very disturbed by it for a couple of days, because they’re historical”, she says sombrely, hinting at real turmoil – the loss of part of her archive, the violation, and the loss of control.
Madonna, Norton and her producer Stuart Price (Photo: BBC/So Television/Ricardo Gomes)Then there’s the insight into her music. Norton implies this record might be her most personal yet – which she won’t agree with. But she does open up about writing a song after a phone call with her brother Christopher, when he was in a lot of pain from pancreatic cancer and she knew he was close to the end. “It was cathartic… It’s a kind of therapy… It’s like an exorcism”. She hasn’t played it yet for their father, who is 95. “I don’t wanna push him over the edge… But it’s not disturbing.”
Then there is a glimpse into how complicated it must be to have Madonna as your mother. The album features a duet with her daughter Lourdes, who performs as Lola Leon. “She approached me. She’s been very reticent to work with me; she doesn’t want to be perceived as my daughter taking advantage of her privilege”. Norton asks if it was very professional, or if she felt like a “proud mama”. She shakes her head. “It was kind of neither of those things. She’s been very standoffish… I respect that deeply…”
One day, her daughter came to her and told her she’d been holding on to a kind of anger, a resentment, during her adolescence. “Because at the end of the day, she didn’t ask for this.” Writing a song together, she thought, would be a healing experience. “You say exactly what you want to say, I’ll say exactly what I want to say.” She doesn’t say much more, other than how beautiful her daughter’s lyrics and voice are, but she does not gloss over or shy away from acknowledging that to grow up as Madonna’s child must be complex and, in some ways, traumatic.
Norton is on his best behaviour here, but he’s respectful, charming and persistent, without being hard-nosed – there would be no point trying to mine Madonna for gossip or pushing her so far she shuts down. More than once, she asks: “Why do you have to know anything?” and he explains, “It’s my job.” He creates space for her to guide the conversation and follows up as well as he can, given how difficult his subject is to read. Yet it is the most basic question that delivers his big scoop – however carefully engineered it must surely have been.
He closes the interview, which was broadcast on what in any other year would be the Friday night of Glastonbury, by asking if she’ll tour Confessions II. “I think I’ll do promo tours for a while, and then in the summertime, something bigger.” Her eyes widen and her face glows with mischief and he is – I think genuinely – taken aback and flustered by the revelation. “Oh, oh! That sounds really exciting and good and I think I know what you’re talking about… Is it in this country?” “It might be,” she says – still, unsmiling, uncompromising, giving away only as much as she can be bothered with and ensuring the mystery of the real woman endures.
‘Madonna and Graham’ is streaming on BBC iPlayer
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