The 2005 show Madonna felt she was forced to play: “Africa’s more important than your children!”
As much as the idea of performing might seem like it appeals only to a masochist, there are some people who are clearly born to exist on stage, and Madonna is perhaps a fine example of someone who has carved a career from her exuberant personality.
The thing is, there’s a stark contrast between going out to perform for the sake of performing and doing it because you want to be able to put on a spectacle for people to gawp over, and for Madonna, if there was no intent behind the performance, then there was little interest on her part in even committing to it in the first place.
Being forced into a performance you don’t want to do is perhaps the worst nightmare for someone who thinks about the finer details of their craft to an extreme, but Madonna found herself in this exact position in 2005 when all of the world’s finest pop acts were being summoned by Bob Geldof to perform at Live 8, a series of simultaneous charity concerts in eight locations around the world, put together to mark the 20th anniversary of Live Aid.
Madonna had been a part of the original event in 1985, performing at the US incarnation of the show in Philadelphia, and while many were being pestered by Geldof to come back, she initially had reservations about being in attendance.
“I didn’t want to do the show,” she confided to Attitude Magazine later the same year, having put on a spellbinding performance at Hyde Park in London. “It was during the only holiday I had with my children. When Bob Geldof started writing me letters, I thought, ‘Oh no, I just finished recording, and I just finished the film,’ and I promised my children I’d go to the countryside, they’d just finished school, and they were really mad at me. Bob was like, ‘Africa’s more important than your children!’”
While you might think that a polite refusal from the ‘Queen of Pop’ would be enough for Geldof to stop his pursuits, apparently, he ended up putting her on the bill without so much as telling her that he’d done so.
“He’s really pushy, that guy,” she laughed. “I said, ‘OK let me think about it’ and the next thing, I read in the paper that I was doing it and I hadn’t even answered him yet. I don’t regret that I did it at all, it turned out to be an amazing thing.”
On top of her initial reasoning, she explained that she didn’t like to do “half-arsed shows” where she hadn’t been given ample time to rehearse with her band, while all of the other performers were in the middle of touring schedules and had their sets fresh in the memory.
However, while Madonna did concede that it ended up being spectacular and far from a regretful performance, you do have to wonder whether her preparedness would have really mattered much, considering the nature of the concert and its charitable cause. As a noted philanthropist herself, Madonna ought to have known better than to turn down one of the most charitable activists in music just for a family holiday.
