Madonna’s chronic lateness shows she doesn’t care about her fans

We were getting into the groove: it wasn’t long after she’d played “Vogue”, and the Queen of Pop was warming nicely into her set – one of last year’s 02 concert dates earmarking Madonna’s first ever retrospective.

But away from the pyrotechnics I was engrossed in a murkier show: the first of a flurry of people climbing the gangway and making for the exit. Two elderly fans were guided by their walking sticks, watching carefully and concentrating on the steps as shards of stage lighting shone the exit in and out of darkness.

She was only just over halfway through her set and so much was to come. She hadn’t played “Ray of Light”, “Like a Virgin” or “Don’t Tell Me”, and there was a drag show as part of the concert, with Julia Fox making a guest appearance. But as Madonna had come on stage over half an hour late, fans who lived out of London had to leave to make their last trains home, missing a huge chunk of what they’d paid for.

Tickets were going for hundreds of pounds, perhaps more for the people who I saw leaving from the seats at the front. It was the elderly couple who were struggling up the stairs that really got me thinking: why should they miss out because Madonna was late, again?

This week, two fans sued the hitmaker because she was late to a New York concert. They had to leave early because they “had to get up early to go to work” the next morning. The lawsuit has raised in a legal framework the sorts of moral questions people have been asking about Madonna’s sets for years. Why is it fair for fans to miss out because she can’t be on time? It’s not the first time: fans argued the singer breached her contract for lateness in 2019 during the Madame X tour, and again in 2020.

Two authoritative voices the night I went told me Madge was likely paying £10,000 per minute she went over the 02’s curfew of 11.00pm. I remember she went on around 37 minutes overtime, costing what I assume was a frankly sickening £370,000 to finish her show.

Not long after the first ditchers a steady, sobering line of ticket holders begrudgingly made for the exit. The narrative on the night in the media boxes? That you were naive to expect her to be on time, that she is “always” late, that that is part of her shtick. A few minutes to 9.00pm when she was supposed to be coming on, journalists were chatting casually, gathering near the toilets, nowhere near a stage view. No one was silly enough to expect her to appear anytime soon.

It isn’t the only example of Madonna’s tone deafness towards those who love her most. During the pandemic she took part in a socially distanced reimagining of John Lennon’s “Imagine”, along with other celebs including Gal Gadot and Natalie Portman.

Madonna contributed her bit while sitting in her huge bath surrounded by rose petals. The video was supposed to be, I think, a message of solidarity to frontline workers and people with Covid, but her luxurious set-up felt like a sickeningly out-of-touch display of privilege.

When Madonna first came to New York she had a few dollars in her pocket and did odd jobs, including working as a nude model, to pay rent. She’s happy to talk about her early struggles, incorporating her personal story into her shows; she did the night I saw her. It is one of many relatable tendrils to Madonna’s fame – she’s also founded her own charitable organisations and speaks about the benefits of adoption, and she is of course a queer role model.

But these attributes clash with the carelessness she displays with her fans. Sadly, she has even referenced her own lateness publicly, seeming to make a joke out of it in one viral social video which fans have commented under saying things like “show up on time. It’s simple”.

Perhaps she’s become so famous that her management and inner circle feel they cannot approach her about her lack of professionalism; to ask her to be on time, for fear of her not showing up at all. Madonna is estimated to have grossed almost £1bn on the road during her career. She doesn’t need the money she has raked in – but many of her fans will have spent a good chunk of their monthly rent seeing her live. That they get half of the show they’ve paid for, instead of the whole thing, is a disgrace.