‘One of the most SATANIC shows in human history’

So said the Pope of Madonna’s Blond Ambition Tour – but this heavyweight biography treats her as a cultural titan who’s as significant as Warhol and Dylan

No one can accuse Mary Gabriel of not doing due diligence on Madonna Louise Ciccone’s infamous life and extraordinary career. Coming in at 800 pages, this is the kind of heavyweight biography that you associate with a major 20th Century artist – Andy Warhol, say, or Bob Dylan. But Gabriel’s point is that, love her or loathe her, Madonna is indeed a cultural titan of our times. It’s not just that she’s sold more records and made more money than virtually anyone else – only her contemporary Michael Jackson comes close – it’s that she’s done it on her own, rebellious, terms.

Consider the evidence. It was Madonna who ‘broke through’ on film in Desperately Seeking Susan (1985) looking pale and podgy yet still managing to be the sexiest person on screen. It was Madonna who included safe sex information in all her concert programmes a whole year before the US government grudgingly followed suit (she has lost many close friends to AIDS).

And if Madonna made conical bras a thing, she did the same for wrap-around head mikes, which have since become standard issue for musical performers who insist on singing and dancing at the same time and wouldn’t dream of miming to a soundtrack. Madonna wasn’t just ahead of the curve, she could see it trying to catch up in her rear-view mirror.

Gabriel covers all this, and a whole lot more, without ever coming over as a fangirl. Indeed, she makes a point of telling us at the outset that she wasn’t a Madonna follower before she embarked on this gargantuan project. Instead, the Pulitzer-nominated journalist approaches her task as a cultural historian would, putting the artist in the context of her times. Take Madonna’s 1989 video for Like A Prayer, which featured burning crosses and an erotic portrayal of Jesus. It was banned by the Vatican and, the following year, Pope John Paul II announced that the Blond Ambition tour was ‘one of the most satanic shows in the history of humanity’.

Gabriel rightly sees this as an extraordinary moment of cultural reckoning – the point at which a young woman from a provincial, working-class Catholic background could

‘If she made conical bras a thing, she did the same for head mikes’

get the richest and most powerful Church in the world hot under its clerical collar.

Gabriel deftly uncovers the early unhappy home life in suburban Michigan. Madonna’s mother – another Madonna – died when she was aged just five and the Ciccone children were left with a loving but strict father. The arrival of a hated stepmother left the young girl testing boundaries. At a high-school concert her dance act was so suggestive that her father Silvio refused to speak to her for weeks. Striking out for New York in the grungy late 1970s felt like coming home. She made friends with outsider artists Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat and spent every free minute taking dance lessons.

No one at this point was thinking of the pint-sized hustler as a singer and indeed there remain plenty of critics who point out how weak her voice is: in 1996 Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd-Webber were sceptical that she’d be able to carry off the title role in their rock opera Evita. In response, she did her usual thing of taking singing lessons and working like a demon until she had developed an upper register that surprised everyone. Apart from herself.

Other critics maintain that Madonna’s career rests on hiring the best creative collaborators. Gabriel deals briskly with this snipe, together with the more damaging accusation that Madonna is guilty of hoovering up other people’s talents and turning them mainstream. The list of potential ‘victims’ of her cultural borrowing is long – black, Cuban, gay, drag and club cultures have all fed into her many stylistic incarnations. But Madonna shoots back with the reasonable retort that she is an artist and all artists steal. Gabriel meanwhile points out that Madonna is unusual in giving full credit to all her collaborators as creators in their own right.

Still, there are places where you can’t help feeling that Gabriel is guilty of giving Madonna an easy ride. Artistic stinkers such as the film Dick Tracy (directed by Madonna’s then lover Warren Beatty) and Swept Away (written and directed by her ex husband Guy Ritchie) get blamed on the men rather than on the female star’s wooden performance. And when it comes to Madonna’s truly dreadful theme song to Die Another Day (2002), which James Bond fans regularly cite as the worst ever, Gabriel glosses over this as a cultural mismatch.

There are some more personal questions that Gabriel ducks, too. For instance, no one can doubt that Madonna is the mistress of reinvention. But what’s with the plastic surgery? At 65 Madonna looks – there’s no nice way to say this – very odd. Why would a woman who has made such a point of looking the way she wanted, regardless of what any man might think, succumb to such drastic remodelling?

Madonna is not on hand to give her biographer an answer because the two have never met or communicated. Instead, Gabriel has interviewed about 30 people who have worked with the star (this is actually a small amount for such a large text and suggests many turned her down). One person she does speak to is Christopher Ciccone, Madonna’s younger brother, who was her artistic associate before falling out spectacularly when he published his own book, My Life With My Sister Madonna (2008). So we’re safe in concluding that Madonna won’t be pleased with Christopher cooperating with Gabriel, even though his comments seem thoughtful and kind.

Still, what does it say that an artist who built a career on telling her millions of fans to ‘Express yourself ’ is brutal with anyone who does just that? It is one of several contradictions Gabriel never quite nails in what is otherwise a well-researched book.