From Taylor Swift to Beyoncé, pop star reinventions are a dime a dozen nowadays. But that was not the case in February 1998, when Madonna ended a four-year recording silence with her career and zeitgeist-defining seventh album, Ray of Light.
This was Madge reborn, transfigured, lifted up and unshackled from her previous image as tweaker of taboos and scourge of moralists. It was also helpfully stocked with bangers – from the Tori Amos/Fiona Apple-flavoured ballad Frozen to an effervescent title track that pulsated with the joyous abandon of an evening spent raving your socks off.
Eager to make the most of her return to prominence, Madonna had planned to follow Ray of Light with an ambitious remix LP, given the working title Veronica Electronica (named for the persona Madonna had adopted while toiling in the studio with producer William Orbit). However, as Ray of Light became a phenomenon, plans for a spin-off were shelved, for fear it would encroach on the success of the original record.
Twenty-seven years later, Madonna’s career is in a different place. There has been ongoing chatter about a biographical movie starring Julia Garner as the young Madge. However, that project is now apparently to be reworked into a Netflix series (with Garner seemingly no longer involved).
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She has also been on the receiving end of unkind – and often sexist and ageist – reviews for 2019’s Madame X. The accompanying tour was controversial more for its tardy start-time than for anything Madonna got up to on stage. Having once scandalised the world with her raw sexuality, now Madonna was only getting headlines because she didn’t know how to operate an alarm clock.
There’s never been a better moment, then, for an outpouring of foot-to-the-floor Madonna nostalgia, and that is precisely what the fun, boisterous and belatedly unleashed Veronica Electronica delivers. Along with that, it is a great time capsule that brings the listener back to the heyday of the superstar DJ.
This was a glorious age when remixes were less sad cash-ins than conceptual opuses, invariably conjured by figures such as producer and deck-spinner Sasha, who overhauls Ray of Light opener Drowned World/ Substitute of Love – inspired by the fun JG Ballard novel, The Drowned World – and whips it up into a supersized rave odyssey.
There isn’t much variety across Veronica Electronica, which more or less follows the running order of Ray of Light (the title track reworked into a rigorously OTT onslaught by Sasha). Two previously unreleased tunes, The Power of Good-Bye and Gone Gone Gone, are in a similar vein to the pre-existing material, and it is surprising to hear the latter was originally omitted because Madonna felt it jarred with the project’s overall vibes.
Ray of Light caught Madonna at a crossroads. She’d given birth to her first child, Lourdes Leon, in 1996 and was preparing to play the title in Alan Parker’s adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Evita.
She had, moreover, become immersed in the Jewish esoteric belief system of Kabbalah – events that led to a period of self-questioning and a desire to move forward as an artist. “That was a big catalyst for me,” she told Q magazine in 2002. “It took me on a search for answers to questions I’d never asked myself before.”
She was also pushing herself as a vocalist – a consequence of the singing lessons she took for Evita and which can be heard on the epic remix of Frozen, where Madonna’s delivery has the quality of a storm rising over ocean waters.
“I studied with a vocal coach for Evita and I realised there was a whole piece of my voice I wasn’t using,” she told Spin in 1998. “Before, I just believed I had a minimal range and was going to make the most of it. Then I started studying with a coach.”
Madonna was eager, too, to tap into the energy of 1990s electronic music – which led her to collaborate with synth-pop artist turned producer Orbit. Yet, though their alliance would prove enormously fruitful, it was not a straightforward collaboration.
Orbit was a bit of a lost soul and initially thrown by Madonna’s ferocious work ethic. “She’s a fabulous producer,” he would later tell the Guardian. “When it says ‘produced by Madonna and William Orbit’, people don’t always give her the credit for that. But she’s as responsible as me.”
Among Madonna fans, Veronica Electronica has long been regarded as the ultimate lost album and news of its release has been greeted with joy. But even an agnostic will find lots here to enjoy. It’s a postcard from the edge of the rave era and an eloquent love letter to pop at its purest and most euphoric.
