Madonna always looks good on the dancefloor. Times reporter Dan Cairns is wowed by her new tour.

“Her Madgesty is receiving visitors, and they’re coming in their hundreds of thousands. Last Sunday, Madonna kicked off her 53-date world tour with a show at the Los Angeles Forum, the latest chapter in the singer’s ceaseless quest to remain the first, the last, the everything of modern pop.

The two gay men tottering towards the venue in drag – one wears a sparkling foil headpiece, white high-heeled boots and a Pucci dress – flick V signs at a passing pick-up full of wolf-whistling jocks with a defiance the material girl herself would be proud of. They get what they’ve come for, and a little bit they might feel they could have done without. In a thrilling but uneven show, Madonna gets most things right. The few occasions where the momentum sags will no doubt be tightened up by the time she rolls into Britain. During the acoustic sections, you can hear the audience deflate as one. They’d heard her promise, “I’m going to turn the world into one big dancefloor” – and they wanted to hold her to it.

Famously perfectionist, the singer will have noticed these niggles, not least when her beturbaned and arguably superfluous backing singer, Isaac Sinwanhy, accompanied her on Paradise (Not for Me) and sang horribly sharp. Will he be checking in for the UK flight? We’ll see.

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Madonna’s last outing, in 2003, a greatest-hits package launched after the release of her album American Life, was called the Re-Invention Tour – an implicit acknowledgment that that record’s lacklustre sales had created a need for some sort of metamorphosis. She promptly delivered, with a show whose wow factor and box office- busting statistics pulled off a trick she has managed whenever brand Madonna has looked like nearing its sell-by date.

This time, though, the circumstances are different. The album Confessions on a Dance Floor took both the singer and her disciples back to basics. The Madonna we’d first fallen for – all come-and-get-me dance moves and let’s-party lyrics – was back. The album has sold 7m copies to date.

So, when she materialised at the Forum, she was basking in adulation, not attempting to win it back. Emerging from, naturally, a giant $2m Swarovski-crystal glitter ball to sing the Confessions track Future Lovers, wearing equestrian gear complete with top hat and riding crop, she whipped the male dancers writhing around her in a display of rampant, unapologetic sexuality. Later, she rose from beneath the stage attached to a vast mirrored crucifix, wearing a crown of thorns: how Madonna is that? Religious, irreligious, excessive, camp, provocative, as if to say, top that if you can.

The British leg of the Confessions tour includes eight nights at Wembley Arena and one at Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium. The entire tour sold out in 24 hours; tickets for some dates were snapped up in just 10 minutes. What will those fans be getting? Given that this is Madonna, the eternal chameleon, that’s an important question.

So myriad have been her incarnations – virgin, slut, church-baiting temptress, actor, children’s author, mother, Kabbalah evangelist, pint-supping, tweed-capped, shotgun-toting country missus – that her return to her disco roots last year was as confusing as it was reassuring. On the one hand, Confessions found her doing what she is best at it, and doing it brilliantly. On the other, there was no escaping the fact that the album is a retread.

The latter point highlighted an interesting contradiction, one the opening night only emphasised: that, no matter the platinum discs, Madonna as a recording artist is not the principal attraction. Certainly, millions of people buy her albums, yet many arguably enjoy her recorded music with a side order of irony, and few evaluate her career chiefly in terms of the music she makes. It’s her life, and the personas she adopts on and off stage, that maintain our fascination.

One of the biggest cheers of the night comes when the video screens do a rapid rewind through her countless image changes. The film that opens the concerts portrays her as a stable girl, getting down with the fillies in a bizarre, fetishistic montage that looks like a Lloyds TSB commercial designed by Francis Bacon. Later, during Like a Virgin, the screens show x-rays of her bones, broken in the famous riding accident. And not for nothing does the semicircular screen above the stage resemble a stock-market display in New York’s Times Square: Madonna has her own unique index, and its price is currently sky high.

The show, co-designed by Jean-Paul Gaultier, with music direction by Stuart Price, is divided into four sections: Equestrian (songs include Get Together and Live to Tell), Bedouin (Sorry, Like It or Not), Never Mind the Bollocks (Drowned World, Ray of Light) and Disco (Music, La Isla Bonita). Aware as ever that controversy counts for everything, Madonna screens Dubya-ridiculing backdrops, and shouts “You can suck George Bush’s dick” during I Love New York, though it’s not clear who she has in mind for the task. She ends with Hung Up, crawling suggestively along the catwalk that protrudes into the audience. She is magnificent, feral, ageing disgracefully – and the Forum, if not the world, duly becomes a dancefloor.

Brits can expect a party, then – and use those lulls for a dash to the loo. Who knows, perhaps this notorious control freak kindly arranged it with calls of nature in mind.

Madonna’s British tour begins in Cardiff on July 30.

From Timesonline.co.uk.