Immaculate Collecting: Off with her head!
Hello Tribers! Here we are with a brand new corner devoted to collecting here on MadonnaTribe.com.
My name is Mario and I’ve been collecting Madonna items for a long time. I collect most anything, from vinyl records, cd and books to promotional items and rare and weird stuff and I’ll be sharing (twice a week) stories about items in my collection, info on their release and sometimes the strage ways I had to go through to get them. I hope this will be a nice walk down memory lane through
“Madonna eras” that MadonnaTribe readers will enjoy. And now to quote Madonna from “Ciao Italia”: Siete pronti? Andiamo!
If you collect Madonna Tour programmes like me and you are a completist, you probably had the same “so now what” feeling when you discovered there were TWO different prints of the big sized re-Invention tour programme, which is in my opinion Madonna’s second best ever tourbook coming straight after the huge sized Blond Ambition Tour one!
As you may recall the tour started in the US, so all the first copies of the tour prog were made in the USA. The very first copies didn’t have the huge red string tied around it as later copies had but that wasn’t the big difference…
When the tour arrived in the UK for the eight dates to be held there, someone had the clever idea to do a UK pressing of the re-Invention tourbook, but for some strange and unknown reason or simply as inside joke to pay homage to beheaded French queen Marie Antoinette, Madonna changes her head in one of the shots.
As you can see from the photos below, Madonna stikes the same pose on both editions but she has one head and bare shoulders on the US pressing and different head and covered shoulders on the UK one.
Sounds mysterious uh! And to add insult to injury let me say that the photo on the original US tourbook doesn’t carry the original head either, as in the original shot M wears a black wig!
Now, for people like me attending the concert in London, the big problem was: how to spot the booth selling the right UK tourbook at the Earls Court venue! Many of the vendors assumed I was crazy and kept telling me “thoy r oll do soume mate” which basically means “they are all the same little trouble maker” or better “get the hell outta here!”.
But as a man can tell a thousand lies and having learned my lesson well and never getting a no for an answer I’ve found my way to the right booth and a nice vendor
made me browse the different piles of Tour books until I found the one I wanted. YAY! He honestly looked puzzled and surprised when I showed him the two different heads!
To cut a long story short I got both versions and later that year I also got the nice and now rare Julien D’ys‘ carnet de travail linked to that tour, one of the many collectables we at MadonnaTribe were the first one to mention online on a Madonna website at the time! But that’s another story.
See you next time guys!