When you’re a pop icon, being fashionably late to your own show is, to some degree, expected. But there’s leaving your fans waiting in anticipation, and then there’s being downright tardy like Madonna, who is facing major backlash for rocking up to perform at ridiculous hours.
Fans of Madonna have recently taken to social media to express their anger at her late start times, and one particularly disgruntled fan is even suing the singer for changing the start time of a Miami concert from 8:30pm to 10:30pm.
According to Buzzfeed News, the fan – Nate Hollander – filed the class action suit after he spent over $1K USD on tickets to Madonna’s Madame X tour, but was unable to attend the concert when Live Nation changed the start time two hours later.
To make matters worse, Madonna’s shows are all ages, but teens living in Miami-Dade have a curfew which states they can’t be out in public without an adult after 11pm. If Madonna’s shows are kicking off as later as 10:30pm, that’s automatically ruling out a huge portion of her audience.
Madonna hasn’t directly responded to the backlash, but she did tweet a video from her Vegas show in which she tells the audience: “A queen is never late,” and captioned it “F.A.C.T.S.”
The singer’s tweet didn’t go down very well with fans, who clapped back calling her behaviour “disrespectful.”
“A true queen shows respect for her people, keeps her commitments (including time commitments), and shows her manners,” one fan wrote. Other fans noted that Madonna didn’t show up on stage until midnight at her Vegas show over the weekend.
“The guy next to me was snoring louder than her songs and a lot of people were chanting for a ticket refund,” one concertgoer tweeted. “It was a disaster.” According to Las Vegas News, fans booed the singer when she finally arrived on stage.
Tickets to Madonna’s Madame X tour cost anywhere between $340 and over $1,000. Considering the hefty price tag, you’d think Madonna wouldn’t leave her loyal fans waiting for so long. The real question here is, why is she rocking up so late to her shows? Is it all part of the performance, or does Madonna simply have a problem with punctuality?