Madonna embarked on a global tour that, by the time it finishes 78 dates later, will have been seen in the flesh by more than a million people. Photo / Getty Images
“I awoke one morning and found myself famous.” Those were the words of Lord Byron on the day the first two cantos of his epic poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage were published in 1812. It’s the most famous thing anyone has ever said about the sudden onrush of celebrity.
As one of the first writers to be the subject of fanmail and fan fiction, “Byronmania” is a fandom that long predates Beyonce’s Beyhive, the Swifties, and even Beatlemania. But modern megastardom is measured by other metrics. Take this weekend. In London, in front of 20,000 fans at the O2 Arena, Madonna embarked on a global tour that, by the time it finishes 78 dates later, will have been seen in the flesh by more than a million people.
Meanwhile, her protégé, Taylor Swift, is bringing her Eras Tour to cinemas all over the world. The film’s premiere sent fans into a tailspin when Swift posed alongside Beyonce on the red carpet, uniting two of the most ardently enthusiastic fandoms of our times. Swift has already taken $100 million in ticket sales in the US; it is already the highest-grossing concert movie ever made, from pre-sales alone.
And yet there are more parallels between two of the most famous women in the history of entertainment – Swift, the current queen of pop and its dowager Madonna – and Byron, the first modern celebrity, than you might think, despite the fact that they came by their celebrity in different eras. Madonna’s rise coincided with the CD and MTV, Swift’s with streaming – she is the most-streamed artist in Spotify’s history – and the internet.
“When there are these moments of transition in culture, whether it’s because of the industrial revolution, the rise of television in the 50s and 60s, or whether it’s social media [more recently] it provides people with more opportunities to be famous because there are more platforms for their work to be seen and their images to be circulated,” explains Dr Harriet Fletcher, lecturer in media and communications at Anglia Ruskin University, who researches the history of celebrity and identifies Lord Byron as the very first megastar. “Industrial changes in the early 19th century and rising literacy rates are why Byron rose to fame overnight as he did.”
But platforms and huge cultural shifts aren’t the only ingredients needed for the mega-fame mix. One is international reach – and that doesn’t just mean ‘breaking America’, as the Spice Girls did in 1997, when Wannabe made the highest-ever entry by a non-American act into the Hot 100. They stole the record previously set by The Beatles who themselves astonished the world with the hysteria they inspired wherever they went; 73 million people tuned into their appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1964 and such was the fervour they experienced wherever they went, John Lennon eventually remarked that they were ‘more popular than Jesus’.
Americans must break the rest of the world too, and nowhere is this exemplified best but in sport. Basketball’s finite reach outside the US limits the fame of Michael Jordan. Ditto Sachin Tendulkar’s outside cricket-mad India. As for tennis, it isn’t a demotic enough sport to spread news of Serena Williams or Novak Djokovic to every corner of the globe. No, the most recognisable people in the history of sport have tended to kick a ball – and/or marry a pop star, as in the case of David Beckham. Together, ‘Posh and Becks’ have eclipsed their respective worlds and become a global brand in their own right, currently dominating the cultural conversation once again with the Netflix documentary, Beckham, which spans that most glamorous trio of industries; sport, entertainment and fashion.
Beckham comes close to being a modern-day Byron. But One Direction, especially Harry Styles, might be a more apt comparison. “There are aspects of his [Byron’s] celebrity that resemble our modern understanding of celebrity now,” says Dr Fletcher. “He was famous on an international level, and he had a very active fan culture that was producing things like fanfiction and fan art.” Similarly, Harries (that’s Styles’s super-fans) have produced thousands of vivid artworks of their beloved star while a portrait of the Redditch-born star by David Hockney, unveiled in August, will be the centrepiece of the National Portrait Gallery’s forthcoming exhibition by the artist, and is sure to draw huge crowds in its own right.
Of course, mega-celebrities are nothing without their fans, and an insatiable interest in one’s private life is key when it comes to connection. “If we compare to the other Romantic poets, Wordsworth and Coleridge were just interesting as well-respected literary geniuses… [Byron] embodied something a bit different… his work was semi-autobiographical [and] had this kind of very mysterious and very interesting persona that he’s cultivated in public life,” says Fletcher. There are surprising parallels between Byron, Swift and Madonna, she suggests, as “I think cultivating a persona that fans can then attach themselves to, and kind of latch on to, is really key to creating a kind of long-lasting celebrity image.”
It’s yet another thing the amorous 19th-century poet and the high priestess of 21st-century pop have in common. “The mechanics of Swift and Byron’s celebrity are very similar,” says Fletcher. “It’s having an active fandom and feeling like you can gain a sense of their life and relationships through their work.” “I cannot exist without some object of Love,’ Byron once wrote to his lover, Lady Melbourne, while in End Game, Swift sings ‘I can’t let you go, your hand print’s on my soul’ of her then-boyfriend, the actor Joe Alwyn. Who knows how she might chart her current rumoured romance with NFL player Travis Kelce in her next album.
Yet for all that, the truer measurement of fame is not breadth. It’s longevity. “What these mega stars have in common is that they can reinvent themselves, they can transform, and they’re not the same thing. Throughout their career, they can adapt not just their musical style, but their aesthetic, their persona, they can maybe reach different kinds of audiences,” says Dr Fletcher. Musicians can reinvent on their own terms; see the many phases of Madonna, among them Ray of Light hippie, British Lady of the Manor and Don’t Tell Me, cowgirl. TV stars often attest to a rising tide of recognition when a primetime show of theirs is showing on a mainstream channel. When it’s not on or, worse, when it’s cancelled, people start looking right through them. Memory is fickle.
That is why Byron scores high on celebrity’s Richter scale. In purely numerical terms, there are Instagram influencers and YouTubers that no one over the age of 25 has ever heard of, but who nonetheless reach far larger audiences than Byron ever could in 1812.
But we still talk about Byron. Some even read him. Like Byron, Madonna has certainly got one of the basics right about mega-celebrity. She’s universally known by only one name. But will her renown last for two centuries? She’s already been famous for 40 years. Only another 160 to go.
Hammer the last song the Kiwi singer will release before her album comes out next week.