Twenty-five years. Depending on how many candles crowded your last birthday cake, a quarter of a century can feel like the blink of an eye, or distant millennia stretching back to the dawn of time. Do you recognise the you of 1999? Did you even exist?
May 1999, the dying days of who I used to be. I was in my final year at university, dissertation due date looming, a couple of exams dotted here and there, perhaps I’d even begun to start packing my stuff away for my imminent exit from my shared house in the Polygon area of Southampton, student central. I had a clock radio next to my single bed and it would dutifully spring into life at the same time every day – no idea what time, my brain has decided, rightly, to excise that nugget in favour of remembering the order of stations on the Northern line. Radio 1 would belch from its tiny, scratchy speaker and I would either reach over – past the ashtray, crumpled soft-pack of Marlboro Lights, and maybe even a half-drunk bottle of Stella – and slam the snooze button, or, occasionally, I would listen to the song. Your last days at university are odd. You’re on the cusp of being a proper grown-up. Cheap suits, meal deals, and pregnancy scares await you. You’re perhaps optimistic and nervous. I was sad, however. University had been a reinvention for me, but I’d not quite escaped the chrysalis of my former self. I was, for example, in what would be my last ever relationship with a woman and, for reasons I couldn’t quite fathom (slow learner), I felt submerged in oil, slowly wading toward a future I couldn’t quite visualise, but feared all the same. Forever – what a concept. Lucky, then, that ‘Beautiful Stranger’ went to radio at this exact time.
Unlike me, Madonna was riding a high. Whether she was craving it or not, her Ray of Light album had given her critical acclaim and recognition by her peers that proved after, what, sixteen years or so at the top of her game, that she wasn’t quite the flash in the pan after all. There was a hunger for Madonna unseen since her Blond Ambition days. It felt like she was winning and, as any fan will tell you, when your fave is thriving, you feel like you are too. Hearing ‘Beautiful Stranger’ for the first time on my battered, off-white clock radio, maybe wasn’t the greatest start to our relationship, but luckily, ‘Beautiful Stranger’ sounds great on almost any piece of hardware simply because, at that time, absolutely nothing else out there sounded remotely like it.
Produced by Madonna with Ray of Light knob-twiddler William Orbit, ‘Beautiful Stranger’ was more of a distant cousin to their previous work. Its sound was influenced by the movie whose soundtrack it would come to dominate, the Austin Powers sequel which, at that time, was enjoying Madonna levels of anticipation itself. The first movie, which starred personal fave Elizabeth Hurley as Austin’s feisty sidekick, had been a surprise smash and its follow-up was set to be the big movie of a summer packed with future classics – 1999 is widely regarded, by people who know better about this kind of thing than I do, as Hollywood’s greatest year. As a result, Madonna teamed the dreamscape of her previous album with psychedelic synths and beats which didn't try to ape the sixties sounds; they twisted them into something new. Its structure is as disorienting as the thunderbolt attraction it describes. Are we in a verse or a chorus? Or is this the middle eight? ‘Beautiful Stranger’ plays by its own rules, mischievous and knowing, luring you into the centre of the song and ending before you even realised you were enjoying yourself.
What was most encouraging about the success of ‘Beautiful Stranger’ was how confident Madonna sounded and how terrific she looked. She was 40 at the time of release yet in the video for the song – which is more entertaining than you might remember – she seemed to be having the time of her life and moving as if she had Castrol GTX coursing through her veins. Perhaps surprising was the song’s lyrical theme. After Ray of Light’s thoughtful musings on the state of the world, fame, her mother’s death, her daughter, and rejection, ‘Beautiful Stranger’ was lighthearted and sugary, Madonna hadn’t sounded so free in a long time. The inspiration for the song was reported to be writer Andy Bird, Madonna’s then-boyfriend and the start of her decade-long Anglophile phase, before the Guy Ritchie era that we all remember so fondly. It was fun to see Madonna losing her inhibitions and being silly in the music video, playing up to her image as a mildly predatory oversexed alien. And Mike Myers was the perfect foil, giving his all as Austin, powerless under Madonna’s spell, as indeed we all were.
In 1999, the first thing you would notice in any student house, other than socks drying on radiators and a pile of washing up that would rival the BT Tower in height, was music television blaring from the large set in whatever poky room had been designated the lounge. TVs were hugely expensive then and so most students would rent them from shops, usually tied into insanely uneconomic deals for cable TV. The Box and MTV UK were the only channels anyone would be interested in and they would be playing day and night. (Every shared house had that one insomniac housemate who’d sit in a dressing gown until 4am, spooning Rice Krispies into their mouth with one hand and stubbing out a B&H into a Muller Corner pot with the other while Blink 182 or ‘Barbie Girl’ blared out.) ‘Beautiful Stranger’ was a staple of The Box, and would be played more or less every third song in rotation with ‘I Want It That Way’ and ‘No Scrubs’. It’s interesting that her age, criticism of which has plagued her career since the early nineties, seemed irrelevant. Despite the fact she seemed to be performing the video inside a soulless fridge freezer, to the cast of Fraggle Rock, ‘Beautiful Stranger’ still went off like a frog in a sock. Young people still loved her; she was hot in every sense of the word. If I close my eyes while listening to the song, I can almost be back in a random lounge in a student house, spinning round and round at 3 in the morning, swigging from Coors Light and taking a balls-deep drag of my ciggie before collapsing on the tattered, draylon sofa and, probably, accidentally upending someone’s carefully arranged skinning up tray.
Given Madonna’s then unthreatened status as Queen of Pop – Britney’s debut had charted only a couple of months earlier – and the fact it sounded incredible on the radio, ‘Beautiful Stranger’ was a huge hit, landing at number 2 with over 135,000 copies sold in that first week. I remember feeling this was a terrible injustice; of all Madonna’s soundtrack songs, this deserved a prominent spot in her canon. It was beaten to the top by the debut single from S Club 7, ‘Bring it all Back’, which had the added might of a TV series behind it and, of course, the combined talent of the smiling septet. I suppose that as Madonna would have two chart-topping singles the following year, it was only right to cede to S Club this time. Why be greedy?
Madonna has performed ‘Beautiful Stranger’ in full on only one tour, 2001’s Drowned World, during which she combined the late nineties trend of ‘skousers’ with the noughties stylistic chokehold that was ‘jeans and a nice top’. The song spent an impressive five weeks in the Top 10 from its June debut.
‘Beautiful Stranger’ came at the right time. For Madonna, it was a glimmering jewel as she hit another peak in her career, and gave us something to chew on while we waited for the next album. It was nostalgic and futuristic at the same time. My own future looked uncertain, and I was still enmeshed in expectations and obligations I could never fulfil. But something else was coming; it wouldn’t be long. My own beautiful strangers were out there, somewhere.
What was that all about? THE MADONNA DIARIES is one of the formats of my weekly newsletter and is a series of personal essays about Madonna’s back catalogue. Next week: something else entirely, probably.
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I loved and still love this song so much and you have also perfectly captured the
90s/early ‘00s shared house MTV telly. My friends and I would randomly play MTV fortune telling - “the next song is your summer/year/entire life”. I’m still haunted by the time we did it and decreed this time it really was serious and my entire life was predicted by ZZ Top doing Viva Las Vegas.
Loved this one! I genuinely think about the outfit she wears here so often. That low camera angle that would ruin anybody else makes her look SO powerful. I was a music video obsessive, this was important to me. When are you don't Don't Tell Me ? X