Bill Jamieson: Madonna brings material benefits

IT WOULD not be an unfair summation among those who know me only a little that I would be unlikely to be found at Murrayfield Stadium on 21 July bopping with a mega bottle of Evian in the front row of the Madonna concert. But you never know. For I am pleased – very pleased – that Madonna has chosen Edinburgh as one of only two UK venues for her global tour.

I had little idea that at 53 the Material Girl was still strutting her stuff in front of huge live audiences, and even less that her fans would be expected to pay up to £125 a pop. It seems an astonishing sum. But even more astonishing is that, according to an estimate from a clearly starstruck Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce spokesman, her concert could be worth £60 million to Scotland’s capital city.

Such sums would be eye-catching even back in the good times before the banking crisis brought the curtains down on the era of “you-can-have-it-all” and when Madonna’s song Material Girl captured the mood of the times.

But today we are stuck deep in a spending downturn and with no end in sight. Household incomes are squeezed. Retailers have sunk to their knees. Shops are closing and the government is struggling to hold down the lid on the biggest spending lockdown since Stafford Cripps sent our grandparents shivering to their freezing beds. £125 a ticket? And an economic boost of £60m? In this day and age? If that’s true, I’m the bass guitarist.

Not all the tickets for Madonna, of course, will be priced at £125, though I hear these are the ones likely to be sold out first. There is the international rock entourage to be catered for, the high priests of the celebrity age, the music scene hustlers and gofers, and those kitted out with tattoos, vinyl clothing and jingling facial accessories – all those for whom it is important not just to see but to be seen. Then there are the fans from across the North of England and the Midlands, comprising a hard core, I am told, of middle-aged women and young gay men. Don’t even ask me to explain.

But clearly this is no mere chanteuse. Madonna is a spectacle, an eyeball-gouging scene, a visual performance that would make a grand opera set for Aida look like something out of a Corstorphine semi. Here are sets that defy imagination, lighting that would drain a hundred turbines, and costumes that would get you arrested in Morningside. What a refreshing change from what passes for style among much of Edinburgh womanhood today: shaggy biodegradable jumpers, deconstructed jeans and organic edible shoes.

Madonna is a break from all this earnest, depressing garb. It is outre, beyond extravagant and over the top. But the whole of the Material Girl does need to be greater than the sum of a mere concert. For Madonna is not just a concert. It is an event to be blowtorched into the memory and rendered all the more valuable because of its rarity. It does not expose the austerity era as a hypocritical lie. But it does provide an evening’s escape from the dreary drudgery that austerity has brought.

It is truly astonishing, the extent to which non-economic events are of real tangible value to the economy of Scotland’s capital. Our non-economic needs and wants – leisure and pleasure, stimulus and relaxation, eating, drinking and socialising, cultural and spiritual refreshment – drive the wheels of city commerce just as much as life insurance and stockbrokers.

A study undertaken for the city council revealed that the city festivals generated £261m of additional tourism revenue for Scotland. The figure for Edinburgh alone is £245m. The festivals play a starring role in the economic as well as cultural profile of the city, sustaining some 5,200 full-time equivalent jobs. Nor is this benefit bestowed by cultural events alone. The 2010 rugby Six Nations Championship saw Scotland benefit to the tune of £63m. The 2009 Heineken Cup Final at Murrayfield saw an overall financial return of £22m. Indeed, taking all events together at the stadium, Murrayfield in 2009 brought in £73m for Edinburgh and almost £130m for the Scottish economy. As for the value of pop music events, the MTV Europe Music Awards in 2003 was estimated to have been worth £6.7m for Edinburgh.

However, some caution is necessary over that £60m estimate for the Madonna concert from those starstruck fans at the Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce. Might Madonna have offered them a fistful of free tickets for this figure?

My own back-of-leather-jacket calculation would go something like this: a crowd of 20,000 paying an average price of £75 gives us receipts of £1.5m. Assuming 10,000 stay overnight in Edinburgh in a Madonna-sized bed at £150 brings another £1.5m. And assuming the 10,000 visitors from outside Edinburgh spend £200 each on meals, drinks, taxis, buses, programmes, gifts and trinkets – another £2m – the grand total comes to £5m.

This would certainly be more in accord with estimates of economic benefits from events at Glasgow’s Hampden Park, which are typically lower. For example, three performances by Take That were estimated to have brought the city £5.7m, and a set of concerts by Coldplay and U2 around £15m.

Silver-tongued event consultants could doubtless swell the Madonna total by adding the diffuse effects of capital city brand promotion, reputational gain, cultural enrichment and all the sleek verbal currency of their trade that they could slide into their leatherbound report portfolios. But £60m would be stretching it. Even for them.

Also, the actual phrase used by our man at the Chamber was “up to” £60m – a rhetorical device that covers any eventuality. It could indeed be £60m. Then again, it could be £6. However, even allowing for a toning down of the hype, Madonna will be an economic boost, coming just two weeks before the start of the Edinburgh International Festival and with the potential to lure a cluster of smaller events around that date. It may well act to prolong the Festival atmosphere in a city that has already shown resilience in the face of a gruelling economic downturn and the tramworks trial by fire.

Madonna may not quite cut it in Morningside or be the destination choice of New Towners who prefer their evenings with Bruckner. But it will be a blast. And I shan’t really be needing a ticket. I’ll hear it just as well in Holyrood Road.