Madonna Brought Kylie Onstage in Amsterdam: “The Lady in Purple Is Here”

Around half past two on Sunday morning, close to an hour behind schedule, Madonna appeared on stage at AFAS Live in Amsterdam. Before the set was over, so had Kylie Minogue.

The Dutch national broadcaster NOS has the shape of the night, attributing the timings to the news agency ANP: on stage around 02:30, a set of roughly half an hour, running nearly an hour late. NOS puts the set at about seven songs, mostly drawn from her new album Confessions II, closing on “Sorry” and “Hung Up,” both from 2005. extratv also has her out at 2:30 a.m.

The fullest account of the guest spot we found came from extratv, which reported that the two performed a new remix of “Love Sensation,” climbing onto the DJ booth to do it. No other outlet we checked named the song. By that account Madonna introduced her with “Ladies and gentlemen, the beautiful Kylie Minogue!” Minogue hugged Stuart Price, Madonna's Confessions II collaborator, and asked the crowd how they were feeling. Then Madonna added: “The lady in purple is here.” They finished the song in each other's arms. “I'm so happy to be here with you Kylie!” Madonna said. “Thank you! I love you!”

Both were in purple — Madonna in a leotard, corset, skirt and boots that extratv read as a callback to the original Confessions on a Dance Floor era, Minogue in a purple sarong over silver slacks. extratv's aside on the matching outfits: it was clear they called each other.

Before this, there was 2024

extratv described Amsterdam as only the second time in their careers the two have performed together. The occasion Rolling Stone documented was in March 2024, at the Los Angeles stop of Madonna's Celebration Tour, where Madonna brought Minogue out for Gloria Gaynor's “I Will Survive” and Minogue's own “Can't Get You Out of My Head.” Attitude's later write-up describes an acoustic version of the first and an a cappella version of the second. Minogue wore a glittering shirt reading “Madonna” across the front — Rolling Stone called it “a recreation of the Kylie Minogue shirt Madonna wore at the 2000 MTV Europe Music Awards.” “MADONNA It's been a long time coming!!! LOVED being with you!!!!” Minogue wrote afterwards.

She later explained on The One Show how it came about, in an interview Attitude reported. Madonna's manager Guy Oseary had approached her, and she assumed she was being slotted into the tour's rotating guest spot. “I just presumed when I was asked to join her on stage it would be her ‘Vogue' section where she has a different guest every night,” she said. “But no, it was to do a cover of ‘I Will Survive.'”

The song was Madonna's pick, and Attitude reports she had two reasons for it. Madonna lost her mother to breast cancer; Minogue was diagnosed with it in 2005. “One, [Madonna] sadly lost her mother to breast cancer and she knew about some of my story,” Minogue said. “And also, just being two women who have survived in the industry.” She kept the whole thing quiet beforehand. “I may have lost some friends,” she joked, “but I got to sing with Madonna.”

What the charts say

Both women have now topped the UK album chart in five different decades — extratv notes they are the only two women to have done it. The individual records are worth keeping straight, because they are not the same record.

Minogue got there first. In November 2020, Disco took her to No. 1 in Britain for the fifth decade running — no woman had done that before, as NME reported at the time. The streak starts with her 1988 debut and picks up Fever in 2001 and Aphrodite in 2010 along the way. Madonna reached five decades this year with Confessions II, which the Official Charts Company headlined as making her the first US female artist to manage it.

About that ticket

When we wrote about this show on Wednesday, two things were still open.

The first was whether she would really sing. NOS reported that Madonna announced the date herself on Instagram, but that whether she would sing, and how many songs, was still a surprise. That part is now answered: about half an hour, about seven songs, plus a guest.

The second was the naming. The World Pride Music Festival is a ticketed event at AFAS Live, and NOS describes it as part of WorldPride; our earlier piece set out how differently outlets had described the festival's relationship to the official WorldPride foundation, and we still have not asked either side to reconcile it. What we can say is that the canal parade and the ticketed festival were both happening on Saturday — and that NOS reports the rumour Madonna would show her face at the parade itself did not, as far as anyone knows, come to anything.

WorldPride Amsterdam's closing concert lands on 8 August. Our Amsterdam listings cover the rest of the week.