Marea Stamper – better known as The Blessed Madonna – never dreamt that one day she would be a pop star. But, as the super-DJ/producer delivers her celebratory major label debut album Godspeed, that is becoming a reality. After all, she’s already instantly recognisable with her kooky glasses, tattoos and blonde pixie cut.
“I’m gonna try not to think about that,” Stamper laughs. “I mean, look, the strangest things can happen suddenly… In England, I’ve got two or three records on the radio right now. It’s absolutely confusing and stunning and wonderful. If you can do that without compromising what you want and who you wanna be, then good. Now somebody else can do it, too.”
Auspiciously for her reps at Warner Music Australia, the American is playing Listen Out as she promotes Godspeed. “I have had the best time,” Stamper enthuses. “It’s impossible not to have a good time here.” The DJ was last in Oz fatefully in March 2020 for the Pitch Music & Arts Festival outside Naarm/Melbourne, just as the COVID-19 pandemic struck.
Today, Stamper is calling from Boorloo/Perth – and avoiding another peril. “I was warned that there would be storms and something about taking your sheep inside,” she says drolly. “So I’m inside for the day here, but it has been lovely. My tour manager and my friend went and saw some animals. I didn’t do that – but it’s only because I’m not fun.”
In the ’90s, super-DJ/producers routinely conducted interviews for even club tours, discussing trends, tech and travel. Yet successive generations limit press, preferring to interact with fans via social media. Image-conscious DJs are wary of journalists. The shift occurred in 2013 when the Swedish ‘EDM’ sensation Avicii was controversially profiled for GQ by Jessica Pressler – a celebrity and business journo. But, though initially reticent, Stamper enjoys chatting – her love for pure dance music is obvious. She’s also funny AF.
Rivalling Jamie xx‘s In Waves, Godspeed is one of the dance albums of the year. It traverses disco, house, and Green Velvet-mode techno. Indeed, Stamper’s music is upfront and steeped in house’s cultural heritage.
Stamper’s curation is astute – starting with that spectacular Kylie Minogue cameo. Among the other guests on Godspeed are legendary figures such as the Chicago house polymath Jamie Principle (who elevates We Still Believe, co-produced by Belgian indie-dance band Soulwax) and credible contemporary acts like the London neo-soulster Joy Crookes, Compton gospeller Jacob Lusk (from the outfit Gabriels), and mysterious UK rave duo Joy Anonymous.
Stamper heralded Godspeed as being about “love, loss, ecstasy, death and resurrection on the dancefloor” and, a progressive Roman Catholic, she fuses Frankie Knuckles‘ fervent gospel-house with Madonna’s filter disco opus Confessions On A Dance Floor. However, she offers few concessions to popdom or anything else. “I really was trying to push for something more… I want more. As a DJ and now as a writer and a producer, I’ve always wanted more. I’m greedy for heart.”
Stamper has been around for a spell. She grew up in rural Kentucky – her father, the late Appalachian blues musician Michael Stamper, aka Nick Stump. Attending her first rave as a teen in the early ’90s, the maverick eventually quit high school because of bullying and instead embraced the communal Midwest party scene – realising her queer identity.
Stamper began DJing while studying English at college and throwing herself into student radio. She wound up in Chicago, working at Dust Traxx, Inc., then becoming resident and later talent booker at the mythic nightclub, smartbar. Along the way, Stamper assumed an alias inspired by Christian icons of the Virgin Mary – The Black Madonna.
Stamper eased into production, breaking out with 2012’s overground Exodus. The next year, she played her inaugural international gig at Berlin’s Panorama Bar (reaching Australia in 2015). In 2016, she became the first woman to be named Mixmag’s ‘DJ Of The Year’ – coinciding with the release of He Is The Voice I Hear.
Stamper relocated to London, where she currently resides with her second husband. In 2020, as the Black Lives Matter movement gained momentum, Stamper changed an increasingly confusing—and problematic—handle, rechristened Blessed Madonna, and generated buzz facilitating Dua Lipa‘s remix album/mixtape Club Future Nostalgia—having previously recast the English-Albanian superstar’s collaboration with Silk City, Electricity.
As a curator, Stamper pointedly redressed EDM’s marginalisation of dance music’s Black and Latinx pioneers, procuring Masters At Work and Larry Heard (Mr Fingers), not to mention Detroit’s Moodymann (“Kenny is somebody that I love!”). She herself remixed the project’s lead single, Levitating, adding Madonna and Missy Elliott.
In 2021, Stamper experienced a Zeitgeist smash as the vocalist on Fred again..‘s Marea (we’ve lost dancing), although she now (demurely) notes, “I’m not one of those people that sits around thinking about DJing all the time during lockdown.”
During the pandemic, Stamper signed to Warner – and the prospect of an album “became real,” she recalls wryly. “I told them I know how to make an album – and now I’m going to have to do this thing that I really didn’t know how to do!”
Stamper was diligent from the outset. “I think, whenever you’re making an album, your first album, you only get a chance to do it once. So I had a sense of like wanting to put an amount of gravity into what it was and what it meant – and also to be critical.”
Godspeed came together “slowly” – Stamper discarding an earlier LP. “I was very late to the party in terms of learning how to write and produce and engineer records,” she admits. “So there was a lot of just hard graft.” Nonetheless, she was “gathering” material before actually committing to the project. “There were already things that I had started writing even six, seven, eight years ago.”
Ironically, the pandemic gave Stamper the opportunity to focus – the DJ, considered “high risk” with asthma, necessarily isolating. “A lot of it was spent reading manuals – and, in a way, writing my own manuals.” Stamper would “diagram” songs she deemed “perfect” – citing Fleetwood Mac‘s Landslide or Stevie Wonder‘s As. But she discerned a blueprint for her album in Daft Punk‘s 1997 house homage Homework – the Parisians managing “to be transparent about their love of a culture and to give credit where it was due and to remove the sleight of hand.”
Still, Stamper didn’t wish to pursue the expected “big slick pop thing,” she stresses. “It was very important to me to push back against conventional wisdom, against niceness, and to be at my best… I don’t think I make a very good protagonist. I don’t think that’s my job. My job is to be a bit antagonistic – even inside a system where I love house music – but to be critical and antagonistic and to think about the future and to ask questions about the system that I’m inside of. And I do think that I did that.”
Prior to Godspeed, Stamper had either recorded solitarily or with a “few very close, trusted people.” She’s spoken of having a “God Squad” – Pat Alvarez her main studio cohort. But Warner’s A&R team suggested Stamper work with various creatives.
Stamper connected with Manchester’s Jin Jin, “a phenomenal songwriter and also one of my favourite people in the world now,” she says. “At the time, I didn’t know her at all. She really brought me out of my shell.” The pair collaborated on Serotonin Moonbeams alongside electro-house fave Uffie – the ravey bop Godspeed’s earliest single in 2022.
They likewise co-penned the piano house anthem Edge Of Saturday Night – now a hit featuring Minogue, the Princess Of Pop relishing a career resurgence with last year’s Grammy-winning Padam Padam. In fact, Minogue’s involvement was serendipitous. “I wrote it long before we met,” Stamper teases. “She was not the first vocalist on it – and you’ll hear little hints of who was…”
The song stemmed from a phrase Stamper wrote down as she was mourning her father’s passing in 2021, soon after inking a deal. “I had this little playlist of songs that I associated with him – and one is a song by Tom Waits called (Looking For) The Heart Of Saturday Night, which is not a thing like Edge Of Saturday Night at all. But, when my dad’s band would play, they would play that every night; they would play that song. They did a few covers. So I was thinking, ‘What would that be like in a different context?'”
Stamper developed the idea with Jin Jin. “I was so shy,” she remembers. “I wouldn’t even sing a little melody in front of her. I would say the words and then tap the rhythm out on the table with my finger – which seems crazy to me now…
“If you ask most people if they would think that I’m shy, they would not! But the truth is, particularly at that time, as far as just even singing a little tune around somebody or talking about words in a song or whatever, it just felt so confessional.”
Edge Of Saturday Night languished as a demo – “I’m telling you, it sat there for a year” – with Stamper seeking a singer. “RAYE was going to be on it,” she spills. “RAYE had just left her contract [with Polydor Records]. When I first talked to her, she was still in it… RAYE and Jin Jin were really close. They’d been writing together since RAYE was a little teenager.
“She came over on a Sunday afternoon, and we recorded it. But, then, just as the album was rearing up, RAYE had this explosive growth because she made a perfect album [My 21st Century Blues]. She won a bazillion awards for it – as she should, because she is a genius. In fact, I have never felt more vindicated in my life. I was like, ‘Yes!’ But, because of that, she could not be on the record.”
Stamper submitted Godspeed to Warner without Edge Of Saturday Night “because I literally could not find one person who would do it.” Yet, happily, Minogue entered the picture. “One day, after I handed the album in, my manager texted me, and he said, ‘You’re gonna get a phone call, and you’re gonna wanna pick it up.’ I said, ‘Man, I hate surprises, so you better tell me what this is for.’ He said, ‘Well, Kylie Minogue has cut Edge Of Saturday Night, and you’re gonna get a phone call about it.’ I was like, ‘What, now?’ I didn’t even know she had it! So it was like a miracle. I couldn’t believe that she did it.”
Stamper invited Minogue to Ibiza to shoot a video with seasoned director Sophie Muller at the boutique hotel Pikes – “this great old school place where Freddie Mercury lived.” It turned into a huge party vacay. “She was just so game for everything and so lovely. I just worship her; I just do. She’s so good. She’s so good and so kind and just exactly as lovely as you want her to be.”
The Blessed Madonna has manifested an emotional – and spiritual – ‘artist’ album in Godspeed. Symbolically, the percussive Somebody’s Daughter incorporates a voice message from Stamper’s dad, expressing pride in her achievements – and elsewhere, she’s used “hot mic” outtakes from studio sessions as interludes.
“I’m a hoarder by nature, as far as audio goes. I have every cell phone that I’ve ever had, and I have all the audio that I’ve ever recorded on any of them. I’ve always kinda been a secret recorder of people and places.”
Authenticity matters for another reason. House originated as a Black LGBTQIA+ underground subculture – and its stalwarts have long been disapproving of co-option and commercialism, some recently decrying ‘business techno‘ as much as EDM. Stamper herself rues EDM’s lack of soul – and was mindful of that in approaching Godspeed, allowing the vocalists to sound like themselves and not be algorithmic ‘features’.
“I think it’s as important to know what you don’t want as what you want – and to maybe even come from a point of criticism or even loathing of the state of things musically,” she says. “I would say that, for all of the sunshine and rainbows that people imagine me to be made of all the time – and I am a really loving person, like that’s not fake… But also there is a kind of radical defence of what I think music should be about and a kind of revulsion at what I don’t like. It’s totally not objective, but I think the de-personalisation of music in general really, really, really gross. You could be in an Uber for 20 minutes and not be able to sift out half of the records.
“There are incredible people for whom that is not true. You have somebody like Chappell Roan or Doja Cat or Lady Gaga or Kylie Minogue or RAYE… I can hear RAYE on any record that she’s made in the last six years, and I would pick her voice out of it immediately… But, then, there are kind of crank-it-off-the-factory-line [tracks].
“I felt, especially with dance music, this really deep de-personalisation – like there were just kind of exchangeable features and it just didn’t matter and the songs weren’t really about anything. And, for me, not only did I not wanna make that record, I wanted to make a record that would remind people what we’re supposed to be doing. That’s my opinion on it – and it’s not a popular one. There are certainly 100 artists in EDM who are indistinguishable from one another and who will headline 75 per cent of the festivals that we’ll see in the next year – and that’s fine.”
Godspeed has mellow numbers, such as the churchy disco-funk Brand New – Dublin post-folkie James Vincent McMorrow, surely the LP’s most incongruous guest, flexing his falsetto (with champion turntablist A-Trak providing scratches). “Bless his heart – that little ginger white Irish boy went on national television and sang a Donny Hathaway song [a cover of Blood, Sweat & Tears‘ I Love You More Than You’ll Ever Know] and did not embarrass himself,” Stamper laughs. “He is too good – like he is the real deal. James is brilliant.”
In the end, Godspeed is a testament to the power of house music but also a tribute to family – Stamper imagining her father hearing it. “The other day, I was giving an interview and talking about him, and all of a sudden, the lights went out in my room, and the blinds closed on their own,” she reveals. “It was the creepiest thing in the world. And, let me tell you, if anyone was going to haunt me, it’d be my fucking dad. So he would have loved this. It’s a damn shame that he didn’t live long enough to brag about it in a bar while he was drinking whisky!”
Wrapping up, Stamper contemplates braving the outdoors. “No sheep so far – it’s sunshine – but you never know.”
The Blessed Madonna’s debut album, Godspeed, is out on 11 October via Warner Music Australia. You can pre-order/pre-save the album here.
