A review of Madonna's soundtrack to the Evita movie, from Q Magazine, December 1996.

In Britain in 1976, it was the Sex Pistols who were vilified, detested and banned. But in Argentina it was Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber. The repressive military junta wasn’t perfect, but they knew a crap album when they heard one. Evita was turned back at the frontiers, and the play has not been staged in Buenos Aires to this day. In South America there is a whole nation that never had to grapple with the concept of David Essex playing Che Guevara.

The Argentinians are still touchy on the subject of Eva peron, a national icon since her early death in 1952. When Alan Parker went to film his movie version of the musical there, outrage ensued. When he announced the actress who would play their saintly Evita, the country almost exploded. “Evita lives! Madonna get out!" read the graffiti. “Madonna,” declared the Archbishop of Buenos Aires, "is pornographic and unsuitable."

Yet he was only half right - because, when it comes playing the upstart blonde who came from nowhere to seize absolute power, Madonna is the most suitable woman on the planet.

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From now until the New Year, when the movie finally opens, Evita/Madonna parallels will be made. The first person to grasp the similarities was, of course, Madonna herself. From the moment the job was advertised, she lobbied passionately on her own behaIf. "I see this role as being my destiny," she said. "1 don't think anyone could have prayed as hard as I did for the film to go ahead. I put on amulets, I lit candles - even consulted fortune-tellers.” Who, then, was this Evita and why is Miss Ciccone obsessed by her?

Maria Eva Duarte was an ambitious provincial girl who schemed her way up through Argentinian show business and married another rising star, the soldier-politician Juan Peron. By 1946 she was First Lady, while Peron emerged as a strongman
who would dominate his country for the next 30 years. "Evita" became the darling of "the shirtless ones”, attacking wealth and privilege (except her own), building hospitals and securing votes for women. Glamorous, loved and feared, she was vital to her husband's popularity, but died of cancer when she was just 33.

Eva was barely known outside of South America until 1976, the year after Juan Peron's death, when Lloyd Webber and lyricist Tim Rice conceived the Evita musical, spawning a huge hit in Julie Covington's Don't Cry For Me Argentina. Then David "Che" Essex got to Number 3 with Oh What A Circus, wearing stubble and jungle fatigues. Barbara Dickson, who did not, merely scraped the Top 20 with Another Suitcase In Another Hall. The stage musical opened in 1978, to enormous MOR acclaim, but the movie project has only now come to fruition.

Meanwhile, Madonna was making her own inexorable ascent. Her film career, though, was a patchy thing, never quite capping her 1985 debut Desperately Seeking Susan, in which she basically played herself. The 1990 Dick Tracy film inspired her 1930s-style I'm Breathless album, which she perversely considers her favourite work to date. (Who remembers Hanky Panky? Do you try no to?) Landing this Evita role may be her last stab at the Hollywood credibility she craves.

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Madonna says that movie success is doubly hard because her off-screen fame gets in the way. The great virtue of playing Evita is that any overspill from her own persona can only reinforce the realism of her performance. Pop stars are hired by directors for box-office clout, not thespian talent, but Madonna first came to New York with her options open: singer, model, dancer, actress - she was up for anything. So was Eva, and she ended up running the country. And Evita is, after all, a musical. If there was ever an ideal vehicle for Madonna's dream of transcendent stardom, this must be it

As it turns out, she brings a good deal to Lloyd Webber's party. The soundtrack carries some of her most commanding vocal efforts so far. Cleverly, her singing develops with the plot When she's a callow showgirl, hustling her way from the pampas to Buenos Aires (which they call "Big Apple"), you hear the old Ciccone squeak. But there is maturity and richness in her rendition of the dying Evita's swan song, the pathos-ridden Final Broadcast

The problem is, unless you're partial to the inherent corniness of musicals, this is Lloyd Webber we're talking about. Apart from exceptions like Lionel Bart's Oliver!, Lloyd Webber's spectaculars are the nearest a Brit has come to rivalling Rodgers & Hammerstein. But our knighted composer has the Midas touch in both senses - if anything he handles turns to gold, it also becomes cold and lifeless. Maybe Alan Parker's movie will breathe some humanity into its story. While Lloyd Webber's theatre productions are full of stuff to startle, there's precious little to love.

As for Evita, it definitely helps if you like Don't Cry For Me For Argentina. The song reappears in various disguises on at least half the soundtrack, Admittedly, it's the closest Lloyd Webber has ever come to an enduring pop music standard. Sunset Boulevard may play to packed houses every night, but who among us can hum a single tune from it? Elsewhere, there is nothing as memorable as Eva's famous theme. Of the "real" actors, Jonathan Pryce sings his Juan Peron parts with due care and attention, but Jimmy Nail sounds downright peculiar as a tango-dancing gigolo. Then there is hunky Antonio Banderas, the same handsome Spaniard that Madonna had a crush on in her documentary film. Here he plays guerilla hero Che Guevara, the story's sardonic narrator (still an irritating, un-historical gimmick of an idea). He copes, but the results are inescapably theatrical.

Naturally there is a lot of Hispanic flavouring, which Madonna need not fear, having toyed with it for years. What's terrifying is the way the soundtrack often betrays its '70s origins with sporadic eruptions of inauthentic heavy metal, or even prog rock. They hardly evoke the atmosphere of '40s Argentina. And Rice's lyrics are apt to clunk instead of click: "That's a pretty bad state for a state to be in!" howls Banderas at one point, like Joe Cocker pronouncing on the decline of Rome.

Love, death and the fate of nations - these are the big ideas that underpin Evita, and they're certain to be trivialised when you try to make a musical out of them. For all we know the movie may restore some sense of drama, but the unadorned soundtrack is kitsch when it wants to be epic, and banal when it wants to be charming. Yet Madonna comes through it unscathed. She gets a hit single specially written into the script for her (the mawkish You Must Love Me) as well as the best tunes in the show - just to sing Don't Cry For Me Argentina will guarantee her the pivotal emotional moments. Even so, her own pop songs are better than most of this, and ten times more adventurous.

But pop music is not quite show business, and show business is where she wants to be. What can MTV offer that she hasn't already had? There is probably nothing as delicious to Madonna as swooning before a movie camera, while crying "So share my glory! So share my coffin!"

The real Evita would have understood. It takes one to know one, and Eva Peron had the patent on blonde ambition before Madonna was even born. Flawed heroines, self-invented drama queens, Catholic pin-ups with a reputation for vulgarity, ruthlessness and sexual guile… they do have to stick together, don't they?

Read my 1994 Madonna interview