MUSIC

Madonna

Finally Enough Love

1 CD or 2 LPs, streaming now, out Friday

★★★★

Finally Enough Love

3 CDs or 6 LPs, out Friday

★★★★★ Michael Kiwanuka

Princes Street Gardens, Edinburgh All Points East,

London, August 28 ★★★★

Madonna is back, not with a bang but a wiggle. To mark 40 years as a recording artist, she’s releasing a compilation of her greatest dance hits – in fact, two.

She has had 50 No1s on the Billboard dance chart, more than anyone else, and this set rounds up either 16 of them or the whole lot.

With some acts, dance mixes are an optional extra. With Madonna (above), who was a dancer before becoming a singer, they come from the heart. ‘Only when I’m dancing,’ she sang on Into The Groove, ‘can I feel this free.’ It’s the best line of her career, a self-portrait in nine words.

Finally Enough Love gets off to a storming start, taking you back to the days when Madonna’s music was irresistibly simple. She expresses herself, again and again, in the imperative: Open Your Heart, Justify My Love and Vogue.

She’s such a boss that she can’t help being bossy, but that’s OK because she has a hotline to your hips. Both sets sparkle like mirrorballs all the way to Hung Up, then get over-complicated.

The 16-track one is more digestible, but it culls too many classics (Like A Virgin, Material Girl, Ray Of Light), so my suggestion would be to buy the 50-tracker and make your own playlist. Express Yourself!

The place to see live music in August is Edinburgh, where the Summer Sessions tempt the festival hordes with intimate shows beneath the castle. It makes a gorgeous setting for Michael Kiwanuka’s raw soul songs.

After three top-five albums, Kiwanuka (inset, above) not only sells out Princes Street Gardens, he draws hundreds of people to the pavement above to listen in for free. Still diffident at 35, he doesn’t love the limelight, but his voice does. It soars, it rasps, it makes you believe every word.

His sound has become heavier, taking up where Sly And The Family Stone left off, and his four sidemen play it well. But Kiwanuka and his powerhouse backing singer, Emily Holligan, barely need them: their vocals are music enough.