Britney #13 On Forbes Most Powerful Celebs Of 2009 List

13. Britney Spears - $35 million

Pay Rank 42
Web Rank 10
Press Rank 16
TV/Radio Rank 11

The tabloids' favorite train wreck has returned to the stage—and the Celebrity 100. After a very public meltdown in 2007, released Circus last November; the album became one of the fastest-selling records of 2008, moving 1.5 million copies in three months. Launched a new tour in March; grossing $24 million with the first 13 concerts.

Source: Forbes

Spears Family 'Keep Her from Lohan'

The following italicized article is from www.showbizspy.com:

Britney Spears's family have reportedly taken steps to keep the singer away from Lindsay Lohan while both are in London.

Spears is currently performing live at the O2 as part of her Circus tour, while Lohan is also in the capital.

A source told The Mirror: "Lindsay is a bit of a loose cannon. She landed in London knowing that her ex Sam Ronson and Britney are in town. She made a big deal about arriving by posting pictures of herself in London on Twitter.

"She and Lindsay used to be friends, but it was all about going out partying. Brit's family are trying to steer her away from the every night extremes that Lindsay gets up to."

Source: Showbiz Spy

Britney Spears Was Put on Prozac at 18

Britney Spears was prescribed Prozac—used for depression and panic attacks—at the age of 18. The singer, who rose to stardom in her teens, had stunning looks, bags of talent, a multi-million dollar fortune, and worldwide fame.

But, when it came to her personal life, she was a nervous wreck and was on Prozac at the tender age of 18 years. During the European leg of her ‘Oops! I Did It Again’ tour in the winter of 2000, Britney started having “massive anxieties” in the middle of the night.

“She had trouble sleeping and crying fits. She was restless and agitated. Nights were the only times she was alone and she struggled with that… When nothing was happening, it drove her crazy. Only exhaustion would knock her out,” the Mirror quoted a source close to Britney as saying.

Her anxiety was not drug-induced, but was her natural state, which got further aggravated by fame. Britney’s moods noticeably started swinging— high and happy one minute, sad and brooding the next.

And thus, the ‘Womaniser’ star was prescribed Prozac. However, she treated it like headache tablets, and took a pill only on the days she awoke depressed—this seemed to make her more hyper.

Source: One India

Alli Sims Opens Up About Life With Britney Spears

The following italicized article is from www.accesshollywood.com:

Britney Spears’ former assistant, Alli Sims, is breaking her silence for the very first time about the years she spent with the music superstar.

Alli lived with Britney in the pop star’s former gated community for over a year. She saw everything and in an Access Hollywood exclusive, revealed even at it’s worst, things with the pop star weren’t as bad as they were portrayed.

“I feel like the media made it appear a lot more insane than it really was,” Alli told Access.

Alli revealed that while she was at Britney’s side, they were constantly followed by the paparazzi.

“It was a minimum of 50 people following us,” she said. “It made everything look so much more hectic. It was crazy.”

Alli was Britney’s assistant for one year until reports said she was let go.

When asked if she was fired from the job, Alli said, “No.”

“I still lived with her after I wasn’t working with her and we’re still best friends,” Alli said.

When asked about the reports that Britney’s dad, Jamie Spears, said she couldn’t come around anymore, Alli said that was true.

“Yeah, he definitely said that,” she said. “You know, they’re very controlling and that’s fine and I just stepped back. I’m not going to fight nine lawyers and parents.”

In fact, it was a team of lawyers that handled a divorce, child custody and questions about Britney’s mental health. And with Jamie in charge, they brought order to Britney’s life.

“They pretty much cut out everyone, honestly,” Alli said.

And despite reports that Britney is bi-polar or suffers from post-partum depression, Alli said she didn’t see evidence of such conditions.

“I just feel like, you know, she had kids fast,” Alli said. “There was a divorce going on and that’s a lot for a young person to handle.”

In January 2008, Britney barricaded herself and son Jayden at her then home, refusing to give him back to ex-husband, Kevin Federline. Alli said the reason Britney refused is quite simple.

“She was just like, ‘I wasn’t ready for them… you know, to go home,’” Alli recounted. “It was a mom just being protective and a mom that didn’t want her kids to leave… I mean, it’s weird when you have kids three days a week and you’re used to having them all day everyday.”

During one stretch of Alli’s tenure with Britney, the star was hospitalized twice in one month. The second time she was taken by ambulance to the UCLA Medical Center’s Psychiatric Ward.

When asked how Britney was in the hospital, Alli said she was OK.

“Fine, fine. Honestly, fine,” she said.

As a result, Britney temporarily lost visitation rights to both her boys in January 2008.

“I think that was a really harsh step,” Alli said. “It looked a lot worse than it was… I actually got subpoenaed for the custody case and I was in there for eight hours and it was brutal. But, I mean, I just sat in there and told the truth. There was nothing bad to say.”

Alli hasn’t spoken to Britney in over a year. She’s spent the time doing what she says Britney encouraged her to do – pursue her music.

Alli’s first single, “Driving Blind,” is about missing someone. In this case, Britney.

“I want her to know when she hears [it], that it is about her and I miss her friendship,” Alli said.

Source: Access Hollywood

SP and JJ Dance to Toxic

Source: BritneySpears.com

Britney Spears Does It Again with a 'Remarkable Return' at the O2 Arena

The following italicized article is from www.dailymail.co.uk:

Her life has often appeared to be something of a freak show, but Britney Spears put her troubles behind her last night as she opened her European tour with a wonderfully theatrical concert with a Big Top theme.

Billed as The Circus Starring Britney Spears, it was a relentlessly high octane and superbly choreographed affair that delighted 23,000 fans.

The 27-year-old superstar's fortunes had appeared to be on the wane two years ago, with her singing career increasingly overshadowed by a messy divorce, a stint in rehab and a custody battle for her two young children.

But, musically at least, things have since looked up dramatically.

With her affairs now handled by her father the singer's last two albums, Blackout and Circus, have re-established her credentials.

Moving away from the bubblegum tunes of her teen years, the Louisiana-born singer has skilfully repositioned herself as a grown-up diva who leans heavily towards electronic dance music and modern R&B.

This show, the first of eight in London and one in Manchester, capped what has been a remarkable comeback.

Presented in the round, with three circular stages positioned amid flashing lights in the middle of the arena, it afforded every member of the largely female audience an excellent view of proceedings.

It was certainly a vast improvement on 2004's Onyx Hotel tour.

The opening salvo focussed heavily on songs from Blackout and Circus.

The show had been proceeded by a video introduction from Hollywood gossip columnist Perez Hilton, in which Spears was billed as 'the mistress of ceremonies'.

Dressed as a ringmaster in a black top hat and red tails the singer made a grand entrance, descending into the hall from above, suspended in a harness.

She then sang the title track from Circus before launching into another recent hit, Piece of Me.

For this song, a bikini-clad Britney was paraded around the three stages while gyrating in a gilded cage - a metaphor, surely, for a life lived in the spotlight.

Surrounded by scantily-clad dancers, a blonde Britney looked trimmer than of late as she lifted the audience out of their seats dancing to her third song, Womanizer.

The show, which took some inspiration from recent tours by Madonna, placed visual values on a par with musical content although the majority of the fans seemed more than happy with this.

Britney might possess a breathless, raspy voice with an appealing Southern twang on record, but she has never been one of pop's more stunning singers on stage.

Her dance moves, too, were so energetic that it was sometimes difficult to assess whether all of her vocals were fully live.

But those dance moves were mostly brilliantly realised: one song, Boys, featured her interacting with a troupe of MBX cyclists; another, Me Against the Music, boasted a thrilling Arabian Nights theme.

While the show concentrated predominantly on recent hits there was room at the end of the show for old favourites Toxic and Baby One More Time.

Only the foolhardy would predict that Spears' offstage problems have all been consigned to history. But on the evidence of the spectacular witnessed in Docklands last night she is currently staging one of pop's most remarkable comebacks.

Seemingly against the odds, Britney has done it again.

See more pics here!

Source: Daily Mail

Britney's Circus Hits London In Style

All around the O2, the posters and flashing billboards reminded us that Britney Spears’s first UK shows in five years were something other than a mere arena show. If you wanted to be reductive about it, you could argue that The Circus Starring Britney Spears merely alluded to the singer’s current album (also entitled The Circus). However, for the most Googled person on the planet, the imagery was excitingly apposite on all sorts of other levels. Lest we forget, a circus is a travelling show where strange and freakish spectacles unfold before you on a stage, possibly featuring heavily sedated creatures who don’t seem entirely sure of their surroundings. For anyone who remembers Spears’s infamous MTV Video Music Award “comeback” less than two years ago, there’s no need to dwell on the resonances here.

But at this biggest of big tops, it was a more alert Spears who descended from the rigging on to the biggest of the three circular stages in a saucy ringmaster’s get-up. Performing The Circus she negotiated a human tide of cavorting dancers dressed in burlesque bondage gear and freakish masks. Was she really singing? A debate that has rumbled on in newsprint and internet forums since the tour began three months ago wasn’t easily settled by watching her lips.

Certainly, even without any big screens to help to decide the matter, you registered the lack of any apparent physical exertion as she got to grips with her stinging anti-paparazzi address Piece Of Me. By the same token, there were times when it felt churlish to mind: the lavish Bollywood shakedown of Me Against The Music; the sheer randomness of a version of Toxic which involved freighting modified metal bedsteads at speed across the stage. And who wouldn’t have chosen to lip-sync on Ooh Ooh Baby — whose set piece saw the 27-year-old mother of two climb in a box and have her entire torso seemingly shunted to the left of the rest of her body. In what constituted something of a high point, the song then segued into Hot As Ice, which saw Spears seemingly teleported 30 yards without the tassled platinum dress she had been wearing seconds before.

It was a set heavily reliant on the last two albums — a surprise, in a sense, given the events in her life that they have soundtracked. By the same token, a chief signifier of Spears’s iconic status is that the more dramatic her life becomes, the better material she seems to inspire from songwriters. Propelled by almost subsonic hip-hop beats, Get Naked (I Got A Plan) truly came into its own.

But postmodern as you tried to be about the whole singing/not singing debate, it was hard not to feel an hitherto-absent frisson of emotional engagement on the occasions when she obviously was. Everytime was a case in point. Whatever other problems she has encountered in her tempestuous life, vertigo certainly isn’t one of them.

Perched on the hook of a precariously suspended umbrella, she received one of the biggest cheers of the evening for a performance of Everytime that came, if not from the heart, then from the diaphragm.

Such moments of old-fashioned entertainment notwithstanding, it was the sheer timeless ubiquity of Baby One More Time (and possibly the fact that she was performing it in leather lingerie) that elicited the biggest roar. That she returned dressed as a kinky policewoman for Womanizer was no disaster. As she set about admonishing the errant cad in the song, she imperiously waved her truncheon at any passing dancers who happened to come too near to it.

If the overheard chatter of the departing throng was anything to go by, 90 minutes of lavish costume changes, camp choreography and cabaret club magic just about mitigated lingering doubts concerning the veracity of her singing. If she did mime, perhaps it didn’t matter. After all, don’t mime artists also belong in a circus?

Source: The Times

Roll up for Britney Spears's Circus

Since Britney Spears's last UK concert in 2004, she has been married, had two children, got divorced, shaved off her hair, been admitted to hospital and taken her former manager and an ex-boyfriend to court.

Her recent TV appearances, including last year's X Factor performance, have seemed lacklustre and non-committal.

So the question on the opening night of her European tour was which Britney was going to turn up: the pop princess with the killer moves, or the disaster-struck diva in her slipped crown?
It was largely the former, "good" Britney. But it was a close call.

The theme for the night was the circus - a reference to the star's recent album, her fastest-seller in the UK to date.

Carnival rides had been erected outside the arena, while the daredevil acrobats of the Big Apple Circus provided the night's opening act.

Showgirl

When Britney appeared, descending from the ceiling, she was dressed in a red ringmaster's jacket, cracking a whip as she called her audience to attention.

"I'm a put-on-a-show kind of girl," she trilled in the opening song, and the girl didn't lie.

The concert was an unparalleled visual spectacle, full of magic tricks, gymnastics and costume changes (nine in all, including policewoman and burlesque dancer).

On stage were dozens of clowns, dancers, unicycles, acrobats, podiums, giant picture frames, period furniture and, at the centre of it all, the mistress of ceremonies herself.

But if Britney pulled out all the stops to divert people's eyes, it was only so they'd ignore their ears screaming, "she's miming!"

It's hard to be 100% sure, of course, but it wouldn't come as a complete surprise to learn that much of the 19-song set was lip-synced.

The band's contribution was hard to gauge too, tucked away as they were off the main stage, providing near-identical renditions of Britney's superlative robo-pop.

But does any of this really matter?

Not really. The audience weren't there to judge a music grade examination, they just wanted to witness the phenomenon.

Here was a girl they'd watched grow up, identified with, idolised and then prayed for as her life fell spectacularly apart.

At the O2, they were willing her on, hoping for a fairytale ending to that tragic story. And she did her best to oblige.

Blindfold

Britney was focused and engaged. The dancing sizzled and the 27-year-old's moves had regained their former snap and punch.

One early highlight was her two-finger salute to the tabloids, Piece Of Me ("I'm Miss bad media karma, another day another drama").

Britney started the song in a gilded cage, trapped like a performing circus animal. By the end, she'd broken free and taken control of her former masters. Subtle? No. But a great piece of theatre.

When, during Touch Of My Hand, she spun into the air, blindfolded and suspended from the arm of a dancer in bondage gear, the flash of camera bulbs could have lit the Grand Canyon during a solar eclipse.

Elsewhere, Britney borrowed from Bollywood on a colourful Me Against The Music, and was sawn in half during Ooh Ooh Baby.

It wasn't until the halfway point, however, that the star remembered to address the audience.

It was profound, too. "What's up London?" she shouted, before launching into the night's sole ballad, Everytime, which she sang perched on the handle of a huge floating umbrella. Seriously.

If there was a fault to the set, it was the decision to focus on material from Britney's two most recent records at the expense of classics like Oops! I Did It Again.

As a result, the crowd never rose to its feet en masse until the show's closing one-two-three sucker punch of Toxic, ...Baby One More Time and Womanizer.

Meanwhile, the choreography - so tight and intricate at the beginning - began to drift into aimless posing and hip-swivelling.

Britney was a particular culprit here, strutting across the stage while her dancers put in the hard work around her.

So, in the end, she didn't quite give it her all.

But maybe it's a good thing that Britney has finally learned to hold something back for herself.

Source: BBC