Britney Spears’ last performance at MTV’s Video Music Awards ceremony was memorable. And not in a good way.
“Sluggish” and “confused” are words that come to mind. She was very good at out-of-sync lip-syncing.
On Sunday night at Madison Square Garden, Spears will take the VMAs stage for the first time since that 2007 debacle at the Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas, and seek to exorcise the ghosts of performances past.
Back then, she’d just come off a custody battle with ex-husband Kevin Federline, stints in rehab and a bizarre episode in which she shaved her head. Something seemed wrong as she opened that show with a version of “Gimme More.”
“It was already a pretty manic night to begin with,” says Garrett English, MTV’s senior vice president of programming, events and live production. “It didn’t rise to my level of fascination at the time, but it ended up resonating for a variety of reasons after the show.”
The performance was roundly panned, and in the months after, she went through a very public meltdown, which included a spell in psychiatric treatment.
Since 2008, Britney’s financial affairs have been under a conservatorship that her father, Jamie, oversees. It’s been reported that he gets a six-figure annual salary for that plus a 1.5 percent cut of her earnings in Las Vegas, where she’s been in residency since 2013.
The regular Sin City shows make the singer’s fans come to her so she can avoid the road. The combination of her father’s oversight and life in a Vegas hotel (she also spends time in Los Angeles) has put Britney in a gilded cage.
It’s not easy to put her dark period behind her — especially with a just-announced Lifetime biopic, due next year, sure to dredge up her downward spiral.
But Britney is ignoring the unauthorized movie, and is ready to stage her comeback — at the very awards show where she had her most public failure. And she’s ready to steal the show from the likes of Beyoncé and Rihanna.
She’ll perform her new single, “Make Me . . . ,” featuring G-Eazy, from her album “Glory,” out Friday. It’s a much more confident and daring effort than her messy, EDM-influenced 2013 album, “Britney Jean,” and a marked improvement on the 2015 Iggy Azalea collaboration “Pretty Girls.”
Karen Kwak, the executive producer of “Glory,” came onboard after “Pretty Girls.” “[‘Pretty Girls’] wasn’t original,” she says. “Britney wanted to do things that were fresh and unexpected this time.”
It shows in the album, with sexually themed songs, such as “Do You Wanna Come Over?” and “Clumsy,” and a variety of styles — dance-pop, R&B and even a track sung in French.
“There was never a moment where she was given a song, and anybody said, ‘This is a hit. You have to sing it,’ ” adds Kwak. “Britney pursued the songs she wanted to do for herself. She came up with concepts and melodies. It’s her baby.”
The regular Las Vegas shows have given Britney structure and helped put the mess behind her.
“It’s like being an athlete. If you’re doing it that much, you’re getting yourself into shape,” says Kwak. “She was always ready to work during the album sessions, and it was very important to her to be done by a certain time so she could pick up her boys [Sean and Jayden] from school.”
The Louisiana girl hasn’t forgotten her roots, either. Her VMAs outfit will be raffled off to raise money to help victims of the state’s recent floods.
The “. . . Baby One More Time” singer has been laying the groundwork for her comeback for a while. In May, she got attention (in a good way) with her hits montage at the Billboard Music Awards.
“The Britney we know and love was in that performance,” says Sharon Dastur, senior vice president of programming at iHeartMedia. “And I’m sure that’s what we’ll see on Sunday.”