She wanted to rule the world and did. Madonna looks back on four decades of fame, why the music industry needs a #MeToo moment, and her still insatiable ambition
On YouTube, you can find a clip of Madonna appearing on American Bandstand in January 1984. She is still promoting her eponymous debut album, released six months before, and still just one among a raft of young singers mining a vein of post-disco dance-pop. She has yet to have a Top 10 hit in the United States, and the host, Dick Clark, still finds it necessary to explain who she is when introducing her. Her labels expectations for the single she performs, Holiday, are so modest, it hasnt bothered commissioning a video for it.
And yet its not just hindsight that makes the viewer realise something big is about to happen to her career. After she mimes to Holiday, the audience wont stop screaming and cheering: Clark has to plead for quiet so he can interview her. Answering his questions, Madonna is funny and flirtatious and very, very confident. He asks her what her ambitions are. To rule the world, she answers.
Thirty-five years on, Madonna laughs when I mention it. Yes, she nods. Sorry for saying that. The thing is, she says, she wasnt confident at all back then: it was all a front. I may have been insecure, I may have felt like a nobody, but I knew I had to do something. If I was going to make something out of my life, I had to, you know, hurl myself into the dark space, go down the road less travelled. Otherwise, why live?
She recalls feeling as startled as anyone else when she realised how famous she had become, less than 18 months after she had informed Clark she was going to rule the world. The Like a Virgin album had come out and sold 3.5m copies in 14 weeks in the US alone. She had scored six transatlantic Top 10 hit singles in under a year. Desperately Seeking Susan was in cinemas: her presence as the titular heroine had turned a low-budget film packed with cameos from New York underground luminaries Richard Hell, Arto Lindsay, Ann Magnuson into a box-office smash. No one was talking about her being just one among a raft of young post-disco dance-pop singers any more.
It took my breath away. I cant begin to tell you. I remember the first concert I did on the Virgin tour, in Seattle, when everything became big and I had no way of being prepared for it. It literally sucked the life out of me, sucked the air out of my lungs when I walked on stage. I sort of had an out-of-body experience. Not a bad feeling, not an out-of-control feeling, but an otherworldly feeling that nothing could prepare you for. I mean, she smiles, eventually you get used to it.