MADONNA AND ME: THREE NI FANS ON HOW THE STAR INFLUENCED THEIR LIVES
The musical icon celebrates her 60th birthday this Thursday. Here, three Northern Ireland writers reveal what she meant to them as they grew up in the Eighties
‘Her determination made me feel I could take on the world’
Madonna was everything I wanted to be in the Eighties. With her dance-along poppy music she was full of attitude and I thought she was great with her ‘thrown-together, couldn’t care less’ New York fashion style.
While I loved her songs — despite their rather corny, repetitious lyrics — what really appealed to this east Belfast teenager was that she was a force to be reckoned. As someone who had grown up practically banned from the city centre due to the dangers inherent with the Troubles, I needed to channel something of Madonna’s spirit if I was going to take on my parents on this one. My sister Dawn and I weren’t allowed to go into town on our own when we were in our mid-teens. My mum, like most parents back then, was terrified we’d been caught up in a bomb attack.
The fact she’d heard a report on the news about shoppers being herded away from a suspect device only for the warning to be wrong and people to be inadvertently directed towards danger only heightened what was an understandable sense of caution.
Dawn and I did not share her concern. Put bluntly, we wanted to go into town as Topshop had just opened.
One of the newest fashion chains aimed at young women in Belfast, we couldn’t wait to see the latest trendy gear. I can vividly recall the angry tears of indignation rolling down my face as my mum told us we wouldn’t be going — under any circumstances.
As a thwarted teenager, no wonder I looked at someone like Madonna — so full of swagger and attitude — and desperately wanted to be just like her. Like many teenagers back then, I also discovered my sense of style courtesy of Madonna. And while her early looks now seem unsophisticated, back in the Eighties, hers was a look I copied for ages. How well I recall dyeing over-sized white vests black in a tin bucket on top of the cooker and wrapping layers of studded belts and wristlets around me.
I rarely left the house without back-combed hair, slashed T-shirts, footless tights worn with a pencil skirt and dozens of bracelets rattling on my arms.
Looking back I must have been a right sight, but it was about finding my style tribe, expressing myself like my hero and refusing to be downtrodden by sectarian politics.
Far-fetched as that sounds today, growing up in Troubles-torn Northern Ireland was hard. We weren’t allowed to talk in our house when the news was on, noone went out anywhere and when relatives visited, the conversation seemed to be dominated by talk of the ongoing violence.
It was a single-agenda society where fun was something that happened somewhere else to other people.
Put simply, Madonna brought a form of escapism into my life at the time when everything else felt grim — I suppose she brought a sense of hope too that life could be better if you could just live elsewhere (with some of her attitude).
Her fierce determination made me feel like I could take on the world and for that I will be eternally grateful. She was the kind of woman I wanted to be — uncompromising and your own boss.
After decades of pop stars that have come and gone and the constant emergence of the next big thing, it doesn’t surprise me at all that Madonna has survived and will be marking her 60th birthday as a true music icon.
While there have been many pretenders to the throne there is only one Queen of Pop.