‘When I kissed my first boy Live to Tell was on the stereo’
Larne in the Eighties was a different world. A grimly pebble-dashed network of council estates plonked unceremoniously in a glorious setting and scented with rotting seaweed. The only movie in which I’ve seen architecture that reminded me of my home town was Gregory’s Girl.
Larne escaped relatively unscathed from the Troubles with one major car bomb. But as was common across Northern Ireland at the time, people avoided the town centre at night and headed to rural haunts for their nightlife.
And if you were a teenager, the town was mindnumbingly boring — or so we all thought. At the weekend you went to the Presbyterian youth clubs (frequented, interestingly enough, by Catholic and Protestant teenagers alike) or headed to the Step-Inn chippy when those heady excitements started to pall.
It was a million miles from the melting-pot excitement of Ghostbusters-era New York or the glamorous locations in Miami Vice where everyone seemed to zip around on speedboats with their hair gelled immaculately and their sleeves rolled up.
So when Madonna turned up on Top Of The Pops, she was a revelation. She was dress-up gone wild. She didn’t have to team blouses with a skirt. She wore sexy underwear on
the outside, not to mention lacy gloves, dayglo cut-off tops and low-rent glittery stiletto boots. Supposedly she was even filmed — it was rumoured in pop bible Smash Hits — having an egg fried on her stomach in a porn movie.
I was a Duran Duran fan through and through, but Madonna was the soundtrack to my meagre teenage social life. When I kissed my first boy in a darkened room at a party, Live to Tell was on the stereo. When I first danced at the tennis club disco with the boy I secretly fancied, the DJ was playing Into The Groove, the iconic track from Desperately Seeking Susan.
One of my best friends threw herself into emulating Madonna’s Eighties style with gusto, investing in a wardrobe full of lurid green net gloves, spangly hair accessories and patterned leggings.
I paraded around once or twice in Larne market, experimenting with pea green leggings, lace top and a pile of plastic jewellery, although it didn’t last long when I discovered The Cure and The Jesus and Mary Chain and turned monochrome overnight.
I still adore the screwball madness of Desperately Seeking Susan and the handto-mouth lifestyles of its bohemian protagonists, although real life has taught me that you probably won’t end up living in a vast New York loft if you’re a humble projectionist.
Years later, the magic still hadn’t faded when I finally got to see Madonna perform live. We vogued ecstatically wearing red cowboy hats in the rain as she played Slane, supported by Iggy Pop. (“Ziggy who?” asked the thirtysomething Madonna fan next to me).
Sadly, however, I haven’t been able to persuade my seven-yearold daughter of the genre-shattering delights of Madonna, even though I gave it my best shot (Ray of Light). “It’s all right,” she said flatly as I tried to get her to dance round the living room. Cyndi Lauper, on the other hand...