Guest Listener - Ian Rankin
Who’s Ian Rankin when he’s at home?
Ian Rankin writes the Inspector Rebus novels. He says they are international bestsellers, which may explain how he manages to spend so much money in bars and record shops
Ian’s Top 3 albums ever?
VERY DIFFICULT THIS. But right now, on this very day:
Solid Air - John Martyn
Let It Bleed - Rolling Stones
Unknown Pleasures - Joy Division
What great album has he never heard before?
Madonna by Madonna
Released in 1983
Before we get to Ian, here’s what Martin of Ruth and Martin’s Album Club thinks of Madonna
The Madonna edition as an 800 metre race.
Off we go.
In the summer of 1978, Madonna leaves her home in Michigan and flies to New York for the first time. She’s 20 years old.
In terms of her biography up to this point, all you really need to know are the following five pieces of information -
1) At the age of 5 she is traumatised by the death of her mother.
2) She develops a difficult relationship with her father, and practically all other forms of authority.
3) She’s educated at a strict Catholic school. Nuns everywhere. All that stuff about original sin, all that stuff about THE Madonna, and she’s sitting there - actually called Madonna.
4) She’s a straight ‘A’ student. She’s REALLY smart.
5) Madonna doesn’t just want to be a star - she knows she’s going to be a star.
That’s all you need to know and, whilst I haven’t got time to really dwell on any of it (it’s a race you see) the last point is worth briefly expanding on.
When you look at the people that made it, that REALLY made it, the defining characteristic seems to be that they always knew they would. Prince saw his dad perform when he was 5 years old and wanted the same for himself – by the time he’s 10 he’s dancing on stage with James Brown. Elvis Presley walked into Sun Studios as a kid and, when they asked him who he sang like, he said “I don’t sing like nobody”.
You can confuse this for ambition, or determination, but I don’t think it is. They just knew and Madonna, more than anyone else, knew all along.
So, back to New York.
She’s arrived to take advantage of everything the city has to offer and make her name as a dancer. Wearing an out of season winter coat, just $35 in her pocket, she gets in a taxi and tells the driver to drop her off in the “middle of everything”. That’s a great destination. So he takes her to Times Square where she wanders round, head spinning, in awe of what she sees before her. The sheer spectacle of New York for the first time - what John Cheever called “the invention of giants”.
By the end of her first night she has a boyfriend and a place to stay. She’s nothing if not resourceful.
She takes a series of odd jobs to get by, eats at irregular hours (mostly fruit) and starts to get the lie of the land, looking for an opportunity to launch herself. The opportunity arises, in November, when she auditions for the highly respected Pearl Lang Dance Company.
Where everyone else turned up like an extra from Staying Alive, the substandard but infinitely more fluorescent sequel to Saturday Night Fever, Madonna arrived looking positively post-apocalyptic - wearing a t-shirt held together by safety pins, and ripped fishnet stockings.
She immediately stood out.
And then she danced for them - all technique and wild abandon, delicately held together at the seams. After the audition, Pearl Lang herself walked up to Madonna, as if to get a closer look. She put her hand up to her face and whispered - “My dear, you have something special”
Madonna replied straight away - “I know”
I should warn you at this point that if you haven’t fallen for Madonna’s charms yet, you probably never will. Although, saying that, there’s considerably more to come.
At the start of 1979, she decides that being just a dancer isn’t enough and that it could take five years for her to be accepted into a major dance company. And then what? She’s just another dancer in the group. That won’t do at all. On top of her frustrated ambition there was also a more immediate concern - she needed money. So in an attempt to a) diversify and b) keep a roof over her head, she turns to nude modelling.
She visits a fella called Anthony Panzera who had a studio on West 29th Street.
He recalls that she walked in looking like a “boyish tramp”, like something out of a Dickens tale. In the completely undiscerning world of nude modelling he was about to turn her away.
“I was hoping for someone a little less boy like”, he said.
Sensing that she was about to be rejected, she immediately takes off her blouse, exposes her breasts, and says to him, “Do boys have these?”
She then takes off the rest of her clothing and, now in charge, says, “Just tell me where to pose”
Panzera looks up, in awe of what he sees before him, and says -
“What’s your name again?”
“Madonna”, she says.
Imagine hearing that, in a world before this Madonna became famous. What a name. She may as well have stood there and said “The Virgin Mary”.
But it gets better.
“No last name?” asks Panzera.
Madonna walks over to his desk, with all the attitude of an impatient naked woman, and puts him in his place once and for all -
“Do I look like I need a last name to you?”
It’s week 46 of Ruth and Martin’s album club, we could go for another 100, but I don’t think I’ll ever tell a story better than that.
You somehow hope that all the people that she travelled through on the way to stardom could one day get together and reminisce about their encounters. The taxi driver telling everyone about the time she told him to drop her off in the “middle of everything”; the pornographer who says “yeah that’s nothing mate, let me tell you about the time I asked her if she had a last name”
But back to the story. There’s the bell. 400 metres to go.
Unsurprisingly, Madonna quickly realises that being a nude model isn’t quite what she had in mind either. So she branches out again - this time as a singer.
After a short stint as a member of a group called The Breakfast Club she comes to the conclusion that “groups” aren’t really for her and she’d rather have the control and spotlight of a solo singer. Accumulating talent wherever she goes, always acting as her own best advertisement, she acquires a network of musicians and songwriters that will help her achieve her dream.
In 1981 she records her first series of demos, including the song Everybody, and takes it to Danceteria - one of the hottest clubs in New York.
She walks up to the DJ, Mark Kamins, and says -
“This is a great song. It’s called Everybody. People will love it.”
She then tells him how handsome he is and kisses him full on the lips.
Kamins plays the song the next night and the place goes nuts. The response was so good, unlike anything Kamins had seen, that he passes the demo tape on to Michael Rosenblatt - an ambitious executive at Warners. He in turn plays it, likes it, and as soon as he meets Madonna in the flesh, offers her record deal.
At last, it was happening. At the age of 24 she was about to take off.
There was only one problem. The deal had to be finalised by Seymour Stein, president of Warner’s Sire Records, and he was in hospital recovering from heart surgery.
Madonna though.
She’s not bothered. She insists that Rosenblatt gets the tape to Stein in hospital, even though he’s lying in bed with a drip in his arm. He does what he’s told, of course he does, and Stein hears the demo and flips out in his hospital bed. He demands to meet her straight away and even gets his barber to come to hospital to cut his hair. He wanted to look his best, he wanted her to know that she was signing a deal with someone who wouldn’t be dead in six months.
Madonna walks into his hospital room, completely oblivious to the fact it’s a hospital room, and says -
“The thing to do now is to sign me to a record deal”.
Stein sits up in his bed and says “Well, you had one before you even walked in the door”
Relieved, excited, but nevertheless confident, always confident, Madonna approaches the bed, extends her hand, and says “Nice doing business with you Mr Stein”
Remarking on her ruthlessness, Stein would later say that if the shortest way home was through a cemetery, on Friday 13th, she would take it.
Still, the deal is done and in 1983 Madonna releases her debut album - a signpost of what was to come. Lucky Star, Borderline, Burning Up, and Holiday.
“Just one day out of life, it would be so nice”.
In the hands of a man that could come across as suicidal, but in the hands of Madonna it’s anything but.
200 to go. The race for the line.
What follows for the rest of the ‘80s is nothing short of astonishing, one of THE careers in popular music. The songs, the videos, the outfits - you remember them all. The Gaultier, who could forget the Gaultier? Why is she never the new Bowie? Why is she never the new Dylan? Song after song, hit after hit, reinventing herself, and defining the decade. Striding all over it like a musical version of the Attack of the 50ft Woman.
They say she’s a feminist icon and she is - she had the boys dancing behind her on stage, she dated the famous men and then pushed them to the back of her photograph. She had control and power - she earned the right to be honest.
They say she’s a gay icon and she is - she said 'fuck that" to tragedy and victimhood at a time when the gay community moved the same way and stood up. They embraced each other and moved on together, confidently.
Remember when she released The Immaculate Collection?
I can see the record company now -
“Ha, I get it. Immaculate Collection. You’re called Madonna. I get it. Very funny”
I can see Madonna now -
“It’s an Immaculate Collection”
And she’s right, it’s not a pun. It’s the defining document of all this, the best of the “best ofs”, the greatest of the “greatest hits”. It doesn’t even have Dress you Up on it. Or True Blue. Or Dear Jessie. I don’t often swear when I do this but, fuck me, that’s a back catalogue if you’re tossing them aside.
Me though.
I loved The Fall, Sonic Youth, The Smiths. But I adored Madonna - the complete and utter glory of her. The total glory. In a record collection of shrinking violets and “musicianship”, she stood out. On a bedroom wall covered in posters of fringes and cardigans, she stood out. And you forget. Before dance music happened to her in the '90s, she was dance music in the '80s. She was all the dances - something for the start, the middle, and the end of the night. Something for everyone. In Crazy for You she soundtracked about 85% of first kisses I ever had. Does she know that do you think? All those parties. The kids in living rooms, hallways, disjointed on the stairs - all Crazy for You in the '80s, all the kids that she travelled through as they grew up.
And that’s what she was, the artist that I grew up with. In school, college, and university. At home too. Madonna was everywhere, Madonna was glory - the first pop star I ever fell in love with.
Heart racing.
Hitting the line.
Eyes closed. Crazy for you.
Martin Fitzgerald (@RamAlbumClub)
The Critics on Madonna
Rolling Stone ranked it the 50th best album of the 80s
Allmusic said “Madonna’s debut isn’t simply good. It set the standard for dance-pop for the next 20 years
So, over to you Ian. Why haven’t you listened to it? WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU?????
Madonna was one month shy of her twenty-fifth birthday when her first album came out - which makes her seem a late-starter compared to today’s fresh-faced batch of pop star wannabees. Me? I was twenty three in 1983, and things weren’t exactly working out.
I know this because I used to keep a fairly accurate diary. The day ‘Madonna’ was released into the world (27 July) saw me in a job at a tax office in Edinburgh, earning the princely sum of fifty-three quid a week net. It was over a year since I’d graduated (Upper Second Class Honours, thanks for asking) and I was living in a bedsit in Arden Street, Marchmont. I had applied for funding to do a PhD but had recently taken receipt of the rejection letter. I was getting pretty used to those, as they were arriving thick and fast for the short stories I was sending out into the cold, heartless bastard of a UK media world. Friends kept moving away - one was about to head to London and a job with a £6,500 p.a. salary - not that I was obsessed with money, you understand.
I was applying for jobs anywhere that would pay better than the tax office, cycling home of an evening to open the official-looking letters telling me to jog the fuck on. And the bike itself (bought for twenty-five quid secondhand) was playing up.
There’s no indication in my diary that I was listening to much music at that time. The only LP I bought in July was The Beatles 67-70. I’d stopped watching Top of the Pops and didn’t buy singles. At high school, I’d moved between prog and the likes of Status Quo and Alex Harvey. Then punk came along and by university (1978-82) I was into the more industrial and Gothy stuff - Joy Division, Throbbing Gristle (I was a fan club member), The Cure and Bauhaus. Throughout, there had been the likes of David Bowie and Eno, the Rolling Stones and John Martyn. But disco?
Disco?
Just as Charlie didn’t surf, Ian didn’t dance, not since those sweaty schooldays with the constant fear of rejection as you approached the girl seated the other side of the assembly hall. And if she did deign to accompany me for three minutes of Sweet or Mud or the Rubettes or the Osmonds… Oh, the horror. The horror. For the fact of the matter is, I danced like an ungainly banshee, really throwing myself into it. Eventually I would notice my partner backing away from the flailing limbs and flapping bell-bottoms - probably not getting a snog later then, I would think to myself, not for the first time. Punk, when it came along, was okay. In fact, it was great. I could pogo, robot and dying-fly with the best of them. But discos and nightclubs would almost never see me darken their dimly-lit doorways, unless they were hosting a pal’s birthday or wedding.
I did have a few disco twelve-inch singles in my collection - Chic and Donna Summer maybe, stuff with good production values and interesting arrangements. But that was about it. And as a twenty-three year old, I had left bubblegum pop music behind long ago.
No reason then why I would have known about Madonna, certainly not until ‘Like A Virgin’ or the film ‘Desperately Seeking Susan’ (which I did see with my girlfriend in 1985). But in July 1983 I wasn’t in the mood for getting into any groove or enjoying good times on anything fans of Madonna might classify as a holiday – though I did manage a wet week in Ireland.
But put away that tiny violin, dear reader, for my situation was about to improve markedly. On August 16th a call from The Scotsman newspaper informed me that I’d won second prize in their short story contest. My prize was a Sinclair Spectrum computer and paid publication in their weekend supplement. And a further month later, the Scottish Education Department had a change of heart. I’d be going back to uni after all - with three years’ funding to do a PhD. So I could chuck in the tax office and wipe my arse on the job applications.
But was I cheered up enough to warrant a saunter on to the dance floor? Nah, I’d still have been murder.
You’ve now listened to it, at least 3 times, what do you think?
She would go on to better things - we all know that. She would reinvent herself, devour different influences, and become something altogether bigger than the music she made. But would you know it from this first outing? Very doubtful, I’d say. If I’d heard this in 1983 I would have dismissed it as a lightweight outing by someone with a tinny voice and not enough ideas, someone who might manage a couple of hits before disappearing off the radar.
‘Insipid’ is one word I’ve used in my scrawled notes. Maybe the sterile early-80s production has a lot to do with it. All those synths and simplistic electronic beats. The wakka-wakka guitars and twanged basses. Yes, I suppose I can imagine people dancing to it after a few too many drinks. Yes, I can see how the numbingly unimaginative lyrics and rhymes might speak to those just out of puberty. ‘Starlight, starbright, first star I see tonight… You may be my lucky star, but I’m the luckiest by far.’ If you say so, missus, but it’s hardly the most revolutionary opening to one of the great careers in pop culture.
She sounds like a pert enough pixie throughout, though she was probably a full decade older than many of her immediate or soon-to-be fans. Cruelly, the version of the album available to me on Spotify is a reissue of some description, which may explain how ‘Borderline’ comes to be elongated to seven minutes, with one of those tedious fills in the middle, the kind that bedevilled ‘extended mixes’ and ‘DJ versions’ of the era. Remember that four-minute song you liked? Then try an added three minutes of half-arsed post-production, usually involving even more motorik drum machine and the odd thwock on a bass string. By the time you leave the dance floor, your hair will be plastered to your face and your clothes will need wringing out - a look guaranteed to endear you to the opposite sex.
And the thing is, ‘Borderline’ is one of the better tunes here. It has a proper hook, one you don’t mind being attached to. But it leads on to ‘Burning Up’ and various other vanilla showcases for a voice that has the subtle allure of a cheese-grater. And the words… Words about needing to be adored, about needing your infatuation to be reciprocated, about the devastation of rejection. Appealing, perhaps, to that teenage audience. Okay, maybe even to folk in their twenties. But I’m fifty-five now and just find it tedious. The songs start to resemble photo-stories from ‘Jackie’ magazine and its ilk, with interchangeable characters and emotions. As soon as you hear her sing the word ‘attraction’, you know that ‘reaction’ and ‘satisfaction’ can’t be far behind.
‘These tears I cry for you are so hopeless.’
Well, cheer up then and let’s go for that cheap package break in the sun, because:
‘It’s time for the good times,
Forget about the bad times…’
Leonard Cohen she ain’t. She feels pre-programmed and pre-packaged, which again may have something to do with the arid, inorganic studio methods and mechanisms of the age. It doesn’t sound to me like music to be played in your bedroom when a few chums have dropped round. It sounds…disposable. That Madonna herself was to prove anything but disposable is hugely to her credit. She would make very good records and high-calibre videos. She would act, set the fashion world on fire, be the name behind a book called ‘Sex’, give as good as she got in interviews and – eventually – become one of those artists you watched out for, because whatever she’d done now, it wouldn’t be boring, even if she ended up flat on her matador arse.
I get that. I just don’t get it from this first album.
‘Let the DJ shake you,
Let the music take you.’
Thanks for the offer, Madge, but I think I’ll sit this one out.
Would you listen to it again?
I’d rather not. I found much of the experience quite painful
A mark out of 10?
3 (but 7.5 for everything she did afterwards)
RAM Rating – 8.5
Guest Rating – 3
Overall – 5.75
So that was week 46 and that was Ian Rankin. Turns out he’d never listened to Madonna by Madonna before because in 1983 his life was no disco, no party but plenty of fooling around on a Sinclair Spectrum. So we made him listen to it and, although he didn’t really like it, he did make me nostalgic for those photo stories from Jackie. For that alone, I would argue the whole enterprise was worthwhile.
Next week Hrtbps listens to something from 1998 for the first time
Meanwhile, here’s Holiday.
Enjoy
Ruth and Martin
xx
