Madonna’s Early Years

A good article appears in today’s Independent on Sunday in the UK about Lucy O’Brien’s new book “Madonna: Like an Icon“.

“She wasn’t an overly charismatic personality. You’d never have guessed she’d become a world famous pop star. That’s why it was so surprising to many of us when she became big. I remember going to the store and seeing her face on an album. I thought, ‘Oh my God, that’s her. I don’t believe it!’ Everyone was very shocked. How did she get to be there?” says Wyn Cooper, one of Madonna’s former boyfriends and, in 1972, director of the first film she ever starred in, aged 14 – a short Super 8 student movie that featured her with a fried egg on her stomach.”

“She was a little bit aloof. She took herself more seriously than most of us did at that age. She was a cheerleader, so that put her into the jock category, but she was also a free spirit and a thinker, so that made her more of a freak. She read more than your average high-school student,” says Cooper, now a poet living in Vermont. He met Madonna when she was 14 and had just started at Adams High in their home town of Rochester, an affluent rural suburb just north of Detroit. He was in the year above, and quite struck by her. “I remember thinking, there’s an interesting, pretty girl. She seemed kind of shy. We developed a friendship and hung out. I had a Mercury Capri with an eight-track tape player. Madonna and I would hop in the car, drive around and listen to [David Bowie’s album] Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars while enjoying a little marijuana.”

It is stories like these that fascinated me when I was writing a biography of Madonna. Having written books about Dusty Springfield, Annie Lennox, and a history of women in popular music, I was keen to get to the heart of one of our greatest living pop icons. I wanted to find out what really motivated her, how she had managed to achieve such extraordinary success – and in so doing, spoke to people close to her who’ve never spoken before. An intriguing picture emerged.

Continue reading this story on the online website of The Independent by clicking here.

Thanks to M-Tribe’s Team member rayoliteuk.

Lucy O’Brien’s book “Madonna: Like an Icon” is out now, published by Bantam Press.