“They had this great energy and they had a strong friendship that was there for their love of music and their mutual vision,” recalls Paul Pesco, guitarist on the demos. Inspired by Bray’s new dance sound, for the first time in her career Madonna showed that she was more than adept at shifting/defining musical genres and wrote a dance song of her own, Everybody. Bray had followed Madonna to Manhattan from their native Michigan just 18 months earlier and was fast becoming her closest collaborator. Undeterred, Madonna took her queue from the lyrics to her song Get Up, the best of the four cuts on the Gotham demo: “Pick yourself off the ground, don’t let it get you down, you get up!” Or rather, she got down and recorded the dance song, Ain’t No Big Deal, written by former college friend and Gotham drummer, Stephen Bray. This also reiterated the fact that her four-track demo of self-written new wave/post-punk/ska/pop songs, produced as part of her year-old contract with Gotham Management, had yet to secure the recording deal she was desperately seeking.
MADONNA IMMACULATE COLLECTION RAR SERIES
She had taken her first bite of the Big Apple three years earlier, when she moved to Manhattan, initially as a would-be modern dance performer, before cutting her teeth as a self-taught, guitar-playing, songwriting, frontwoman in a series of short-lived new wave bands, made up mostly of boyfriends and fellow tenants of The Music Building (a cheap, 12-floor rehearsal space in New York’s Garment District) into which she had all but moved two years earlier.Ī well-received New Year’s Eve gig the previous night, supporting David Johansen of New York Dolls at My Father’s Place, Long Island, was followed by her attendance at a party hosted by the fledgling cable TV channel MTV. RC takes a look back at when the girl first went wild in the studio, making her very first single, through exclusive interviews with the key players involved in the (X-Static) process.īy New Year’s Day 1982, the dreams of 23-year-old Motor City-turned-New York City girl, Madonna Ciccone, had yet to come true. Referencing “them 808 drums” of her earliest dance hits on the album opener, Girl Gone Wild, Madonna proves that, 30 years since she first invited us to groove with Everybody (how could we say no?), she’s still got her ear (and feet) to the dancefloor from which she first emerged. MDNA plays like a greatest hits, a 21st Century Immaculate Collection, re-affirming brand Madonna for anyone who may have thought that maybe Gaga/Rihanna/the next “new Madonna” did it first.
Madonna also released 12th studio album, MDNA, which by its March 2012 release, had already hit No 1 on iTunes in 54 countries on pre-release alone helped in part by Madonna’s tour de force half-time performance at Super Bowl 2012, watched by 114 million people (yes, really!) – the most watched in US TV history.
In the past year alone, at a stage of her career when many other artists have long since burned out/ retired/are on their umpteenth “comeback”, Madonna has completed her sold-out, eight-month, 88-date MDNA tour (filmed for future release in Miami in November 2012), which was named by Billboard magazine as the highest grossing tour of 2012, and proved that as a live performer she still has no equal. Madonna would go on to write better songs that would move millions both on and off the dance floor, but the 12” provided enough material from the girl to convince Sire to take a chance on the soon-to-be Lucky Star.īut luck had little to do with the ascent of undoubtedly the smartest and hardest-working star on Sire’s roster.
The song was the debut single by Sire’s newest signing: a 24-year-old from Michigan calling herself Madonna.ĭJs had been shaking New York’s dancefloors to Everybody since the song was released as a promotional single on 24 April 1982 but, outside of New York’s underground dance scene, the world had yet to be introduced to the woman who was on the cusp of revolutionising popular music and defining the pop sound of the emerging decade.
Thirty years ago, a 12” dance single called Everybody peaked at No 3 on the US Billboard Dance Chart. Some girls have all the luck!” (Madonna, The Roxy, New York City, 23 October 2005 on her Confessions On A Dance Floor promotional tour). My whole career started out with 12 inches.
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