Flashback. Of the good kind

Madonna has been the inimitable force of pop music for thirty years now. And for about twenty of them she was actually good. At the turn of the millennium something strange happened. I don't know if the water in England is different to Stateside springs but Madonna took a turn for the worse and for every awkward utterance of cockney rhyming slang and tweed flatcap she plonked on her son I loved her a little bit less. The list of desperate, bizarre and increasingly veiny appearances in the public eye only compounded this. Of course, I could just be an unflexible traitor to the cause De Power Woman, but whatever Madonna is trying to do Lady GaGa just outdoes with more shiny armadillo shoe panache and increasingly powerbomb crotch shots. Surely...?

But then I found these snaps at a carboot sale, an obvious adandonment by a once ardent-Madge fan, now selling this lifetime of fandom for the measly sum of ten pence. She had badges ("They're ten pence, my love") and some more badges ("Those ones are ten pence too"). She had CDs, lots of CDs ("Ten pence for those ones; good ones mind"). But my personal favoruite was her collection of die-hard fan photography, which, yes, unsurprisingly, were also racking up the high bid of 10p per bundle. Sensing I might be a soft option that could be splashing out as much as 50 pence she hit me with the hard sell and began explaining that the photos were well loved momentoes of her time in the heady whirlwind of the Material Girl's peak fame.



1990, it seems, was a big year. And flicking through her photos it was easy to see why. This was Madonna when she was truly a star; a high-kicking, peroxide-curling, hit-making, Jean-Paul Gautilier-wearing cone-busting Super Woman. It was as if time slipped away and all her sins of the past decade became erased. At once I love her again, all thanks to some ardent Cornish fan no longer loving her at all.



The dancer's wide lapels on his crisp trench are reminiscent of Patrick Bateman on the weekend but it's the overall composition of the photo that really takes my fancy. Doing what now, Madonna? On stage? Surely not.




I can't believe I ever doubted Madonna's supremacy. I suppose I will just have to live in the past. Price to pay etc.