Madonna loves Margate
I can't wait to be best friends
Madonna’s recent love letter to my hometown came as a huge surprise. My lifelong musical idol professing her love for little old Margate, the place I now call home and also lived in during my peak Madonna listening era (age 10-17) is something to behold.
Even more surprised by Madonna’s affection for our arty little town were, I imagine, the owners of what Madonna calls her favourite Italian restaurant. Oh wait, Madge, do you mean the very same place where I gathered friends and family for my 50th birthday back in December?
What can I say, great minds.
I can’t wait to hang out and discover all the other things we have in common, Madonna. We can braid each other’s hair and you can teach me how to properly do my eyeliner. We’ll obviously become best friends. As proof of my dedication, here I am dressed as the queen herself in her iconic Desperately Seeking Susan era - a last minute costume with what I had in my closet - and I think I did ok.
The idea that my childhood idol, the one artist who has soundtracked pretty much my entire life, stood in the same spot as me just weeks after my party, thrills me more than it probably should. I’m generally not star struck. I’ve met quite a few famous people and even have a few in the family, but Madonna is in another league for me and many others, I’m sure.
Like a Virgin was the first album I ever bought, on cassette of course seeing as it was 1984. I remember my grandad sniffing at it disapprovingly to my mum - a highly inappropriate title for a nine year old and he wasn’t pleased. Being Jewish, he also wasn’t thrilled about the giant cross I started wearing on a chain around my neck as I rapidly morphed into a mini Madonna.
I’m not sure I even knew what a virgin was when I played the song on my walkman, singing along and making all the adults uncomfortable. All I cared about were her arms filled with bangles, the lacy fingerless gloves, the black eyeliner and the beauty spot, and the teased hair tied up with bits of torn fabric.
Dolled up as my new idol for a friend’s fancy dress birthday party (whatever happened to those?) in what was probably a creepy Lolita-esque manner, I performed dance routines to Papa Don’t Preach - a song about teenage pregnancy. The grand-parental disapproval was clearly valid.
Madonna, patron saint of pushing boundaries and big fan of Cantina Caruso had this to say about her recent visit:
“Whenever I go there [Margate], I feel like I’ve entered a dream. On top of all of that, I get to eat at my favorite Italian restaurant which I’m not giving anyone the name of because then everyone’s going to go there and it only has one table!!”
She may not have name dropped them but if you know you know. And they deserve to be known.
I promptly ditched Margate in 1992 (Madonna’s Erotica album was in the charts FYI) when I had a chance to go to New York, vowing never to return. Joke’s on me I guess as I sit in my little bungalow less than a mile from the house I left at 17. Best laid plans and all that.
Like Madonna, I was adventurous and I had big dreams and Margate wasn’t going to fulfil them back then. I didn’t become a global superstar like she did, but leaving for the excitement of America opened a lot of doors for me. And New York in the nineties was sooooo great, Margate couldn’t compete.
Incidentally I once saw Madonna at a club I used to go to in New York not long after I moved there (Club USA, Limelight, Tunnel? I can’t recall. Read on and you’ll understand why my memory is blurry). Not as unlikely as it sounds seeing as it was the 90s Club Kid era in New York and she was absolutely on that scene. I was on the periphery of it, owing to someone I endearingly call my gay boyfriend (everyone knew but me, despite it being so, so obvious). He was very much in that scene.
Madonna and I locked eyes and passed each other in the chaos of the club. She stared at me hard as she passed.
I was very high on ecstasy so it’s possible I hallucinated her…
Or she was real and was thinking “look at the state of that girl!”
I like to think she was real and she was taking note of my fabulous outfit and ignoring my enormous pupils.
(Before you judge me - it was the nineties. Find me someone who wasn’t high on E).
I fell back in love with Margate around 2018 when I first started thinking about leaving London for the seaside. I returned thirty years after leaving, to a town that was already on its way to regeneration thanks in part to Dame Tracy Emin, another Margate local who moved back home.
Madonna is the queen of reinvention. Her fashion, hair colour/style, boyfriends, and music have all changed continuously over the past four (!!) decades. You don’t like her recent dabbling with facial enhancements? Guess what? She doesn’t give a shit. I would’ve loved to see her grow older without it all because I think she’s beautiful anyway, but it’s her face/her body/her choice.
It’s hard to overestimate the cultural impact she had on a generation of girls, women and gay men alike. There isn’t an era of hers musically or sartorially that I didn’t love or at least respect. I remember sitting in class at the school just down the road from where I now live - just weeks before deciding to leave for NYC - and someone was passing around her SEX book, its silver cover gleaming, just before it got confiscated by the teacher for its raunchy pictures.
Compared to the content of today’s hyper sexualised world, Steven Meisel’s soft porn imagery in the book probably wouldn’t ruffle the feathers of any school teacher today, although maybe Madge writing about how much she loves her pu**y would (her word, not mine). An adventurous English teacher might even use it as a teachable moment, critiquing her grammar as she writes about her most intimate parts.
I didn’t love all the songs on the Erotica album that came out around the same time as the book, but it didn’t matter. She always felt important and relevant in terms of what women were allowed to do and be in the public eye. Bondage? Sure, whatever floats your boat Maddie.
A few years later and her entire image had morphed once again in the late nineties. Softened by motherhood, and sporting long strawberry blonde locks and flowing dresses, she was once again virginal (although was she ever?) if only in her choice of clothes on the cover of Ray of Light.
Madonna showing up in Margate a number of times in the past year and most recently during Off-Season - the town’s grassroots arts festival only in its second year - makes me wonder if she’s craving a return to the grittier times of her early career, living in a ‘roach motel’ in New York’s East Village, and the struggle that comes with that, and often leads to inspiration and meaningful art.
Being around artists - and there are so many in Margate - is intoxicating. Some people feed off their unbridled creativity, perhaps hoping it will rub off on them. Maybe Madge is seeking a bit of that. I don’t blame her - I often feel the same.
15 years ago Margate wasn’t yet on its way to recovery after years of neglect and decline. Now a cup of coffee will set you back the same as in a bougie place in Soho. And you’ve seen the caliber of restaurants we now have here. Stellar! So Madonna hasn’t put Margate on the map. It already was, nurtured by artists and creatives and chefs and musicians seeking freedom by the sea back when it was cheap.
But many of her 20 million Instagram followers will have discovered it for the first time via her recent post and I’m not sure what that will do for the area. The coffee isn’t going to get any cheaper that’s for sure. In any gentrified area, there are always casualties and often it is the people who were here before that suffer, being priced out of an area by the very same people who helped to improve it. I don’t have the answers, but I do hope that Madge’s love for Margate and its artistic community will help all its residents thrive.
For a deeper look at one of my favourite last minute Madonna related costumes, pop over here. Glad I’m back on the weights in the gym because I’m not sure I could pull off that bustier nowadays…
Thanks as always for reading/listening x
Loved reading this Emily, I’m the same age as you and this brought back so many memories. 🤎 Like a Virgin was one of my first albums (second to Now That’s What I Call Music 7)!! She was certainly the first (for our generation) in defining goal power and ultimately not giving a shit about anything.
Great read thanks