The year is 1984. Reagan is re-elected, newish PM Bob Hawke begins his slow-burn descent from inspirational everyman leader into a leathery Botoxed spiv indistinguishable from his second wife, “Advance Australia Fair” is proclaimed our national anthem and green and gold as the national colours, the Olympics are held in LA, McEnroe and Navratilova win Wimbledon… The Cosby Show debuts, as does Perfect Match, while Hey Hey It's Saturday transforms from a Saturday morning kids’ show into a Saturday late night kids’ show… Band Aid releases “Do They Today it’s hard to imagine the outrage when Madonna performed “Like a Virgin” on the first annual MTV Video Music Awards in 1984, rolling around on the stage, revealing lacy garters and a belt buckle with Boy Toy written on it, and grinding herself on the set. The impact was incredible… by the time she tamed the lion-faced men of Venice in the music video she was a bona fide star.

Signed to Sire Records in 1983, Madonna succeeded with a pair of 1984 singles, “Lucky Star” and “Borderline”, and by year’s end, her self-titled debut album had gone platinum. Then mid-way through 1984, Madonna met up with superstar producer Nile Rodgers, who made use of monstrous drumming from fellow Chic member Tony Thompson, who’d just done Bowie’s “Let's Dance”, and went on to Power Station with Robert Palmer, and “Addicted to Love”, for that matter. December 1984: The album Like A Virgin peaks at #1 on the US charts, where it stayed for 3 weeks, and remains her highest selling studio album in the US. It would stay in the Billboard Top 10 for 33 weeks, and Top 200 for more than two years. It went on to sell 11 million units when it was released and has sold an estimated 19 million units worldwide.

She was 26 years old, quite old by today’s starlet standards… Britney Spears was 17 when “Baby One More Time” launched her. But times were different. As Time magazine observed in 1985: “the neoconservative mood of the kid culture seems to be just right for an entertainer whose personality is an outrageous blend of Little Orphan Annie, Margaret Thatcher and Mae West”.

Mick Jagger (then 41) said at the time that Madonna’s records are characterised by “a central dumbness”. Which is pretty funny… until you remember that at the time he was months away from releasing his debut solo album She’s the Boss with the singles “Lucky in Love” and “Just Another Night”. Hell, it was only a coupe of years till he released “Let's Work”: “Let’s work, be proud, stand tall…”

Then there re was the fashion. The never-ending and mutating career. (Madonna once said: “I'm like a cockroach - you just can't get rid of me.”) And so 1984’s Like a Virgin is an album that will go down in history as the birth of so many things… which is ironic, given its title.