When Madonna went into the studio in September 1988 to begin work on what would be her fourth studio album, she was the biggest pop star on the planet. Although not an overnight success – having toiled hard until landing a deal with record label Sire – her career experienced a meteoric rise from the moment she released her debut single Holiday in 1983.
And yet in the 12 months before laying down new material, she had put the music on hold as she tried to prove herself as an actress. A pair of big budget movies, Shanghai Surprise and Who’s That Girl, had failed to wow the critics and her performance in David Mamet’s Broadway play Speed-the-Plow had delivered so-so reviews.
There was a lot of turmoil in her private life, too. She was in the wars with husband Sean Penn and they would file for divorce at the beginning of 1989, and she had become fixated that, now aged 30, she was the same age as her mother when she died of breast cancer. Madonna was just five-years-old at the time and was brought up by a difficult father – but more about him later.
While she had changed the course of pop – thanks to some of the most emblematic songs of the decade – she was determined to be taken seriously as an artist and the resulting album, Like a Prayer, certainly delivered on that aspiration.
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