Before becoming the ‘Queen of Pop’, Madonna played drums and sang with New York’s new wave punks The Breakfast Club, one of several gritty pit stops on her way to global superstardom.

(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)

And now, thanks to the internet’s bottomless memory, one of her rawest early recordings has resurfaced: a bold punk demo called ‘Shit On the Ground’.

The track, clocking in at just under three minutes, is an ode to the gloriously messy punk scene of the late 1970s with its jagged bassline and scrappy guitar work. Singing about the garbage-strewn streets of New York, it’s much more Lydia Lunch than ‘Like a Virgin’, and that’s exactly what makes it so compelling.

Recorded back in 1979, the track predates Madonna’s pop debut by several years and reflects her life during a transitional time.

She’d recently moved to New York to study dance and was struggling financially. During this time, she was also dating Dan Gilroy, a New York singer-songwriter who formed The Breakfast Club alongside his brother Ed.

When her dance career wasn’t going anywhere, Gilroy gave her introductory drum and guitar lessons, suggesting she would be a compelling centrepiece in the band.

‘Shit On the Ground’ was one song from a four-track demo, also featuring ‘Shine A Light’, ‘Little Boy’ and ‘Love Express’. In the demo, you can hear her experimenting with genre and identity, with an unrefined but strong voice that teeters between bratty defiance and genuine frustration.

The lyrics aren’t subtle either, “There’s shit on the ground / and I step in it daily”, but they tap into a real sense of disillusionment and urban grit.

You can hear her trying things on and pushing at boundaries with scrappy energy in her delivery, somewhere between shouting and singing, that hints at the performative edge she’d later refine into pop dominance. While it’s a far cry from her usual top 40 material, it’s oddly magnetic.

It was in 1980 that she left the group to form her own band, Emmy & The Emmys, writing songs influenced by The Pretenders and The Police.

She recorded another four-track demo featuring the songs ‘(I Like) Love For Tender’, ‘No Time For Love’, ‘Bells Ringing’, and ‘Drowning’,adopting a rock and roll persona similar to Pat Benatar, according to her former bandmate and ex-boyfriend Steve Bray.

Bray told Rolling Stone, “She used to really belt. If we’d found that right guitar player, I think that’s when things would have taken off…”

However, Madonna pursued her solo career shortly after and signed a label deal with Gotham Records in 1981. That same year, she began working with producer Mark Kamins, recording slicker dance tracks that fused her punk energy with club-ready beats.

After signing a deal with Sire Records, a subsidiary of Warner Bros, she started laying the groundwork for what would become her breakout self-titled debut album in 1983.

Her creative collaboration with Steve Bray continued, however, and the pair co-wrote four songs on Madonna’s 1984 album Like A Virgin, going on to sell over 21million copies worldwide and become arguably her most iconic album.

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