Blondie – 10 of the best | Music | The Guardian
10 of the best
Blondie – 10 of the best
They were initially dismissed by the New York punks as too kitschy and pop, but Blondie soon outgrew CBGB to become the biggest pop sensation of the late 70s
Blondie … ‘We wanted to be uncool.’ Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives
Wednesday 16 September 2015 11.28 EDT
Last modified on Tuesday 5 January 2016 06.40 EST
1. In the Flesh
When they emerged in 1974 from an embryonic incarnation called the Stilettos/Stillettoes (the spelling fluctuated), Blondie were initially dismissed by New York punk scenesters. They were too kitsch, too pop, and Debbie Harry too much of a heart-stopping bombshell; their aesthetic of camp glamour didn’t chime with the art punk of downtown Manhattan. In the Flesh, from their self-titled 1976 debut album, encapsulates everything that irritated the early punks: on one level, it’s a swooning tribute to early-60s girl groups, with an opiated chorus that instantly embeds itself in the memory; on another, it was a shop window for Debbie Harry’s “Blondie” character – a cool, knowing siren whose deadpan vocals promised heartbreak for anyone who fell for her. Harry was a fan of groups like the Shangri-Las and the Ronettes – hood girls whose toughness concealed their vulnerability – and adapted elements of their image into her Blondie persona. Fittingly, In the Flesh was a homage to them – a velvety slowie, steeped in girl-group harmonies, that could be taken as a daydreamy love song, or as something more base. It starts with Harry mooning over a boy she spots when she’s out walking on the Lower East Side (this was a reference to the neighbourhood where the band shared an apartment, across from the punk club CBGB), and having a confrontation with his girlfriend, who hisses: “Hands off this one, sweetie – this boy is mine.” Undeterred by that passive-aggressive “sweetie”, Harry spends the rest of the song yearning to be “warm and soft, hot and close … in the flesh”. She’s magnificent here, going several lustful steps further than the early girl groups would have dared, but simultaneously radiating sweetness. This became Blondie’s first hit – in Australia, anyway, where it reached No 2.
2. Rip Her to Shreds
In which Harry, in mean-girl mode, dissects the appearance of another girl, vehemently sticking the knife in: “Oh, you know her, Miss Groupie Supreme / Yeah, you know her, Vera Vogue on parade / Red eye shadow, green mascara / Yuck! She’s too much.” It’s a comic-book spite-fest, made camper by Jimmy Destri’s Farfisa organ and Chris Stein’s surfy guitar; you can picture Harry on a Bowery street corner in her leather jacket and stilettos, sneering at the retreating figure of Miss Groupie Supreme (thought by some to be Sid Vicious’s girlfriend, Nancy Spungen). “It’s so dirty and menacing,” Harry said of the song. “It’s what we all do when we’re getting catty – that’s what the New York scene was like. There’s toughness, but a lot of affection as well. It’s like being roasted.” But she also offered another interpretation, claiming the song was actually about the press’s treatment of female celebrities. By the same token, her own record label colluded in exploiting her, issuing a promotional poster of her wearing a transparent black top, with the invitation: “Wouldn’t you like to rip her to shreds?” Harry, who’d known nothing about the poster until it appeared, was appalled, but also resigned to the response it would get: “I’ve always been followed by perverts. Always the sick kind.”
3. I’m on E
Almost more demo than finished song, this track from the Plastic Letters album is about as lo-fi as early Blondie got. There’s a good deal less craftsmanship here than usual – it’s a two-minute romp propelled by Clem Burke’s hopped-up drumming and Harry’s detached voice intoning: “I’m on E, I’m on E, I used to have a car of my own, I gave my car to a guy named Vinnie.” It feels like an in-joke, or something the band were playing around with but never got around to fleshing out. In any case, it’s much more of a piece with the Mo-Dettes’s breathless DIY hit White Mice than with the sophisticated pop of Plastic Letters. I’ve included it here because it’s Blondie’s most insidious earworm: hear it in the morning and it’ll still be in your head in the evening. The moment to listen for is 1min 21sec, when Harry hits a hysterical crescendo and sounds as if it’s the most fun she’s had all day. The title, by the way, has nothing to do with ecstasy, which was then years away from being adopted as a recreational drug. “It wasn’t written about ecstasy, that’s for sure,” according to Harry. “I guess it was E for England, E for energy, E for empty.”
4. Hanging on the Telephone
This cover of a song by short-lived California pop-punks the Nerves essentially copies the original note-for-note, right down to the ringing phone at the start. For my money, though, Blondie’s version is far superior. The Nerves infuse the song with adolescent petulance, but Blondie turn it into a ragged demand for attention, with Harry turning in a grade-A job of acting out the role of a woman desperately trying to contact some chump who refuses to pick up the phone. Over its 2min 20sec, Harry becomes increasingly distraught as the phone rings and rings, and at the end collapses, phone still unanswered. From the first line, she’s rattled (“I’m in the phone booth, it’s the one across the hall / If you don’t answer, I’ll just ring it off the wall”), then resorts to sexual provocation (“Your voice across the line gives me a strange sensation”) and eventually breaks down, pleading: “Hang up and run to me.” It’s a massive powerpop tune, produced by glam-rock veteran Mike Chapman, who was brought in in 1978 to give Blondie’s sound a makeover for their third album. He was so expert at smoothing down their new-wave edges and ramping up their full-figured pop sensibility that the album, Parallel Lines, sold 20m copies and ushered in Blondie’s golden age.
5. Fade Away and Radiate
The B-side of Hanging on the Telephone, Fade Away and Radiate fused some of the things Blondie loved most: sci-fi, Hollywood glamour and being awake at 4am, watching old movies in a narcotised haze. The synth intro – which might have been playing on Ultravox’s stereo three years later as they wrote Vienna – conjures up the chilly blueish light given off by a portable black-and-white TV (the only kind of television that New York punks owned; they saved their money for leather jackets and black skinny jeans). Then Debbie Harry wafts in, swooning over the long-dead actors on the screen, who exist now only in cathode-ray tubes. Her lyric absolutely captures the nocturnal dreaminess: “Ooh, baby, I hear how you spend night time / Wrapped like candy in a blue, blue neon glow … Silver pictures move so slow / Golden tubes faintly glow.” Woven through the song is a proggy-but-perfect guitar line, played by Robert Fripp. He was then living in New York, and keen to work with new-wave bands, who were duly nonplussed (he had to “beg” Los Angeles punks the Screamers to let him do a gig with them). Perhaps because of Blondie’s arty aesthetic, they got on well enough to play a few shows together and work in the studio.
6. Heart of Glass
Blondie’s first nine singles failed to chart in the US, though they were hits elsewhere. At home, they finally broke through with the song that definitively severed their ties with the punk scene. “When we did Heart of Glass, it wasn’t too cool in our social set to play disco,” Harry said. “But we did it because we wanted to be uncool.” Uncool, maybe, but releasing an unabashed dance record was also a resounding commercial progression. This changed Blondie’s fortunes at a stroke. The 1979 Billboard chart reveals that almost every No 1 single of that year was either disco or disco-influenced. Heart of Glass fit in so well – it was No 1 for the week of 28 April preceded by Amii Stewart’s Knock on Wood and followed by Peaches & Herb’s Reunited – that it was almost as if Blondie hadn’t spent the past five years scuffling around with the CBGB demi-monde. Harry’s spun-sugar vocals float atop Jimmy Destri’s dizzying synth line, creating the sweetest confection of Blondie’s career. Several thousand listens later, it still sparkles.
7. The Hardest Part
From 1979’s Eat to the Beat album, this one saw a return to camp role play, with Harry assuming the persona of an armed robber’s moll. Blondie were by this point a full-fledged dance-rock act, and if this single erred on the side of rock, the dance element was still perceptible, bubbling away under Chris Stein’s squawky riffing. The lyric – a fantasy about the heist of an armoured truck – is one of Harry’s funniest: “Twenty-five tons of hardened steel rolls on no ordinary wheel / The hardest part of the armoured guard / Big man of steel behind the steering wheel.” Or maybe it’s just her sneering delivery: she enunciates every word with metaphorical middle finger raised. The video, by the way, suggests that the group didn’t want to lose touch with their art-pop roots completely – it was filmed in a warehouse that had been covered with purposefully-artless graffiti. But among the spray-painted scribbles are slogans like Freedom of Expression, Art Soup and Urban Realism.
8. Call Me
Call Me is pure, chrome-plated hedonism. Written for the soundtrack to the 1980 film American Gigolo, starring Richard Gere, it’s as cold and detached as Gere’s male-escort character, Julian. It was co-written by Harry and Giorgio Moroder, who had recently finished work on Donna Summer’s Bad Girls album. Call Me turned out to be mutually beneficial: it showed that Moroder, then the world’s top disco producer, could work with a rock band, while, for Blondie, it proved that the success of Heart of Glass wasn’t a one-off. Call Me was a global hit, and the biggest-selling single of 1980 in the US, as well as the ninth biggest single of the whole decade. Call me was an impeccably judged rock-disco hybrid, allowing as much room for Chris Stein’s guitar as Moroder’s swirling disco production. As ever, Harry’s lyrics were both arch and funny; the line “Roll me in designer sheets, I’ll never get enough” is particularly so, given that the early 80s saw the rise of everything “designer”. Harry herself briefly appeared in a Gloria Vanderbilt advert, one of the first designer brands.
9. Atomic
During the first Gulf war, Atomic was on the BBC’s banned list (along with Lulu’s Boom-Bang-a-Bang, Cher’s Bang Bang and everything by Massive Attack) because the title was deemed inflammatory. To be fair, the video did show an immense nuclear cloud, but it symbolised the sexual explosiveness Harry alluded to in her lyric rather than something more literal. The whole thing came together by accident while they were making Eat to the Beat; co-writer Jimmy Destri was trying to create a song replicating Heart of Glass’s crystalline freshness, but it turned into a surging spaghetti western/surf track that ranks as perhaps Blondie’s best song. It does something most Blondie songs don’t – namely, it builds up, verse by verse, to a huge (atomic) crescendo – all hands on deck, Clem Burke’s drums pounding, Stein’s guitar twanging hell for leather and Debbie wailing, “Oh, your hair is beautiful! Uh-uh-uh-tomic!” It’s one-third of Blondie’s perfect post-punk trinity, along with Heart of Glass and Call Me, but its hot-bloodedness sets it apart. It’s glorious.
10. Rapture
It took about 20 years, but Rapture finally grew on me. When I first heard it, its flaws were numerous and glaring. It was a lily-livered bit of opportunism that showed Blondie in the least flattering light, exposing Harry as a hopeless rapper who didn’t get rap, even if she did mention Fab 5 Freddy. Drifting from a dreamy sung introduction (“Toe to toe, dancing very close”) to karaokeish have-a-go rapping, it was the definition of bandwagon-jumping. And it got to No 1 – the first “rap” single to do so. But now I hear it for what it is: a great song that adapted rap’s precepts to suit Blondie’s own style.