'Punk album'? Okay, I'll admit to bending the rules a little bit on this one... perhaps it is more pop, new wave, garage, disco... who cares, it is one of the defining albums of the 1970's and I bet there are not many visitors to this site that don't own a copy of it.
I missed punk, but there was no escaping Debbie and Blondie. I remember in 1980, my home town of Burgess Hill in West Sussex hosted a 14 - 18's on Saturday mornings in a hall in the town centre. I was 11 and my mate, Paul, also my next door neighbour, was 10. What's more we were both tiny, real small fry.... but we got in week after week. The reason for getting in was simple. Paul's Dad was the local 'celebrity' DJ responsible for spinning the discs at these events. Thinking on, the year could have been late '79 into '80. Either way, Blondie was huge and the singles lifted from 1978's 'Parallel Lines' album were still played as they were guaranteed to fill the dance floor with teeny boppers. 'Sunday Girl', 'Hanging On The Telephone' and 'Heart Of Glass' were just huge. The intros to each of those tunes are perhaps the most evocative songs in my jukebox brain. To hear them throws me straight back into the late '70s. If ABBA produced the perfect pop, then Blondie took the crown for delivering perfect pop punk, or perhaps as the term did not really exist at the time... power pop. What's more their incorporation of the rhythms of disco did not seem out of place at all... after all New York City was the crucible of the '70's disco scene.
However, whilst the singles were brilliant, the album tracks that make up 'Parallel Lines' are also works of extraordinary art. 'One Way Or Another', Fade Away & Radiate', '11.59', 'Will Anything Happen'.... all classic tracks that would also have been huge hits if released as singles.
It's funny, I have never been drawn to female vocalists. Don't worry I'm not an incel or an otherwise misogynistic moron!! I just happens that 80% of my record collection features male singers. Debbie Harry was always an exception. It is fair to say that I did rather fancy this particular female singer too. Debbie's looks worked very well for the band, a fact that Debbie herself exploited to maximum effect. That is not to say that Blondie were just a band with a pretty face. Far from it. As a package they had it all, great musicians, great producers and engineers, all contributing to a great collection of songs... and they had Debbie Harry fronting! There was something else too... Blondie were extraordinarily exotic, at least to a pre-teen from Sussex! They walked mean streets of New York City, a place known only in the vaguest sense through television. Blondie encapsulated all of that I imagined of New York at that time.
Many years later I saw Blondie for the first time and it was in Manhattan, at the Roseland Ballroom to be precise and it was something else.
Years later still, in 2013 Gunta and I travelled to New York to see The Stranglers. On our last day in the city we were drinking in a bar, possibly in Bleecker Street or Greenwich Village, I don't recall now, but we got talking to an elderly, bohemian couple. They were in their 80's and had lived in the area for ever. We started taking about the NYC music scene. They said that Lou Reed could be regularly spotted wandering throughout the area, but they said that he was a miserable old sod (or whatever the New York equivalent was) who hated to be recognised on the street almost as much as he hated not being recognised! Debbie Harry, on the other hand, whilst also a regular sight on the roads all around, was lovely, always obliging to say hello and to have a photo taken... take that Lou!
Back to 'Parallel Lines', here's what the UK critics had to say.... it was mostly positive, but at the end of the day I don't give a damn for the opinion of the music press... 'Parallel Lines' is a work of art!
Sounds (9th September 1978)
New Musical Express (9th September 1978)
Record Mirror (9th September 1978)
There will be a couple more 'Parallel Lines' related posts to come. But for now I just want to wish Debbie Harry a very Happy Birthday. The remarkable lady is 81 today! The greatest female icon of my generation!
