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‘Make Me Tonight’: Listen to Debbie Harry’s isolated vocal for Blondie’s ‘Atomic’
09.04.2019
06:51 am
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A song that lasts more than a generation connects with the listener on an emotional level, an infectious tunefulness that anticipates a moment of approaching joy. Blondie have an impressive back catalog of such songs. From “Sunday Girl,” “One Way or Another,” “Picture This,” “Heart of Glass,” “Dreaming,” “Call Me” all the way up to their more recent (and perhaps less well-known) tracks like “Mother,” “Fun,” “China Shoes,” “Long Time,” and “Doom or Destiny.”

Blondie have been blessed with a maverick mix of genuine talent as both musicians and songwriters and one of the all-time best frontpersons in the business.

It was their unique, utterly joyous sound that hooked me first. No doubt, I would have been instantly smitten (and most likely punished by the parish priest with one Our Father and three Hail Marys) if I’d first seen Harry tease and sashay in that promo for “Denis.” But it was the sound of Blondie that thrilled me first. Clem Burke’s drums, Chris Stein’s guitar, and Debbie Harry’s vocals. And let’s not forget Gary Valentine (bass), Jimmy Destri (keyboards), Frank Infante (guitar), Nigel Harrison (bass). Who all together they made music that will last for decades more than their three or four minutes of play.

Take a song like “Atomic” written by Destri and Harry who were originally trying to do something like “Heart of Glass” and then gave “it the spaghetti western treatment” with a little hint of what sounds like Dean Parrish’s Northern Soul classic “I’m On My Way.” Before that, according to Harry, “it was just lying there like a lox.” Add to this Burke’s pulsating drums, Harrison’s driving bass line, and Stein’s razor sharp guitar riff and you’re on target for a hit.

Then there comes the cherry on the top—Harry’s god-like vocals.
 
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Her lyrics are minimalist. The same four or five lines repeated over and over. In Cathay Che’s biography on the singer Platinum Blonde, Harry said she composed the lyrics while the band were playing the song, She was just “scatting along,” riffing, trying to figure out what to sing. The lyrics could have been banal but they suggest a deep sexual yearning, a burning desire, which may or may not relate to Harry’s own early life. Well, at least her lyrics make me think that maybe so as she once explained about her sex hungry teenage years in an interview with Victor Bockris for High Times:

I was really oversexed. Really charged and hot to trot. Later on, when I got my driver’s license, I used to drive up to this sleazy town near Paterson [NJ] and would walk up and down this street called “Cunt Mile.” I would get picked up by and make out with different guys in the back seats of cars to get my rocks off because I was so horny and couldn’t make out with anybody from my own town.

O, to have lived in that little sleazy town back then.

“Atomic” from Blondie’s classic Eat to the Beat album was released in February (UK) and April (US) 1980, where it topped the UK charts and made the Top 40 Billboard Charts in the States. I often feel that Harry has never quite had the respect she deserves as a singer or as a pioneering front woman who “was saying things in songs that female singers didn’t really say back then,” as Harry explains in her forthcoming autobiography Face It:

I wasn’t submissive or begging him to come back, I was kicking his ass, kicking him out, kicking my own ass too. My Blondie character was an inflatable doll but with a dark, provocative, aggressive side. I was playing it up yet I was very serious.

Or as author and journalist Paul Burston once remarked, “Everybody wanted [Debbie]. You either wanted to fuck her or to be her.”

Though obviously tempted by one of those suggestions, I personally wanted to listen to Debbie Harry.
 

Blondie—isolated vocal ‘Atomic.’
 
Listen to Debbie Harry’s isolated vocal for ‘One Way or Another and ‘Call Me,’ after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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09.04.2019
06:51 am
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Eurythmics go krautrock (and the Throbbing Gristle connection)


 
When Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart left The Tourists to form Eurythmics in 1981, they traveled to Cologne to work with noted German producer Conny Plank on their first album, In the Garden. Some of the musicians involved were Can’s Holger Czukay and Jaki Liebezeit (billed as “Les Vampyrettes”), DAF’s Robert Görl and Blondie’s Clem Burke. Karlheinz Stockhausen’s son Markus was also on the album. (Annie Lennox would record a lot of the vocals—eight tracks—for Robert Görl’s 1984 solo LP on Mute, Night Full of Tension.)

“Never Gonna Cry Again” was the first single, and in the duo’s first TV appearance as Eurythmics, they played it along with “Belinda,” the second single release. Neither song would hit, but they became famous worldwide with their next album, Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) in early 1983. Lennox and Stewart were joined by Burke and Czukay—who looks like an absent-minded old guy who just wandered onstage to jam with his French horn—when they debuted on television’s The Old Grey Whistle Test (In the album’s credits, Czukay’s include “walking.”):
 

 
A second Eurythmics recording with some even more decidedly avant garde co-conspirators than most people might assume would be a fit, was the darkly pulsating “Sweet Surprise” single they recorded with former Throbbing Gristle members Chris and Cosey, recorded in 1982, but released on Rough Trade in 1985. Lennox and Stewart are not mentioned on the sleeve which shows a photo of Chris & Cosey beside two familiar-looking silhouettes with question marks. They are credited on the label, however.

A ‘sweet surprise’ after the jump…

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Posted by Richard Metzger
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10.13.2016
04:44 pm
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In the Flesh: Blondie’s perfect pop performance on German TV, 1978

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Most teenage males “of a certain vintage” were hipped to Blondie by the video for the single “Denis” with a slinky Debbie Harry in a red-striped swimsuit and cascades of backlit blonde hair. Understandable. My introduction was via the radio—which meant my focus has always been on the music. I bought the 45rpm record of “Denis.” Wore it out and had to buy another copy.

Of all the bands that came out of punk or new wave, for me there has never been one as brilliant as Blondie. New wave in the UK was generally angry and political. American new wave—as epitomized by Blondie—was musical, ingenious, subversive and unforgettable.

What makes a song last more than a generation is its infectious tunefulness. Songs that connect on an emotional level, at a liminal moment of approaching joy. Blondie have a major back catalog of these kind of songs—all of which will last decades longer than their three minutes of play. Perhaps centuries, who knows?
 

 
I missed out on their eponymous debut album, but got up to speed with the second album Plastic Letters and then Parallel Lines. With Parallel Lines one would have to go back to The Beatles to find a band that produced an album filled with only quality songs of utter pop perfection. All killer no filler, it played like a greatest hits from the very first spin.

That’s not to say Blondie were sweet—their songs were often double-edged and charged with complex meanings. A cursory listen to “One Way Or Another” might make you think it’s just some old romantic song rather one about a stalker. Or, how cold is the dreamy “Sunday Girl”? And who else could write such a bittersweet disco song such as “Heart of Glass”?

More after the jump…

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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04.01.2016
09:28 am
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