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.
 

 
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…