BLONDIE – “Heart Of Glass”
Most of the great records we’ve encountered on Popular find modern-day imitators – but often these imitators aren’t bands I choose to listen to. If a thrusting young beat combo wants to make their own version of “Hot Love” then they have excellent taste, and I wish them every joy of it, but I’ll just sit that one out, ta. “Heart Of Glass”, though – and the rest of Blondie’s hits – are a blueprint for a lot of the pop records I’ve enjoyed most this decade: Ellis-Bextor, Annie, Richard X, Girls Aloud would all murder to have this in their back catalogue (by some kind of marrying-your-grandmother time paradox).
It was ever thus: when I started reading the music press, Melody Maker’s Chris Roberts was in a great lather over his pet “blonde” movement, and the figleaf of a dropped “i” spared nobody’s blushes. Debbie Harry’s distanced “oo-ooh-aa-aah” post-chorus hook ancestors shoegaze vocal tics as much as her unblinking hauteur births modern robopop. Blondie, in other words, have never not been cool – well, almost never.
This has an odd effect on “Heart Of Glass” itself, in that its status as a pop Rosetta Stone rubs uneasily against its sublime diffidence. Debbie Harry’s coos and sighs aren’t especially regretful, and she mumbles most of the words: fine, I’ll sing about this guy, but seriously, he wasn’t a big deal. “Pain in the ass” gets it right. As the video suggests, the record is a knowing trifle – new wavers go disco with more than half an eyebrow raised – which happened to hit a mood so perfectly that it became immortal. That isn’t entirely Harry’s doing – just listen to that gorgeously restrained pop-and-click intro for how well-made “Heart Of Glass” is – but she’s what makes this track so iconic. The fleeting anomie of the pleasure-seeking clubhound, as captured by Bryan Ferry earlier in the 70s, but discofied, feminised, futurised – and near thirty years later still cryptic and still resonant.
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#48 – Although my personal chart was usually confined to official commercial releases, I did score a Number One Smash in the spring of 1982 with a home-taped recording. My recording partner turned professional later that year, and can be heard on a number of hits by a group that we’ll be coming to on Popular in the fullness of time.
re #48 rest assured Tom your cat’s cover of ‘Stop The Cavalry’ did grace my top 10 for a couple of weeks the following June.
My goodness, talk of people’s own personal charts does beg the question “do you know you’re saying this out loud?” A friend and I each had our own charts based on our own singles collections for three years, stopping (in my case at least) as O-levels hove into view.
Movement was decided by a roll of the dice to decide whether a record went up or down, then another roll of three dice to decide how far. With such randomness records could spend ages on the chart (Wings’ “Hi Hi Hi” and Bowie’s “Jean Genie” were on the list for most of the three years) and unless you cheated you couldn’t decide what would be on the chart at what time of year (hence “Merry Xmas Everybody” topping my chart in August). The highest new entry ever was the Rods’ “Do Anything You Wanna Do”.
God I can’t believe I’ve shared that. Rosie, you’re right, males ARE sadder…
Dice? What the…
“And down to #2 this week having been slain by an elf it’s those valiant warlords Ashford & Simpson”
#53: Oh for pity’s sake stand up for your passions man! Don’t be all Alexander Armstrong wimpy!
(and thanks to my dear wife for disproving that tired old anti-thesis upthread!)
As I’m sure I must have said before here (or somewhere) I did my own charts regularly from ’74-7 until the actual charts began to agree with me and I’m sure I must have the obscurest of all personal number ones – “Daybreak” by Survival Kit, on the shortlived Island USA label, September ’75, a nifty little nu-Northern Soul toetapper. B-side was “You Bring Out The Love In Me” by Bobby McClure and AFAIK neither has ever appeared on any Northern Soul compilations.
It should be added that there was method in the cat recording madness: my personal Top 40s tended to include all the records I didn’t hate out of the Top 40, re-ordered for preference, and then we invented ones to fill in the gaps. Modesty prevailed, naturally – my own invented records were not likely to be placed higher than Madonna or Prince ones, whereas I figured my cat could probably do a better job than Sal Solo.
I once read Paul Heaton say in NME he’d been doing his own chart for many years but it was a monthly top 20 (LIGHTWEIGHT) and he admitted to ‘A Design For Life’ having made it a second month. Somehow this was enough to encourage me to continue ranking favourite songs on a weekly basis well into university years and beyond.
#56: So how high did you place “Ruff Mix” by Wonderdog?
For a few heady months in 1979, I compiled a separate chart for songs by school bands / local bands / mine own fair compositional hand. Dolly Mixture had several Number Ones, which I’m sure would have pleased them.
In the autumn of 1984, I wrote a BASIC program for the Acorn Electron, which used the machine’s random number generator to simulate the movement of a Top Twenty singles chart. Thus the movemements weren’t totally random, as I weighted them based on whether a single was rising or falling the charts, etc. It was quite a sophisticated piece of spaghetti code, but it all went horribly wrong during execution when Black Lace’s “Agadoo” started mysteriously replicating itself, eventually occupying 50% of my Top Ten.
Forces at work, man. You don’t wanna f**k with that stuff.
#58: I suspect Maurice “Obie” Oberstein…
In fact it was the first manifestation of the greatest enemy Popular will ever have to face…
Blimey, you are a bunch of pop anoraks. The most I ever did was an occasionally updated list of my favourite records of all time. For many years ‘Tightrope’ by ELO had the top spot then I started going backwards in time and it was supplanted by ‘Mother of Pearl’ by Roxy Music and the last time I remember doing it (by the time I was in art college) it was ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ by Sam Cooke. Don’t think I’d change that one now anyway.
I must say it never occurred to me to challenge the established order of things by compiling my own singles chart. I was too busy (in my anorak period: roughly late ’79 until mid-1980) just keeping tabs on the movements within the Real Actual Top 40. I was blissfully unaware that anyone published this stuff, so if I didn’t write it all down…
Then I discovered the weekly music press.
…and here, scanned by mine own fair hand, is the label of the original 12″, showing Debbie in a distinctly more flattering light:
http://troubled-diva.com/blondie-label.jpg
…and here is a detail from the back cover of the same 12″, which has always tickled me. Can YOU spot the elementary error?
http://troubled-diva.com/blondie-back-cover.jpg
Hah! Had that 12″ for years (still do), never noticed that!
They obviously had to send a junior down to HMV Oxford Street… and that is an HMV sticker, yes? It looks a little clearer on the cover itself.
Unless Debbie Harry worked there for a bit.
Thanks to Satan’s friend Websense blocking these scans I have no idea what either of you are going on about.
OK, on the pics of “Albums Available”, the album “Blondie” seems to have a HMV price ticket on DHarry’s chest.
Which could be seen as a comment on the marketing of pop icons, or just that they forgot to take the price sticker off it before they photographed it for the sleeve.
My money’s on a backroom stock boy ‘avin’ a larf. Where was TV’s Bradley Walsh in 1979?
Would that be a backroom Private Stock boy? Eh? Eh?
Oh, I just kill myself sometimes…
Funnily enough, back around this time, I found “Parallel Lines” in a local junk shop, with a label pressed onto the playing surface on one side. So, I sent it to the record company address. They sent me a new copy with a “you really should have taken it back to the shop, but we’ll let you off this time” letter. Total cost, 50p, plus postage there.
haha it has a post-punky “celebrate/reveal the sales-process” design vibe to it — i kinda miss when that was all still new and fun (and i was young and wide open)
#72: oh gawd, Mike’s Maconieisms remind me that the Mercury awards are on tonight; I think I’ll watch ITV1′s mirthful retrospective on On The Buses instead…
If Elbow win, will the last person to leave pop music please remember to turn out the lights?
#76 – DNFTT!
I’m rooting for Rachel Unthank, though. If ever there was a year for Token Folk to win it, this would be the year.
:-p
Yes, I’d be very happy if The Bairns won.
Me too. In order:
1. Rachel Unthank
2. Everyone else xcpept..
3. Rubber Plant.
I would love it if either Rachel or Estelle won, but my hopes are not that high.
made up charts with songs by your cat? you lot is nutters.
anyway, HOG would be my third, or maybe fourth, ten and i think it has the best (and yep, most modern) sound of any of the number ones up to now. as soon as it starts you’re enveloped in something that’s impossibly shimmering and glamorous while still feeling warm and human. and then on top of that you’ve got the extraordinary vocals. lovely new york hipster diffidence, whole lines done more as a single sound than a set of words (i still can’t decipher half the lyrics)* and then the glorious moments where it snaps into focus foor the punchlines – “pain in the ass” indeed. all this and pop’s best ever haircut.
*”mucho mistrust” who’d have thought?
If Estelle wins, cue Maconie rant in next week’s Radio Times/on Radio 2 tomorrow evening re. Mercury judges being prejudiced against white men with guitars eh eh.
(go girl go!)
pink champale: excellent point about the lyrics shifting in and out of focus! That’s something I really like about it – it’s like a half-overheard conversation where you suddenly pick up on intriguing snippets.
The Caravelles (Brit girl duo with candyfloss vocal technique) were once described as “appearing to sing in French”, which fits Heart Of Glass quite snugly too.
I was amazed at how many of my friends had worked out “mucho mistrust” until they told me Parallel Lines came with a lyric sheet.
Estelle! Got to be! But I’m worried the M People factor means that nothing so pop has a chance…
I always thought it was “Mucho Mistrust” but that’s more thanks to NME’s Lone Groover cartoon…
#76
are you gonna hit the light switch then DJP?
burial woz robbed
#85 lone groover – now there’s a memory – I’m off to scour the interweb
“Mucho Mucho Mucho Marvey
I’ve got a chick from the Yugoslavey”
Burial couldn’t be arsed to turn up morelike (infallible Mercury rule: the prize goes to whoever can be bothered to show up).
It was sickening watching 6Music presenter Lauren Laverne and Radio 2 presenter Charles Hazelwood slavering over victorious 6Music presenter Guy Garvey in that hideously quasi-Masonic way that only the BBC can do. Fix fix FIX.
To paraphrase a future Popular artist: for God’s sake burn it down.
I fear his popularity is behind him, alas…
Still, well done to Sue Perkins on Maestro who definitely did Beethoven’s Fifth better service than Goldie and thank fuck Jane Asher didn’t win.
I’d concluded that the MMP wouldn’t go to an artist who hadn’t turned up – but then remembered that PJ Harvey gave her acceptance speech from Washington DC in 2001, so it wasn’t always the case even if it may be so now.
since this thread degenerates into (justified) grumbles about the mercury music prize, i may as well tell the story of my brush with defunct telco-endorsed greatness.
the morning after the (2007?) awards i was at westminster tube on my way to work when i noticed the klaxon with the baroque leg cast and large head. i’d seen him being notably lairy on live tv twelve hours earlier and he was now unmistakeably in that state that can be acheived only through staying up all night drinking (“in the mix”, as one of my friends has it). mr klaxon was talking animatedly to a smartly dressed elderly lady who wore an expression somewhere between benign interest and mild alarm. inevitably i veered over in their directinon to do a bit of earwigging. as i passed, mr klaxon was saying, with real feeling: “TWENTY GRAND!!”.
Nine years old when this went to No 1, and it scared me, because I really didn’t get pop music – we had none in the house, we listened to R4 – and I only ever heard it on ToTP.
It’s hard to remember the moral panic around punk and new wave now in anything except the broadest terms: Bill Grundy, spitting, fighting etc … But that panic pervaded a certain part of the media. I remember reading my grandmother’s Sunday Post, and there being a long first person story about a mother who’d “lost her son” to punk. He used to be the life and soul, full of happiness, kind to old ladies, and so on. Then he started listening to punk and became sullen and silent, staying in his room, never a nice word for anyone. In the video for Heart of Glass, Debbie Harry seemed to embody that: she was so contemptuous, sneering at the camera, but amused, too – not angry. It seemed to me that she just didn’t care – and what could terrify a child more than an adult who didn’t care? Care – about the price of bread, about kids, about the state of the toilet – was what adults did. Heart of Glass seemed to be a harbinger of a terrible, cold world – far more than any of the actual punk records I’d seen on ToTP.
30 years on, I recognise that the child in the Sunday Post hadn’t been “lost to punk”, he’d become a teenager. And I recognise that this is no more a punk record than Up the Junction. But first impressions die hard.
I hit puberty at just the right time for Blondie. Debbie Harry was head and shoulders above everyone for my “affections”, even Sian Adey Jones on Page 3!