BLONDIE – “Atomic”
At some point in the early 1980s – after this, but not long after – I realised we were all going to die, rather horribly and rather soon. I acquired the conviction before I picked up the geopolitical knowledge to put names to it – Reagan, Afghanistan, Cruise. Maybe I picked up the information at school, or watched the wrong five minutes of the news. Once I became aware of the imminent nuclear doomsday, I avoided fresh information on it, but when some did break through my filter it was like overproof liquor for the imagination. How bad would it be? Infinitely. How would we know the hour of its coming? You wouldn’t. What on Earth would you do when they dropped the bomb?
If I’d been born a few years earlier, maybe Blondie would have given me an answer. “Atomic” stares down Armageddon with contempt and desire and then dances in the ruins. There are, broadly, only two strands of nuclear pop – songs protesting about the bomb and lamenting its consequences, and songs which take its nihilising presence as an opportunity, a challenge. We’ll be meeting great examples of both in the future, but it’s the second type that’s more thrilling and fascinating: “If Ronnie’s got a bomb we could all die anyday! But before I let that happen, I’ll dance my life away.” This kind of song, now I think about it, opened me up to the possibilities of pop more than anything else. Question authority? I was too well brought up. Question sexuality? Save it for later. But for pop to be able to question – no, to flout – something as huge as The Bomb? Now that was power.
But all that came later. I didn’t register “Atomic” at the time, and didn’t return to it until years later, when nuclear war had slipped down my list of concerns. It still seemed exciting, but inscrutable too: in “Atomic” the bomb is in the background, something for Debbie Harry to pose against on the sleeve like a pin-up girl from the dawn of the nuclear age. And that’s the song all over: striking a pose against the end (or after the end, in the hilarious video – 25 UNITS!).
It’s a shame that Mike Chapman cut the album version of “Atomic” down to a four-minute-warning friendly length, as what the single loses is priceless: the sense of event of those “Three Blind Mice” intro chords, and the sense of width and dynamics that bass-driven breakdown gives the song. But what remains is still magnificent. Next to “Atomic”, “Heart Of Glass” sounds tentative, a band experimenting with disco but still half-ready to discard it. As a fusion of rock, disco and pop this is far more full-blooded – indeed it’s one of the band’s most passionate singles. Debbie Harry sounds possessed by the moment, and the climax – “Oh, atomic, oh”, when she fades into her own enraptured backing vocals – is extraordinary.
Blondie, of course, were a group, and never more so than here. The sound of “Atomic” is unbeatable – those surf guitars, the surges of synth under Harry’s verses, Clem Burke’s rocket-fuel drum fills; all interweaving to make the single sound as vast and modern and hot as it does. And as lean: nothing is wasted, nothing is overdone. In the end, “Atomic”’s abstraction is what makes it one of the greatest Number Ones. You could hear the song as making love one last time as doomsday comes, but I prefer a more metaphysical reading: that wanting to come up with something that would match the absolute of nuclear war, Harry simply reached for the perfect gesture of glamour. “Oh, your hair is beautiful. Oh, oh, oh tonight.” Sex beats death.
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Tom in FT / Popular • Pop • 2,132 views • Share/Save
#25 – We don’t have to wait much longer for our first “straight in at Number One” entry in years, but “Atomic” wasn’t it.
As for the 1994 Diddy remix, I enjoyed it a lot – but then I was experiencing it in context. (That “context” being Love Muscle at the Brixton Fridge on Saturday nights.)
re ballard: at least i’ve got an excuse! i’m co-host on a fabulously popular science-fiction related radioshow which you shoul all check out pimp pimp, which has recently featured ballard as a topic hence i have been reading him 19-to-the-dozen of late…
i totally agree that phrases are used all the time (in pop and elsewhere) without thought to the wider resonance that could be found in them/projected onto them, and that the projection can be misleading — my feeling here is still that “atomic” in 1979/80 was not such a word (and that blondie were not as a project thoughtless in this way); other years, other moments, this same word would have easily flown under the radar*
caveat: at the time, it absolutely flew under my radar – but that’s a result of my inattention, and relative indifference to words in simple-seeming songs
my comment about them being a pop group rendering them “unserious” is really mostly a diagnosis of how *i* felt about them at the time — i liked them a lot but wasn’t terribly interested in them
*but actually even if this is a projection on tom’s part, i don’t think it delegitimises his point at all… if meaning is a picnic, the listener always brings some of the sandwiches (especially to minimal and evocative stuff); unlike tom, i was never bothered by the threat of the bomb — insofar as i was animated by it, i — rather shallowly — liked the idea of it; wanted it to fall; now that he’s read the song like this, i do too — in that sense, i tink he’s right, but he’s right because the reading’s interesting and fruitful and provocative, not because he’s solved the riddle correctly) (it makes the song seem bigger than i used to think it was, which i enjoy)
Re 18, The fact that something is not “musically complicated” is not necessarily a reason to mark it down. No matter, the pop craft displayed on “Atomic” is redolent of a band at the top of its game.
Re 22, Talking Heads. Hmmmmm. How many people actually listen to “Remain In Light” all the way through and enjoy the experience. TH were always better in theory then practice. I love bits of RiL, but some of it is dull and repetitive, like a lot of their work.
Good analogy – picnics and sandwiches. I know I’m going senile when I start to understand your posts!
I was thinking the same thing as Mike that the whole nuclear war scare didn’t start until a few years later into Reagan’s presidency. The whole world of CND marches, Greenham Common, ‘When The Wind Blows’ and ‘Protect and Survive’ wasn’t until after this.
I’d say the height of all that was when “Threads” was broadcast in 1984.
#28 – Remain In Light is a record I absolutely love but I tend to listen to the first side a hell of a lot more than the second.
Mike gets at what I was going to say. The word “atomic” here is a retro signifier. By 1979 we all said “nuclear” as we do today. “Atomic” actually fits in with other 1950s sci-fi lyrics such as “giant ants from space” from Blondie’s 1st LP. As well, I feel it’s just as likely the real meaning has to do with the idea of “atomizing,” breaking something down into tiny bits in this case. Maybe this is even a self-reflexive allusion to the arrangement of the song itself – a little guitar here, little bass pulses there, short vocal phrases… By the way, the “three blind mice” intro was a trick that Mike Chapman added in post-production – at least one of the musicians wasn’t happy with it, hearing it only when it was in the final mix. The bass solo, it’s commonly said, was Nigel Harrison noodling around when he thought the tape wasn’t running.
I don’t think the apocalytic dog-whistle of the word ‘Atomic’ relates to the threat of nuclear war as such. I agree that that wasn’t ramped up until a year or so later (although the threat had been in many of our minds for a long time.
What was in the fore of the public consciousness was the possibility of catastrophe resulting from the malfunction of nuclear power stations. The film China Syndrome was fresh in the mind and, although Chernobyl is yet six years away, so was the incident at Three Mile Island that inspired it.
I’ve always read the song as comparing the energy of Debbie’s lust for her beloved to the (potentially disastrous) energy of the atomic pile.
even if this is a projection on tom’s part, i don’t think it delegitimises his point at all… if meaning is a picnic, the listener always brings some of the sandwiches
I’m nodding in emphatic agreement here (and at Elsa’s take at #32). This could even be my favourite post of Tom’s to date. The song gets 8, but the post gets 10!
conrad @ 28:
Me, me, me! I love Remain in Light, it’s one of my absolute favourite albums and I often listen to it all the way through. Repetitive? I’d call it hypnotic and haunting myself! (The Great Curve is another of my favourite tracks to run to, actually, although the album as a whole isn’t entirely suitable.)
(mike if you can get to it, you absolutely should go see the V&A’s “cold war modern”, which is exactly about what you called “50s utopian futurism”)
yeah it’s true that thermonuclear anxiety didn’t generally ramp up for a couple of years (i just dug out that 1982 sun ra 12″ on y records, “thermonuclear war”, while looking for something else entirely) — there are plenty of flashes of it in mid-70s US punk culture (ubu obviously; ramones “rocket to russia”; dead kennedys; search and destroy fanzine as it morphs into REsearch) but maybe not enough to sustain my stronger claim :(
#26 Ah, come to think, it was first on Record Mirror’s list of songs that entered inside the Top 10 in the ’80s – funny to think of that as remarkable.
My context for the remix was bedroom-mixing in Bristol. Possibly not quite the same.
#28 I listened to Remain In Light all the way through two days ago. Wonderful. Mmmm. Ok, a bit drifty here and there.
… although Sir John Hackett’s book “The Third World War”, in which the Soviets consider a nuclear attack on the West in 1985, was published in 1978, and at school around that time they arranged a showing of the famous 60s TV drama “The War Game”, basically to scare the sixth form shitless.
Plenty of opportunities as we get further into the 80s to see how pop dealt with and reflected the prospect of nuclear war hanging over us. Simon Le Bon, this means you… (and the nearest we came was in 1983 too, although the aforementioned SLB wasn’t the main cause).
Comments on “Remain In Light” duly noted! About time I gave it another listen I think…
(sorry for the name drop, but Nick Heyward once told me “Favourite Shirts” was his attempt to write “I Zimbra” by the way. Although I think that single’s B-Side “Boat Party” sounds more like “I Zimbra” myself…)
“if meaning is a picnic, the listener always brings some of the sandwiches”
Yes!– that is a wonderful line Mr lørd sükråt wötsît
I will never listen to ‘Favourite Shirts’ the same way again.
PS: I always preferred ‘Fear of Music’ meself.
Since Day One of our relationship, it has been an understood “given” that my partner WILL desert me, if bidden to do so by David Byrne. I believe this is known as the “Celebrity Bye”.
I give thanks every day for Byrne’s heterosexuality.
* suddenly remembers with an icy shudder that he has booked FRONT ROW tickets for us both on next year’s “Songs of Byrne and Eno” tour. I shall be checking sideways for come-hither winks. *
i think i stole it off noted stand-up mr frank kermode!
(i too prefer fear of music)
Yesterday I discovered that Rob DIckens, formerly of Brit Award fame, has said that Xenomania are ruining British pop because they can’t structure songs properly – they only stitch choruses together.
Better than stitching bridges together, I thought. And now it occurs to me that Atomic is all intro, bridge and coda. No conventional verse or chorus.
Re 19: Yes. At the time I was pissed off that Union City Blue stuck at 13 while this follow-up crashed in at 3 (to use the parlance of 1980 Radio 1). I like it plenty, but that still grates as I think Union City Blue is unimpeachable, my fav Blondie 45, followed by Heart Of Glass, Picture This, Dreaming, Rapture, and Presence Dear. Atomic just after.
Possible dawn of public synth/gtr divide? Didn’t think that left me trailing, but as Seymour Skinner said to Mrs Krebappel, “I’ve always admired your ability to be personally offended by broad social trends.”
I’ve been grumpy about the last couple of #1s (and meh or negative about the previous eleven). I also said a little while ago that my favourite Blondie is the very early neo-Shangri-Las stuff. But actually this is great and I think Tom captures its musical delights superbly (as always). I think I’d reserve 10s for records I totally love, so I’d stick with 9 here.
My view on meanings: we don’t need to decide what Blondie intended (I’m rarely interested in that), nor do we need to decide between invoking nuclear war or the old optimism around the atomic age or it just meaning ‘wow, great sex!’ – they are surely all in there at once, and it’s more rewarding to hear them all at the same time, I think.
Re Mike @ 26 – Yes, Love Muscle was indeed my dancing memory of the Diddy remix. And those were lovely evenings/mornings, but the original remains unbettered for me at least. Why the overall love for this one? It was an oddly subversive record without being particularly avant garde (so it isn’t Remain in Light for example). Key thing for me, thinking about it…. “your hair is beautiful” was an odd lyric, objectifying a male lover by Harry’s vocal. It was, and is, very sexy and very odd, rather abstract. And so very powerful.
I am, in context reminded also of Picture This and the lyric that goes”….my finest hour, the one I spent watching you shower” in a more conventional song – but still hugely memorable for me. Gosh, they were good….
The ideological battle between Atomic and Union City Blue interests me from above, because they are remarkably similar songs. In both there is minimal lyrical content, Debbie Harry’s voice is more of an instrument than anything else. The words are chosen for effect but the magnificence, or the power and/or passion of what is going on is not attached to much beyond the groundswell of goodwill they create in the listener. In that respect the titles of both songs make more sense, they are the right words in the right space for the songs.
For all the reggae, disco and rap toying with songs that Blondie did, they are really making dance music here, and dance music where the lyrics are subservient to the groove. Atomic has builds, crescendos and their versions of sampling (3BM + The Shadows). Its playful and is a stone cold 10 for me. Union Ciddy Blue’s lyrics are equally vague, but its a guitar based singalong.
With the exception of “Eleanor Rigby”/”Yellow Submarine,” every single one of your 10 scores as sucked. And yes, I realize I’ve marked myself as a rockist, but seriously, I don’t understand why “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’,” “Atomic,” or even “Dancing Queen” deserve 10s. I don’t find these songs inspiring in the least little bit.
Further thought on “if meaning is a picnic, the listener always brings some of the sandwiches”
What if the listener brings the wrong sandwiches?
Does that not spoil the picnic somewhat?
My own opinion, I have decided, is that most listeners’ sandwiches will be appropriate, maybe not to your taste, but not so much that they spoil things, and someone else can have those ones anyway. Unfortunately, you’ll always get some who bring sandwiches which simply don’t go with that particular picnic.
vinylscot @ 47:
You don’t have to eat anybody else’s sandwich if you don’t want to. My banana and pickled onion may not be to your taste but they are right for me, while your peanut butter and anchovy would put me off (good anchovies spoiled). But we can both still enjoy the picnic! There is no fixed meaning…
pjb @ 45:
“oddly subversive without being particularly avant garde” seems the perfect formula for an outstanding pop single to me. It has to be accessible to a degree or it won’t sell in the numbers required to get it to the top, and it has to be subversive enough to change the thinking of a significant slice of the general public.
Captain Beefheart and Talking Heads may have broken more ground but they didn’t have really big popular followings (Once in a Lifetime notwithstanding). I tend to thing of Blondie as the mass-market face of the Heads.
Seven year old Billy assumed that Union City Blue was a song about trades unions that he couldn’t understand, the political subject matter contributing to its disappointinting chart performance.
as everyone knows*, UCB was the themetune** to “union city”, a film deborah harry starred in (released in 1980) set in a grim 50s industrial american town — so the word “union” DID have secret/sketchy political content (heh, just like atomic!), esp. if you actually saw the film (it’s based on a short story by cornel woolrich)
(to be honest the only thing i can remember in it is that DH and her husband had one of those beds that fold into the wall)
*is this true? the internet seems strangely quiet about it, so maybe it’s become a widely forgotten or never-known fact
**actually i dimly remember that the song wasn’t used in the film, tho chris stein wrote the music — but might be wrong about this
I remember reading about Union City in Smash Hits, with a b+w pic of Debbie sat in her kitchen with a cup of coffee, looking stunning with short dark hair. Was it set in the 60s, Tarkus? It certainly never made it to Purley Astoria.
I dimly remember reading that the song wasn’t in the film.
In my mind Union City is season 2 of The Wire, only in black and white, and starring Debbie Harry. Clearly this film would rival The Third Man, so it can’t be true, but if anyone has a copy I’d LOVE to see it.
“only in black and white”… Meanwhile, in back in the world of film criticism, Union City is apparently “noted for its use of color”. But I’ve never seen it, and I must say that – prompted by the video of the song? – I also imagined it had something to do with the docks. Which it doesn’t, or at least as far as I gather.
no it’s set in the 50s, in union city, new jersey — i saw it (i think on video, possibly on tv) in the early 80s… i’d forgotten she had dark hair (and i wonder if this worked against the film’s success?)
i actually remember it as bein in black and white but this may just be the passage of time — i suspect it ain’t very good or we’d all know more about it! (deb’s next big role would be in cronenberg’s videodrome)
Well, I’ve just found out it’s on dvd, so I’ll let you know! The cover shot looks like tinted monochrome, and features her rugged beau Everett McGill (later in Twin Peaks) and a BLONDE Debs (!) with a fine Atomic Age ‘do – something which may have been playing on hers and Chris Stein’s minds when they wrote the 45 we’re meant to be gassing about.
also it features cch pounder, an actress i have always liked
#54, I like her a lot in The Shield. Although I’ve never worked out how to pronounce her name, beyond “see-see-aitch” which I suspect it isn’t.
it’s just her initials so i think it is exactly that (i only know because i read it on imdb)
On New Year’s Eve, 1999, I was in a kitchen in Glasgow, getting ready for a night out at Optimo, which was on upstairs at the Art School.
I didn’t realize it yet, but a lot of my friends that night were already turning into the intransigent stay-at-homers that would later become, with one in particular refusing to even come out at all until he was literally picked up and carried to a cab.
But before all this, we got ready, me and a ginger-haired Edinburghian, by chatting nonsense and listening to the Top Singles of the Millenium on Radio 1. This song beat them all. It was the first time I, an American, had even heard it, but my friend was bouncing around the room, hair dryer as microphone, deadpan poses struck.
I would have been happy to just stay in that night with her, listening to that tinny countdown, striking poses in her kitchen, taking stock of everything pop had accomplished. But eventually it ended and it was time to go.
[...] 3) Popular: Blondie – “Atomic” [...]
I loved this song at the time (and still love it), and I definitely remember latching onto the atomic = nuclear = end of the world theme, and that this was part of its appeal. I think I associated it more generally with the alienation/nihilism of a lot of the “new wave” music I was listening to at the time (Gary Numan, Berlin Bowie, Joy Division etc). The hedonism-in-the-face-of-apocalypse is a theme that comes up often enough in pop.
Much as i enjoy reading all the posts of these songs dissecting meanings n trends-above ALL those kinda things in importance for the best pop music-beneath the great futuristic production here even, is the intuitive ‘rightness’ of the tune-something rarely (ever?) mentioned…Here,the joy of those long sun-drenched tonights on the verse into the open arms rush of the ‘oh your hair is beautiful’ chorus..Its a quality of magic n spirit that defies analysis-but everyone understands it when they hear it-and if this song didn’t have it in spades it wouldn’t've reached #1-and no one here would be talking about it at all….
Blondie lost touch with that spirit imo after Eat To The Beat..The Police lost it when The Police turned into Sting .Bolan had lost it by the end of ’73.All pop n rock artists seem to lose touch with it in the end.Its like they take their eye off the ball and forget what made their music brilliant n special in the first place or something…..9
This is similar to my theory about a band following up a mega success after a long absence with something that’s, if not overblown exactly, but lacking in the ease and lightness of touch they once had. It happened to Duran Duran after ‘Rio’ and The Police after their third album (I’d even say they lost “it” after the second). It could be as simple as money changing everything, but those moments when a band has “it” are usually fleeting and only the really special ones keep hold of it for very long.
Reading this, some song lyrics popped into my head about “Oppenheimer’s deadly toy”… ‘Russians’ by Sting had exactly the same effect on me as Blondie had on you, and the power of pop on young impressionable minds should never be under-estimated.
I think 63 has it right. The shelf life of many bands (not all) is never very long once vast success is reached. It’s not that the eye is taken off the ball as 62 suggests, it is imho a case of the ball in question changing from a soccer ball to a rugby ball and Bolan and Sting and company don’t notice and end up slicing their kick. Then there’s someone like five star who in the same analagy didn’t even have any boots and someone had nicked the ball as well so that’s them fucked.
Surprised (but v. pleased) to see the 10 score here, I was expecting to have to react to another ‘underwhelmed’ review. ;)
I can at least quibble with the comment about the single edit, which I think improves the song.
More later. I’m sure I wibbled on about “Atomic” on an ILM thread once. I’ll see if I can find the post…
I think I just don’t “get” Blondie, and probably never will – “Atomic” bores me more than anything else I’ve heard by them and clearly if I were going to be a fan I wouldn’t feel that way! This just feels empty, thin and wimpy to me, and whatever attitude might be embodied in the nuclear ambivalence just doesn’t crystallize for me. Different strokes, I guess.
Hello. And Bye.
“Atomic” scared the shit out of me when I first heard it; its luridly lucid music and its livid, primary-coloured video shot straight to videotape, full of gashed yellow and bleeding red, suggested the last three minutes before the Apocalypse, the end of everything. Debbie’s urgent-verging-on-frantic vocal performance (is she singing “Uh huh, make me tonight” or “Atomic me tonight”?) is sung as though the radiation is already seeping in, as though this is absolutely our last chance to “make it right.” If we have to die, then let it be with screams of ecstasy to blank out terror: “Uh huh make it magnificent/Tonight.” The perilously precious security blanket of Romanticism is clung to even as it shreds up: “Oh your hair is beautiful” is proclaimed as the Last Trump.
The music, with its heavily echoed lead guitars and deliberately backward-looking chord changes, via the Shadows/Barry/Morricone, also drags me back to my earliest memory; the sonorous and vaguely ominous clang recapturing the nocturnal taxi, conveying me back home from the Glasgow Royal Infirmary in December 1964, having just clung onto life following a near-fatal bout of pneumonia – it may have originated from Billy J Kramer’s “Little Children,” of all unlikely candidates. Moreover, the song demonstrates that its parent album, Eat To The Beat, was Blondie’s real masterpiece, ahead of the undeniably great, but a touch too clinical, Parallel Lines; “Dreaming” roars off its leash, ecstatically running downhill, and in particular Clem Burke’s drumming defines liberation, the return to punk power pop, with added Spectorian hauntology, is simultaneously intimate and epic. “Union City Blue” is perhaps Burke’s finest moment, as he lets rip with torrents of fourths and eighths fills and rolls, like thunderclaps over the leaking roof of CBGBs. But “Atomic” just edges out “Rapture” as the group’s greatest single (as in 45) achievement; it is a panoramic, scared and bold declaration of renewed love and permanence of spirit, just as the soul of the planet is being ripped to shreds.