@Doctor Casino # 67:

What you say pretty much sums up what the bulk of the ‘credible’ music press were saying back in ’80 when this came out. Blondie were dismissed as a corporate rock band, with some decent studio craft, who appealed to kids that didn’t know better.

Remember, Blondie records were nestled in the same charts that held The Specials and The Jam. Credibility would not have been so generously dished out as today. Think on that.

Clem Burke was, and is, one of the greatest drummers around.

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.

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 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.

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)

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.

(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

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.

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.

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.