BLONDIE
“I want you to dis Blondie, because I don’t believe it’s possible”, writes a naive reader, but you see this attitude is precisely what makes Blondie so hateful, the belief of their fans that the band represent pop perfection when really they were an OK new wave group who nicked their best ideas. Nicking ideas isn’t a problem, obviously – this is pop music, after all – but if you’re going to swipe stuff, do it better than the originals, for goodness’ sake. Blondie’s eager, clodhopping version of “The Tide Is High” is excruciating once you’ve heard The Paragons, their Moroder-disco stuff is a pallid sham (you could only dance to it in exactly the same ironised spirit which it was made, which is why “Atomic” et al. have become so popular at foul 80s kitsch nights), and let’s not even approach “Rapture”.
As for their early, guitar-y, ‘sassy’ stuff, if it’s not a xerox it certainly sounds like one: again, their synthesis of the New York Dolls, Shangri-La’s and the Ramones is about a thousand times more interesting if you’ve never heard any of those bands. Blondie’s main appeal was their adolescent bitchiness (“Rip Her To Shreds”), and certainly they do that passably well, and certainly there’s always going to be a segment of the audience for whom that kind of catfight-pop is the epitome of what the music can be, but let’s leave them to their Daphne And Celeste records and move on.
Still though, as pop stars, as icons, they passed muster: pity they weren’t happy just being pop stars. They had all these experimental roots, don’t you know, which once they’d put that frivolous disco stuff behind them they needed to show. So you got a couple of bad albums pre-retirement, and then one unfeasibly dreadful one post. I’m not sure which was worse, the cod-sophistication on the jazzy reunion tracks where the real Debbie’n’Chris strutted their stuff, or the cod-unsophistication of the money-grubbing singles. No Exit? No Escape would have been more appropriate.