Blondie was founded in 1974 in New York, where the group drew its influences from the famous punk rock club CBGBs. The band was initially going to be called Angel & the Snakes, but eventually the choice fell on Blondie after singer Debbie Harry was called that name during a walk along Houston Street. Andy Warhol designed Harry's look, blonde and dressed only in a white T-shirt and underwear. The first album, titled Blondie, strongly embraced the punk ethos. The music was reminiscent of girl groups from the sixties, a kind of female version of the Ramones.
They broke through in Europe in February 1978 with the second album Plastic Letters, which included the Buddy Holly-style song Denis (originally by the sixties duo Randy and the Rainbows aka Vinni Careller and Mike Zero, with their female version "Denise" from 1963) that topped the Dutch charts for three weeks. The success was followed by Presence dear. Their biggest hits Picture This, Hanging on the Telephone, and the disco-like Heart of Glass were on the third album Parallel Lines. This was followed by the album Eat to the Beat (1979) with the hits Dreaming and Atomic. This album was followed by Autoamerican, again produced by Mike Chapman, featuring the reggae cover The Tide Is High (originally by The Paragons), which reached fourth place in the Dutch charts. In 1980, the song Call Me was the music for the film American Gigolo. Blondie also made the first white rap hit, Rapture.
The group split up at the end of 1982, with bitter lawsuits over royalties as a result. Debbie Harry and her partner Chris Stein were the driving force behind the band all along, and the other band members felt financially disadvantaged by them. From 1982, the life-threatening disease pemphigus vulgaris meant Stein could no longer be musically active, and Harry gave up her solo career to care for Stein for two years. Eventually, he recovered enough to resume his musical career.
In 2006, Blondie was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. At the end of 2006, Deborah Harry released a new single in collaboration with Moby: "New York, New York", which reached second place in the World Dance Charts. In 2007, a European tour followed and Harry released the album Necessary Evil. In 2010, a new Blondie album appeared, called Panic of Girls. The Dutch artist Chris Berens designed the album cover. At the end of 2017, the band released the album Pollinator. The production reached number 4 in the United Kingdom, and the single 'Long Time' became a hit in various European countries. The album also did well in their home country America.
Source: Wikipedia Photo: Public Domain
On 26 January 2020, the album Parallel Lines was on our turntable during Sunday Morning Classics.
