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Parallel
Lines by Blondie (Chrysalis/ 1978)
Nothing could have prepared me for the quake in my trousers that accompanied my first sighting of Debbie Harry on Top of the Pops. I’d just come home from playing in a school team football match and turned on the TV, and there she was singing Blondie’s first major hit single Denis, which had just entered the charts. As if her platinum presence alone on TOTP were not exciting enough already to a fourteen-year-old boy with raging hormones, Debs actually performed a striptease during her performance: artfully removing her baggy white shirt/ skirt to finish off the number clad only in a Victorian-style bathing costume.
It was an intense experience for sure, but when the following Saturday, Denis blared out of the speakers as my friend and I blimped girls being spun-round by greasy guys on the waltzers at the local spring fair, the resultant effect was nothing short of transcendental. It’s a hackneyed scenario, I know, but nevertheless it was a goosebumps and hairs-standing-up-on-the-back-of-the-neck moment of heightened sensation which briefly encapsulated everything that being a teenager was all about.
Then, having bought the single and played it to death, things went a little quiet on the Blondie front until the release of ‘Hanging on the Telephone’ about six months later, by which time I was a fledgeling punk. However, it wasn’t until I eventually bought my copy of Parallel Lines and read the lyrics, that I realised with some disappointment that the opening line of ‘Hanging on the Telephone’ is actually, ‘I’m in the phone booth, it’s the one across the hall,’ and not ‘I’m in the phone booth, if you want to call a whore’.
This misreading of the lyrics had been brought about not only by Debbie’s NY drawl, but also by my then growing perception of Ms Harry as, ‘something of a one’! Indeed, at the time, there had been a rumour doing the rounds at school that she had once posed nude for a dirty mag, though no-one had ever come up with any evidence.
Meanwhile, everything about Parallel Lines was just perfect: the striking black and white op-art influenced cover, Debbie at the front in her classic-cut white dress and the boys at the back looking as though they’re having a top laugh in their modish black mohair suits, mop-top haircuts and punky Converse. This very look, inspired in equal part by The Jam was one I was soon to adopt myself (as did many others) by combining my old school blazer and kecks with my grandfather’s funeral tie. I even made my own Blondie badge with a picture cut out of Smash Hits and some sellotape. This was pretty crap, but in retrospect can be said to have encapsulated the prevailing DIY ethic of punk. Sadly though, things were soon to come between me and Debbie and the boys.
The problems started with ‘Heart of Glass’: Much as I instinctively loved this track, the stark fact was that it was a disco record. As such, it became the cause of schisms within the greater punkerati who could usually be relied upon to come together for a mass pogo during ‘If the Kids Are United’ by Sham 69, at the under-18s hop. Still, when the DJ played ‘Heart of Glass’, most of us elected to join the girls on the dancefloor. And given that you certainly couldn’t pogo to it and it was too slow to kick your legs out wildly to it, Siouxsie Sioux style, it was decided that a variant on the old skinhead, thumbs in trouser tops and alternate knee-bending routine wouldn’t compromise our sneering punk machismo too much.
But by the time the bittersweet 'Sunday Girl' hit the charts, it was pretty much agreed that Blondie had well and truly sold out, and to be caught with a copy of Parallel Lines in your record collection was tantamount to treason. Of course, it was testimony to Blondie’s success in crossing over to a wider pop audience, that all us boys were selling our copies of the album onto female schoolfriends who, six months earlier, wouldn’t have gone anywhere near what they perceived to be a punk band. I sold mine to Jayne L, a classmate whom I maintained a crush on for years.
I knew that getting shot of the record was wrong, but at that age what you know in your heart to be right is often overridden by the need to conform. Thankfully, the following Christmas my sister got Eat to the Beat and the year after that, AutoAmerican, meaning I could still indulge my passion for Blondie without compromising my credibility. And by the time Blondie came to play my home town in the winter of 1980, I’d grown self-confident enough in my musical choices to no longer give a hoot what my peers thought if I went along to see them.
Extracted from a longer article which appears in Nude, issue 8