|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
||||||||
 |
|||||||||||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|||||
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, including 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.
Now Deeside Leisure Centre may no longer feature on the rock ‘n’
roll map, but back in 1979 some whizz had come up with the notion that
if you placed insulated carpet over the ice, you could transform the town’s
ice rink into Britain’s third largest concert hall in the country.
Incredibly for a backwater town in North Wales, the Deeside Leisure Centre
for an all too brief time played host to some of the greatest names in
pop, including The Jam, Gary Numan, Bob Marley, Kiss, The Clash, Ian Dury
and the Blockheads and um… Showaddywaddy.
What’s more, many visiting bands also commented on the enthusiasm
of the Deeside crowd, including Debbie Harry herself who, in the book
Making Tracks: The Rise of
Blondie, comments,
" We did two shows at a place called the Deeside Leisure Centre outside
Liverpool, in a hockey-sized skating rink. It was packed with five thousand
people and the audience sang along on each song. Those two shows were
the best gigs of the tour.”
But the plain truth was though, that as well as being one of the biggest,
the Deeside Leisure Centre was also by far the coldest concert venue in
the country. As such, the warm all-singing-all dancing welcome afforded
the many acts that came to play was generated in part at least, by a practical
need to stave off frostbite and hypothermia. And though the gigs were
clearly memorable for Debbie, the night I went was memorable for all the
wrong reasons.
It was during the interval between the support band and Blondie that it
happened. My friend Rob G and I had just found a place with good visibility
next to a couple of girls, when one of them suddenly span round and fixed
me a glassy-eyed stare. Little did I know she was about to open her mouth
and projectile vomit all over my jeans. Not that, given the press of the
crowd, I could have gotten out of the way had I anticipated it.
Though my jeans were soaked right through, Rob had somehow managed to
escape the warm and watery emission, and I didn’t hold it against
him that he managed to lose me in the throng shortly afterwards. After
all, I did now honk to high heaven with the potently pungent and sickly
sweet bouquet of cider-besed sick. Such was the smell, that I had to decide
there and then whether to stick it out or give up and go home.
But on the plus side, having decided to stick it out, at least being gagged-up
on meant that wherever I wandered, the crowd melted away around me, giving
me an excellent view of the stage. And it certainly was a great gig. Still,
I was relieved to get home and get cleaned up. It was a Saturday night
so my folks were still down the local with their friends Irene and Tony.
But when they got back, they asked me how the gig went.
" Some girl puked on my jeans," I replied, still feeling sorry
for myself. But everyone thought that was just hilarious and Tony made
some lame quip about pregnancy along the lines of,
" Are you sure she wasn’t trying to tell you something?”
I left them having coffee in the kitchen and turned on the telly. Rosemary’s
Baby was just starting…
Copyright: Poke-in-the-Eye Publishing 2006