The band Blondie “were trying to sound like” for ‘Heart of Glass’
Blondie don’t feel like a band that ever struggled, do they? Not that they didn’t put the work in, mind. They were famously a bit of a joke on the CBGB scene until they grafted enough to become tighter than the Ramones’ keks while also being a hell of a lot better to look at. What I mean is that it’s difficult to imagine a band with their back catalogue, back story, and literal Debbie Harry up front being anything other than a slam dunk success.
The story of Blondie, though, is tough. One filled with false starts, peaks and troughs of popularity and victory snatched from the jaws of defeat. They earned every shred of success they got and deserved a lot more. What else can you say about the band that gave the world ‘Heart of Glass’?
Broadly speaking, the Manhattan punk scene of the time could be split into two groups. There was the high voltage, four-to-the-four punk rock ramalama of the Ramones, Dead Boys and The Heartbreakers, but Blondie found themselves in the other group. One where their peers were Television, Talking Heads and Patti Smith, who always had one eye on a more expansive sonic palette than what could be done with half a Marshall stack and a knockoff Strat. It wasn’t that they couldn’t make pogo-able pop punk, but after their first couple of albums, they were keen to push the envelope, and at the end of the 1970s, there was a lot of bold new sounds tap into.
By 1978, the band’s two albums had made a name for themselves in Europe but were still little more than a cult concern back home. Their label, Chrysalis, knew they had potential superstars on their hands, though, and were throwing collaborators at the wall to see who could break them into the mainstream. George Martin was mooted, as was ABBA’s Benny and Bjorn. The band took a meeting with Phil Spector before deciding he was, in Chris Stein’s accurate assertion, “completely whacked”. In Mike Chapman, though, they found a producer who was open to the same influences the band were.
Which isn’t to say they got on. Chapman worked the band like a drill sergeant, even nearly coming to blows with bassist Nigel Harrison when he wouldn’t play what the producer told him to play. However, he could be more insightful when he needed to be. Case in point, the band had been tooling around with a demo called ‘Once I Had a Love’ for a few years. They were convinced it was a reggae song waiting to happen, which Chapman disagreed with. Rather than forcing the issue, he instead tried a different tack. Talking to Uncut in 2008, he recalled asking Harry, “What’s out there at the moment that’s influencing you?” She said, ‘Donna Summer’. I really liked Giorgio Moroder’s repetitive synthesised groove, too.”
Not everyone was on board. As Chapman remembered, “That was the last thing Clem (Burke, drummer) wanted to do. He said, ‘I’m not playing disco’.” But as the band worked on it, it soon became clear that tapping into this new synthesized sound was the way forward. It was a huge gamble at the time, Burke told Uncut: “We didn’t record it to be our big breakthrough. We had no idea. We were trying to sound like Kraftwerk.”
What people didn’t know then was that Moroder, Summer and Kraftwerk, with a little bit of tweaking, were going to be the sound of the entire 1980s. By keeping their minds open, Blondie got there first and had their first US number one off the back of it.
