The best disco song that Debbie Harry ever heard
When Blondie emerged in the latter half of the 1970s, they were rightly hailed as innovators ushering in a new era of alternative music. While they were surrounded by several other innovative groups performing in iconic New York clubs such as CBGB and Max’s Kansas City, what Blondie offered wasn’t quite snotty or edgy enough to be punk and still only felt adjacent to the art rock bands in their extended circle. That said, it was fresh, exciting, and completely new.
It was the ‘new wave’, as people would go on to proclaim. What they’d done was successfully take the ethos of punk and merge it with unapologetically poppy elements, with bright synth lines that one wouldn’t expect to hear from your typical punk act being scattered over the top. They’d managed to turn an attitude that was staunchly anti-mainstream and make it commercially accessible while pulling from all of the underground movements that were happening around them in a tasteful and refined fashion.
Their self-titled 1976 album and its follow-up, Plastic Letters, were both hailed as groundbreaking albums for how they introduced the world to the concept behind ‘new wave’, but they really hit their stride with the release of their genre-defining third record, Parallel Lines. Thrusting them beyond the underground, they not only achieved critical adoration for the release of the record, but became a commercially appreciated group who had ensured their place in history.
It’s normally around this point in an act’s trajectory that they begin to branch out and display signs of expanding into different territories in order to prove they’re not one-trick ponies and are capable of demonstrating artistic growth, and in their case, they were certainly more than accomplished at this.
After they’d cemented their status as trailblazers, the band saw fit to venture into the worlds of disco and hip-hop, both of which were also in their infancy and very much part of the New York underground scene that Blondie considered themselves a part of. Their home city was helping to spawn these new innovations, and with their increased notoriety, they saw fit to place more attention on these burgeoning scenes that deserved more exposure.
While this greater foray into disco had been inevitable since they chose to include the four-to-the-floor beat of ‘Heart of Glass’ on Parallel Lines, what may have been slightly more surprising to some was that they’d go on to work with the king of disco himself, Giorgio Moroder.
In a brief radio interview with Triple J broadcaster Maynard in 1990, vocalist Debbie Harry proclaimed that her favourite disco song of all time was one of Moroder’s best-known efforts, his 1977 collaboration with Donna Summer, ‘I Feel Love’. Now regarded as a staple of the genre and one of the most groundbreaking releases of its kind, you can certainly hear how this would have played a vital role in their sound moving in this direction.
“I think I really liked the Giorgio Moroder things that he did with Donna Summer,” she revealed to Maynard, claiming that this stood above the rest of his work alongside the artist. However, she would also go on to declare that she is still stunned by the fact that she got the opportunity to work with him on the band’s 1980 hit, ‘Call Me’. “It was a coincidence, I guess, that that came up,” she told the broadcaster. What isn’t a coincidence is that Blondie would become celebrated for this embrace of disco, and that they were dead good at it too.
