The Cornish island that hosted Blondie’s last classic video
A tucked-away archipelago off the mainland of England’s Cornwall served as an unlikely backdrop for Blondie’s last classic video.
They’d hit rocky waters by the time of 1982’s The Hunter. Only a year or so earlier, Blondie were one of the biggest bands on the planet, the first bona fide superstar of the CBGB punk cohort and a leading force of the US new wave. There was a King Midas’ touch to their pop domination, as the band tried their hand at everything from rocksteady whimsy to disco glamour, and even ventured into New York’s emerging hip-hop scene, fuelling their eclectic chart supremacy.
But in a swift derail of momentum, the Blondie magic began to ebb. For their sixth LP, the band pursued a conceptual “theme of searching, hunting, or pursuing one’s own Mt Everest” to attempt to anchor a clump of unfocused and mushy suite of songs lacking the bright pop lights still shining as recent as prior LP Autoamerican.
While one of The Hunter’s few saving graces, ‘War Child’, stood as Blondie’s last single of their original tenure, it was the eccentric ‘Island of Lost Souls’ that yielded the last promo before their disbandment in late 1982.
A sequel of sorts to ‘The Tide is High’, ‘Island of Lost Souls’ conjures an infectious dive into their Caribbean fancies, drummer Clem Burke playing a steelpan and Chris Stein handling a Brazilian cuíca for extra calypso flavours. Dwelling in a subtly surrealistic lyrical plane, Blondie sought out a suitably unique environment to serve as a backdrop for a fittingly curious promo video.
It turned out that the Isles of Scilly boasted just the sub-tropical environment Blondie were looking for. A cluster of islands 24 miles southwest of the Cornish peninsula, the sunny archipelago’s Tresco Abbey Gardens featured all kinds of exotic plant species and unique botany, a perfect locale for Blondie’s offbeat new pop number.
Heading to Tresco Island with director Keith ‘Keef’ McMillan and longtime band photographer Brian Aris to snap surrounding promo stills, the band let loose a dress-up traipse of undertakers sailing on a gig boat and the band alternating between a Latin American get-up and white, robed brass players in fish masks.
Among such slapdash theatre is Blondie singer Debbie Harry cavorting around the strange land one minute, to frantically navigating its flora labyrinth the next. There’s a loose, off-kilter air throughout ‘Island of Lost Souls’ reflecting the band’s internal unravel, lacking the razor cool of ‘Rapture’s hip-hop strut or ‘Heart of Glass’ disco ball shimmer, but there’s a charming oddness to The Hunter’s only video, possessing an irreverent energy keenly eschewing their poster group expectations and grabbing at new ideas, if not entirely hitting an aesthetic bullseye.
Blondie would break up in November 1982 after The Hunter’s lacklustre reception and scant ticket sales, precipitating the cancellation of their scheduled European tour. Harry would pursue a fairly successful solo career, but until 1999’s ‘Maria’ revamp, the lasting impression the world had of Blondie’s pop reign was their raided costume box promo in the heart of Cornwall’s far-flung islands.
