The pop group Debbie Harry said offended people the most: “So far up people’s noses”
No other band straddled pop and punk as immaculately as New York’s Blondie. Lifting old doo-wop and girl groups from their youth and melding with new wave’s sharp and hooky affrontery, for a moment in the late 1970s, singer Debbie Harry found herself as the poster girl for the whole CBGB scene.
Before Talking Heads would pace past them in the early 1980s as America’s golden art pop outfit, Blondie found themselves as punk’s Billboard monster with their third LP. Released in September 1978 and pushed by the massive disco-flavoured hit ‘Heart of Glass’, Parallel Lines would eventually sell over 20million copies and still stands as the 83rd biggest-selling album of all time.
Yet, punk purists in the community would turn their nose up at Blondie’s keen grab for pop appeal. Visually striking with a stylish aesthetic that played with glamour and keen fashion savvy, Harry had already rubbed the small-minded and incurious up the wrong way with their demands for faux-DIY orthodoxy. The band’s embrace of genre trends of the day also lost them a few original fans.
Ever the curmudgeon, Ramones’ prickly and belligerent guitarist Johnny Ramone made his views clear on his 1981 appearance on NBC’s The Tomorrow Show, scoffing to host Kelly Lange in response to her comparing the two bands’ commercial fortunes: “They took that way to do that well, you know. Disco music, things like that to make it. We do what we believe and we have our integrity and original ideals…” Cue a rapturous applause from the audience clearly stuffed with the Ramones’ faithful.
A veneration for pop sensibility in whatever form guided much of Blondie and Harry’s musical output for the decades that followed. Jump to 2007, and Harry was sharing a bill with the likes of Cyndi Lauper and Erasure on the True Colours tour. Speaking to Hot Press at the time, the frontwoman revealed her karaoke song of choice, made public with an afterparty singalong with theatrical indie duo The Dresden Dolls.
“The show ended with us all on stage singing Abba’s ‘Take a Chance on Me’, which I’ve done before at parties but never in public!” Harry confessed. “Something I didn’t know until I was told it the other day is that the Sex Pistols based the ‘Pretty Vacant’ intro on Abba’s ‘SOS’, which makes Abba as big an influence on UK punk as Iggy and the Dolls!”
Referencing the New York glam band rather than the aforementioned Boston cabaret act, Harry further claimed that Sweden’s premier cultural export possessed as much confrontational energy as anybody that seized the London or Manhattan musical underground: “I don’t think any band’s got so far up people’s noses since”.
While a little hyperbolic, it’s true that Abba’s 1975 smash at least inspired ‘Pretty Vacant’s’ structural foundations, original Pistols bassist Glen Matlock diffidently acknowledging songwriters Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus’ unwitting helping hand in shaping a punk anthem over the years.
Abba’s sophisticated pop magic has reached into many of pop’s disparate corners, pulling everybody from The Sisters of Mercy and Portishead in covering their work, and counting the likes of industrial provocateurs Throbbing Gristle’s Chris Carter as an unabashed fan, titling 1978’s ‘AB7A’ instrumental in honour of the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest winners.
