The moment Clem Burke called the peak of Blondie’s career
By anyone’s standards, 1978’s Parallel Lines, the third album from Blondie, was a monster hit and runaway success.
Selling over 20 million copies, the record accounts for almost half of Blondie’s total career album sales, but it’s no wonder the the release is such a perennial favourite when you remember that it has tracks like ‘One Way or Another’, ‘Sunday Girl’ and ‘Heart of Glass’ tucked away inside the sleeve with that iconic black, white and red cover.
But the band are far from a one-album wonder, and have seen plenty of singles success, too, with songs like ‘Dreaming’, ‘Call Me’, ‘Atomic’, ‘The Tide Is High’, ‘Rapture’, and ‘Maria’, among others. They’re known for their daring and eclectic blurring of genre boundaries, and blending unlikely combinations like punk with disco, or else fusing funk and pop, rock, new-wave, reggae and even elements of hip-hop into their iconic sound.
Having come up out of the same New York CBGBs punk scene that also gave us acts like Television, Patti Smith, Talking Heads and the Ramones, Blondie became one of the biggest and most all-conquering powerhouses the scene had to offer, though their embrace of more radical musical styles didn’t always go over so well with those who preferred to remain solidly on more punky ground.
But it did win them the attentions and affections of another musical luminary and adventurer, and one who they had greatly admired since the start of their career. In fact, when asked in a 1979 Rolling Stone interview with Jamie James, not long after the release of the Parallel Lines album, what the high point of Blondie’s career up to that point had been, drummer Clem Burke couldn’t look past the first meeting with one of his musical heroes.
“Aside from all the success,” he said, “I’d have to say meeting David Bowie. That was good. We are all Bowie freaks. There have been so many things that have taken us over a hump, but that was definitely the first biggie: getting to Toronto and meeting Bowie and Iggy [Pop] and having them come into the dressing room and introduce themselves”.
Having been booked as the opening act for Iggy Pop’s 1977 The Idiot tour, where Bowie was featuring in Pop’s band as a keyboard player and backing vocalist, Blondie would get to become much more familiar with the English singer over the coming years and decades, and would continue to cross paths for the rest of their careers, although following the end of the ‘77 tour, they never worked together again professionally.
Following Bowie’s 2016 death, she echoed Clem Burke’s words from all those years ago in suggesting how much the band had lionised the British singer. “Without this visionary and his friend Iggy Pop, where would Blondie be today?” she asked, before answering herself. “Silly question and one that can’t be answered really, but there is no doubt in my mind that Bowie played a big part in our future successes”.
As familiar as Blondie would get with Bowie over the years, it was Bowie himself who got a little too over-familiar with frontwoman Debbie Harry during their early encounters on the Iggy Pop tour. In her 2019 memoir Face It, Harry recounted the time that Bowie, with Iggy in tow, had hit her up for a bump of cocaine when he couldn’t find any anywhere else, and how he had subsequently exposed himself to her. Harry brushed the incident off by saying, “I guess he was trying to say thank you”, and so seemingly took his actions with much better grace and humour than they deserved. Bowie later tried to push things one step further, when he propositioned Harry with the question, “can I fuck you?” to which she supposedly, drolly, coolly and dismissively replied “I don’t know, can you?”
Though each of the members of Blondie have continued to speak positively about their musical hero over the years, it would hardly be a shock if Bowie’s actions after they had met him took an edge off what Burke had previously considered to be the pinnacle of their career.
