Blondie | Eat To The Beat | (Chrysalis) 1979

LP Reviewed in NME, 22nd September, 1979

BLONDIE have more fun. They also sometimes sell more records. This puts our subject in a rather invidious position. The temptation to sneer at Blondie’s rise from trash pop pariahs to bona fide teenybop idols has not been widely resisted.

That’s what you get for making it all look so easy. The fact that Blondie are, merely fulfilling the fantasy they were first rooted in has been widely overlooked. They make good singles, it is grudgingly acknowledged.

They make albums that contain good singles; that will be bought by many and remembered mostly for the singles. This is no exception.

Come Christmas, with by then perhaps two more hits to their name, grandparents all over the country will enter record shops and say that name. Blondie are that close to being a genuine pop phenomenon.

I don’t want to belittle their labours by harping on the phenomenon’s foremost aspects, but it’s hard not to. As an album, ‘Eat To The Beat’ ranks ahead of its immediate predecessors — a varied, rounded, more confident display of the things they do well and the things they insist on doing regardless.

Mike Chapman

But as a rock band Blondie cut little ice. Catching them live on their first tour supporting Television proved a big mistake. Debbie Harry‘s frail presence could hardly even front an army of toy soldiers, never mind a live jiving rock division (should she have one to front).

But it’s just this presence that’s been exploited so well in other ways. Her slight voice, too timid for rock, has the perfect coy quality for pop, especially the pop Mike Chapman produces.

That his brand of guileless teeny pop (Mud, Suzi Quatro . . . lest we forget) is back might have been anticipated. All part of the richly disposable tapestry of the early ’70s that feels uncannily near right now.

Blondie | Eat To The Beat | (Chrysalis) 1979

If The Knack are The Sweet, Gary Numan is David Bowie, Spizz might yet be Marc Bolan, and even Sparks are back in the charts, then what can that make Blondie? Who cares? It’s a silly game anyway: All I know is the cover of ‘Eat To The Beat’ already looks like a page in Smash Hits.

So, let’s forget the thesis and take a stroll around the contents. They assimilate quickly. The title track, ‘Victor’ and ‘Accidents Never Happen’ follow the band’s infatuation with modish rock, not the most rewarding avenue.

The first four cuts lead straight to the heart of their appeal: ‘Dreaming’, the single, adds the lilt of ‘Sunday Girl’ to the rumble of ‘X Offender’, but what Richard Gottehrer made sound like a roller-rink Chapman adapts for an English church hall youth club disco.

‘The Hardest Part’, redolent of early Bowie / Alomar collaborations, replays their favourite cold war foreign movie theme in stop-frame bursts.

“The hardest part of the armoured guard. The man of steel behind the steering wheel. Need to feel some hardened steel,” she squeals. Bear in mind that Lois Lane is in fact a brunette.

‘Union City Blue’ is another ‘Sunday Girl’ or ‘Presence Dear’ relating to the movie Union City that Debbie stars in, while ‘Shyla’ is pure dream candy; the cotton-wool sound of ‘Going Back’ as once rendered by Dusty Springfield.

The first four cuts on the other side find the Blondies at play: throwaway reggae (‘Die Young Stay Pretty’), some obvious Motown locomotion (‘Slow Motion’), a throwaway lullabye (‘Sound Asleep’), and a commercial fail-safe Euro-disco extension of something you may well have heard somewhere before.

Blondie | Eat To The Beat | (Chrysalis) 1979

If you’re planning a move to Tibet then by all means buy this album, but if not you’re going to hear the best of it in the circumstances best suited to it anyway.

One more thing. Debbie Harry has a past that belies her glossy image, and that disturbs certain people. But she’s never tried to hide it, and I like her for that.

As (I’m not) ‘Living In The Real World’ (no morel, the Britpunk sprint that finishes the album attests, she’s not quite what popular myths have assigned, and Jayne Mansfield sealed, about du . . . (oops) blondes. Her tongue is pretty certainly in her cheek. (Paul Rambali)