Published in Sounds, 19th January 1980
Blondie | Gig Review | Hammersmith Odeon, London 1980 | SO BLONDIE is all about Debbie Harry huh? Leastways that’s the propaganda and never having seen them live before that’s what I was expecting. But it ain’t necessarily so.
In fact on this last night of their British tour it was their generally neglected tub-thumper Clem Burke who won my heart and not just because he had the gall to upstage Ms Hari (as Guru Gaz insists on spelling it) with a genuine gold lame suit the like of which I hadn’t seen since Vince Eager bestrode the ‘6.5 Special’ studio like a rock ‘n’ roll colossus.
Throughout Clem declared himself forthrightly the second most important part of Blondie’s on-stage sound. He was the only one acknowledging that beneath their unique sheen sweat might be shed in the cause of communicating the music in a different way to the all-conquering records.
Clem was as flash as a whole marching band. He twirled his sticks, flung them 10 feet in the air and if he missed the catch he did it again. Most of all he cracked those skins with a verve and precision which swept them way out in front of the guitars and keyboards to insist that this was physical music, rock more than pop, not just an anodyne living-room experience between you and your record player.
Clem dug the road, all Deb had to do was graciously cut the tape to declare it open. Don’t get me wrong. It was a highly acceptable concert and the whole band must have been contributing effectively but it was in the manner of the pen-pushers in the Portakabin whose individual efforts are never identified.
Blondie | Gig Review | Hammersmith Odeon, London 1980
The gig was about the navvy and the great lady, and Clem was the point of contact, the one I could relate to. I needed him because Debbie Harry is such a strange performer, so elusive. I mean wouldn’t you agree that she’s at her very best, her artistic peak, as a photographic subject?
When she’s at her greatest distance from you or me? In the Great Scheme Of Things (not her own) I think she gained fame through music in order that she would be photographed. And that’s an extra to the usual list of reasons why a concert has a lot of ritual about it.
‘Blondie: a retrospective exhibition of their hits’. More than for any other rock band in the world the people come to look as much as to listen. They could almost end up ‘looking’ at the songs, artefacts, the way they look at Debbie, artist/artefact.
Heart Of Glass
On this night at least it was Clem Burke who stopped that happening and made Blondie live. And the rest is about Debbie Harry. Accepting at a stroke the lack of intimacy and emotional depth in her music I was left with a sequence of dynamic surprises — about her resources of sheer craftsmanship and the slippery chimerical quality of the style, attitude, and atmosphere she evokes.
She is a startling singer. Her middle-range single-hit tone is summed up in the song and the phrase ‘Heart Of Glass‘. Pure but fatigued and stressed, necessarily protected by a hard outer shell.
I expected that to be the whole story. Instead infinite variety. ‘Shayla‘: for the bridge section between verses of the tale of a factory girl she dived down into a subterranean register, still powerful, still effortless, as if she was working up to slotting ‘Old Man River’ into the next album.
‘The Hardest Part‘: she growled ’25 tons of hardened steel’ trying to persuade us that -the urban angel has a savage side.
‘Victor’: from the back of the stage behind the guitarists she screamed time and again, incomprehensible raw power, refuting all prettiness, cracking the image though certainly not exposing her true self behind it because it was just sound not soul (even so I’m sure I felt a shock-wave from the audience for whom this vocal equivalent of the high kicks she does from time to time was almost too much).
Blondie | Gig Review | Hammersmith Odeon, London 1980
‘Atomic’: over Blondie disco-machine funk she hit stunningly loud, high sustains, total technical bravura. Pete Frame’s band family tree in the programme showed that Debbie Harry has been singing in groups for 14 years and her performance showed that she’d been learning all along —specifically how to do what she’s done to us for the past three years.
Whether she will ever choose to apply her skills to anything more profound I’d guess to be a matter of where her temperamental growth takes her rather than ongoing assessment of maiking demands.
For now Blondie’s slight songs gather together over an hour and a half into an expression of resigned fatalism. There is no pain in it — though there might be a tough resilience or courage if that impression isn’t from the facial and vocal grace of Debbie Harry fooling me into seeing content where there is none.
One Way Or Another
Still, Blondie are a mood at least. The encores, the last of the tour, said a little more about them. ‘Louie Louie’, greeted with decrepit joy by card-carrying fogies like me, came as an outpouring of relief that the formalities had been completed.
They broke ranks. Robert Fripp sat in. Iggy Pop led them through something wild which might have been ‘Fun House’. They kicked the arse off ‘One Way Or Another’ and Clem Burke declared this concert closed by wrecking his kit in the manner of his hero, Keith Moon.
With the tight (self-imposed) rein off Blondie are a different, hotter band. Smart New York personalities form a queue to jam with them and that’s nice.
But it did remind me that of all the New York underground bands over the years it’s only disciplined three-minute-pop-song Blondie who have got close enough to a mass of people to issue eight straight hit singles without making idiots of themselves and their fans.
They lack depth but they lack pretentiousness too. (Phil Sutcliffe)
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