Guest listener - Josie Rourke
Who’s Josie when she’s at home?
I’m the Artistic Director of the Donmar Warehouse in Covent Garden. My production of “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” is just getting to the end of its run there. My next project is a brilliant new play by Nick Payne, about death, love and consciousness, called “Elegy”.
Josie’s Top 3 albums ever?
Blue by Joni Mitchell
The Stone Roses by The Stone Roses
Hamilton by Original Broadway Cast (I have recently seen it and cannot stop playing it)
What great album has she never heard before?
Parallel Lines by Blondie
Released in November 1978
Before we get to Josie, here’s what Martin of Ruth and Martin’s Album Club thinks of Parallel Lines
The Adventures of Blondie.
To begin with, here’s everything you need to know about the early life of Debbie Harry.
1) As a baby, she was adopted and raised by a couple in New Jersey.
2) As a child, she thought that Marilyn Monroe was her real mum and started to dream about becoming a performer.
3) As a teenager, she became a massive fan of The Shangri-Las and was voted the “prettiest girl in class”.
That’s about it - she wants to be famous, everyone fancies her, and she loves songs about doomed teenagers. Sounds exactly like my teenage years to be honest - apart from the bits about wanting to be famous and everyone fancying me.
But anyway ….
The ambitious teenager moves to New York and throws herself at Greenwich Village in the hope that something would stick.
She begins by joining a band called The First National Unaphrenic Church and Bank who, as if they weren’t taking the piss enough, released an album called The Psychedelic Saxophone of Charlie Nothing. For what should be obvious reasons, they didn’t quite work out.
She then follows that up by becoming a backing singer in a folk rock outfit called The Wind in the Willows. They had secured a record deal following a load of publicity after one of them had accidentally starved to death whilst on a macrobiotic diet.
Again, for what should be obvious reasons, they didn’t work out either.
Not a great start then. In fact, it’s so inauspicious that she takes the next five years off and doesn’t perform at all. Instead, she takes a load of drugs, fends off loads of men, and starts to see what New York City has to offer.
And what’s remarkable is how omnipresent she becomes - how she always manages to appear at exactly the right scene at the right time. She’s at one of Janis Joplin’s first gigs; she sees The Velvet Underground and Nico at a time when you could just stroll in without paying; she’s a waitress in the notorious back room at Max’s Kansas City and hangs out with actors and musicians; she moves to the lower east side where she becomes a fan and a friend of The New York Dolls.
Over a seven-year period, ranging from folk rock to glitter, Debbie Harry manages to be the fresh face at every party - taking everything in and never letting a scene go by without her. She even managed to find herself in a car with the serial killer Ted Bundy after accepting a lift. Fortunately for her, and the rest of this story, she decided to get out because he had terrible B.O. But that’s my point, she had this uncanny ability to constantly intersect history before moving on.
The Ted Bundy incident aside, she experienced the New York that a music-obsessed time traveller would. We’d all go to the village and see The Velvet Underground and hang out at Max’s. And of course, when that was over, we’d all migrate towards The New York Dolls. We’d all do that now, with the benefit of hindsight, but she did it then, with a sense of opportunity.
Her ability to sniff out the start of an adventure was incredible.
And after years of observing, she decides to get back in the game.
With a couple of girlfriends, she forms The Stillettoes - a garage girl group who mixed original songs like Dracula, What Did You Do To My Mother? with the theme tune to Goldfinger. Their first gig was in a bar where the legs had been cut off a pool table to create a makeshift stage. I’ll be honest, the entire enterprise sounds amazing and, before long, an assorted crowd of bums and lowlifes on the Lower East Side were turning up to take part in the fun.
One such character was Chris Stein, a guitarist who was into comic books, exploitation cinema, and the soundtrack to Dr No. Like Debbie Harry, he had his own ambitions to be a performer and, after a shaky start playing a leaf in the school play, went on to support The Velvet Underground in the brilliantly named First Crow To The Moon.
Come 1973 though, it looked as if his opportunity had passed him by and he was aimlessly drifting along - although he did have a girlfriend called Elvira.
Until he walked in on The Stillettoes’ second gig.
Debbie Harry has since said that she felt a psychic connection, that she was aware of him staring at her all night and performed the whole show for him. After the show, she asked him to join the band and before long they were an item.
It’s at this point that they both find themselves at the beginning of yet another scene. One that, in time, will launch them to stardom.
A club called CBGBs opens on the Lower East Side and The Stillettoes make their debut supporting Television in May 1974. This coincided with a feature on the New York music scene in Melody Maker which had decided that Debbie Harry was its “face”. Everything was falling in place, but then everything fell apart. The Stillettoes split up because they couldn’t work out whether they were a band or a cabaret act.
Debbie Harry and Chris Stein, still together, decided to form a much better band instead - Blondie.
At last.
After 9 years in New York she’s finally in a band with a decent name.
They recruit Fred Smith on bass, the brilliant Clem Burke on drums (the last drummer out of 40 that auditioned), and off they went.
There was only one problem - everyone hated them.
In the oh-so-serious world of New York punk the last thing that anyone needed was a band who couldn’t really play their instruments and wanted to have loads of fun. As a result, their contemporaries sneered and dismissed them as lightweight and frivolous - as if that was a bad thing. They were the runt of the CBGB litter, derided for having the nerve to have a singer who was simultaneously good looking and feminine. Patti Smith was particularly antagonistic, almost adopting an “it’s you or me sister” attitude to Debbie Harry and making it clear she had no interest in sharing a bill with her.
Any attempts at securing a record deal were met with a similar response. Label execs kept telling them that "girls don’t work out front” and the fella who was putting Foreigner together said they were the “worst piece of crap he’d ever heard”. And he should know, he was putting Foreigner together.
Eventually, Fred Smith decided he’d had enough of being in a joke band. So he left Blondie and joined Television who, let’s be honest, never made anyone laugh.
Without a bass player, without any support, Blondie fell into a malaise and briefly considered jacking the whole thing in before it had a chance to get going. And maybe they would have done if it wasn’t for Clem Burke. Frustrated, resilient, he phones up Chris Stein and says “look, are you going to do something or not? I think you should at least try”.
I told you he was brilliant didn’t I?
He’s only 20, the youngest in the band, but it’s him that starts to pull the whole thing together - impatient at everyone’s adult misery. Even when Stein reminds him they don’t have a bass player Burke simply solves the problem by getting his friend Gary Valentine in.
Almost singlehandedly he refuses to allow Blondie to fail.
They then bring in
Jimmy Destri on keyboards, the final piece of the jigsaw, and they start the
turn.
The new line up plays its first gig in February 1976 to their most enthusiastic crowd yet - Debbie Harry leading from the front, a band that now sounds complete bringing up the rear. A buzz starts to form around the band - a crowd of dancing fans that were lighting up the earnest squalor of CBGBs.
Before long an independent label called Private Stock swoop in and sign them up. They release their first album, brilliantly titled Blondie, and round off 1976 playing to 2000 people in Central Park on New Year’s Eve.
1977 sees the band play on the Iggy Pop/Bowie tour, go to the UK with Television (who still hate them) and release their second album - Plastic Letters. Much darker than their debut, Plastic Letters gives the band its first taste of chart success with the brilliant (I’m Always Touched By Your) Presence, Dear and the insanely catchy Denis.
They weren’t just selling records, though - everyone was falling head over heels for Debbie Harry.
On her first appearance on Top of the Pops, she performs Denis wearing just a man’s red shirt and boots. As if that wasn’t enough (let’s be honest, it was) she sings the fourth verse in French and starts hugging herself. You can see why everyone’s head fell off - it was quite the step up from Felicity Kendall in The Good Life.
Having proved that girls very much do work up front, Chrysalis records now take over and install Mike Chapman as producer - an Australian who had previously worked with Sweet, Suzi Quatro, Mud and, er, Racey.
His remit was simple - make a hit record.
After a tense start to proceedings, in which Jimmy Destri threw a synthesiser at their new producer, everyone started to settle down and get to work on Blondie’s third album - Parallel Lines.
And it finally happened.
The comic strip, The Adventures of Blondie, gloriously came to life. A blonde and a gang of cheap suits running riot - Heart of Glass, Picture This, Sunday Girl, Hanging on The Telephone, One Way or Another. Each one its own adventure, each one its own episode of her and them.
And like all great comic strips, everyone plays their part and gets a chance to save the day. The song writing was shared and EVERYONE contributes. They can all look back at it and say it wouldn’t have been the same without them.
But, look, having given credit where it’s due, let me now do the thing you all want me to do.
Do you know how old she was when Blondie released Parallel Lines?
She was 33. I know. It beggars belief. Madonna had released The Immaculate Collection by this point, Elvis was about to do the ‘68 Comeback Special, and David Bowie was releasing Ashes to Ashes.
Yet, after years of being a bystander in other people’s adventures, Debbie Harry was finally ready for her own. She was about to sell 40 million records and become the biggest thing that had ever come out of CBGBs - she was about to make EVERYONE love her.
And she did it in the only way she knew how.
Despite all the attempts to sell her, to create artifice, she shone through and created her own image. She avoided the pop cliché of the heartbroken woman, refused the punk stereotype of tough androgyny, and just went with “look I’m gorgeous, funny and smart, so I’m just going to have loads of fun” instead. So, of course she rhymed wallet with solid, of course she watched someone shower for an hour. It was relentless - winking at you during the verse before growling at you in the chorus, dominating you on the one hand and disorientating you with the other.
I could go on forever,
I could write another 2000, but there’s a photo taken by Chris Stein that sums up
the entire story for me.
It’s 1978, just before she’s about to REALLY make it, and she’s cooking in an
apartment which looks like it should probably be condemned. There’s grease and
dirt everywhere - it’s wall to wall misery. And to make matters worse, the
frying pan is on fire. Oh and the baking tray on the floor is on fire too.
Yet despite the squalor, and the impending danger, she’s still dressed like Marilyn Monroe.
Martin Fitzgerald (@RamAlbumClub)
The Critics on Parallel Lines
Rolling Stone ranked it the 140th greatest album of all time.
The NME ranked it the 18th greatest album of all time.
So, over to you Josie. Why haven’t you listened to it? WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU?????
It’s clear from my twitter feed that I need to bathe in shame at not having listened to this album. That’s easily achieved, I was brought up catholic. They taught me “gnawing guilt” at school. There was no certificate but I’m considering a tattoo.
As to my musical education, I found that in the same place as my guilt education: St Patrick’s Roman Catholic High School, Eccles. And I am not referring to my willful ignoring of the viola; a cold shoulder that lasted five years and three youth orchestras. I’m reminiscing about those alluringly troubled boys in my year, who showed me the road to Madchester.
These boys had figured out that they could swerve the masochists teaching woodwork and metalwork by opting to study “graphic design”. Through some institutional oversight, “graphic design” counted as an ‘ology’. On Wednesday afternoons, there were no fifteen years olds in Salford happier. They basked, unbullied, for a whole double-period, lovingly crafting massive, photo-real drawings of The Stone Roses album cover. And I followed them.
Just as a side note, my road less travelled was not being cool enough to bunk off school with the two girls in my year who truanted down the Arndale Centre and met two members of Take That before they were Take That.
Happy Mondays, Inspiral Carpets, James… My first proper boyfriend aged seventeen was called Neil, had pleasingly thick curtains (forehead not parlour) and one of those navy blue James jumpers with a big white flower on it. He had pulled the cuffs six inches beyond his fingertips. When he danced, he would jump up and down on the spot, curtains bouncing in the sweaty air.
I have never been very cool. I’ve previously confessed that I finished E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End in the toilets of the Hacienda. My early musical tastes were lodged between Madchester, and the folk clubs I’d visit with my Dad and his tape-to-tapes of Ralph McTell (I cannot describe to you his joy when I showed him how to set Blues Run the Game as his ringtone). I was born in 1976. I’m afraid I wailed and toddled through the late 70’s (other recommendations gratefully received).
Last summer I went to Glastonbury. Largely terrified of stumbling across a musical genre I would not understand and exposing my ignorance, I spent most of the weekend following around my much cooler mates, who poured scorn on me for knowing far, far too much about the Burt Bacharach’s role in musical theatre. I did attend Kanye’s performance, but largely passed the time explaining the lighting rig and staging choices to my fascinated companions.
Shame engaged… Ready to listen. Here goes
You’ve now listened to it, at least 3 times, what do you think?
So, clearly, I’m a fool, I have heard a lot of these before. I just didn’t put it together. Sorry. In fact, I think my Aunty Louise might have played it to me but as I was only five or six, and what I mainly remember is helping her to tidy her bedroom. So I hope I’m not breaking any rules here…
And it’s wonderful: insidious, swirling, metallic, addictive. This was a soft choice for me. It’s going to be on a lot in my house. It’s poppy enough to be needy but at the same time it’s saying, sometimes directly, Just Go Away. I love that something so catchy can be so defiant.
If only I could dance and type simultaneously…
Maybe I’ve been thinking about my school days too much. One Way or Another reminds me of those chemistry lessons when the teacher used to burn magnesium in water. It’s bright, fierce, dangerous and surely a bit wrong. And my god, that is an amazing voice. I love the sensuality in Picture This but I also admire the way she denies us its silkiness elsewhere.
I didn’t really know 11:59, and it’s probably my favorite discovery on the album. She’s capable of being so lyrical and effortless but then has the defiance to twist the sound into something dangerous. It threatens ugliness, which can be underrated.
I enjoyed the unapologetic sweetness of Sunday Girl. Then we hit Heart of Glass. It is one of the all-time great disco songs, or just songs. It’s pure joy, my finger is itching to ‘repeat song’ all day. What I didn’t know was Will I See You Again. It’s so jumpy. I love the jittery Bernard Hermann paranoia, it’s is quality, poppy, angst. I needed this song earlier in my life. Never mind, I have it now.
I didn’t know they had covered Bang a Gong (Get It On) and I really enjoyed the wooziness of their version. I probably enjoyed that a bit more than the Buddy Holly cover I’m Gonna Love You Too. I really prefer the Buddy Holly version. Although I loved the implicit threat in the voice of You’re gonna say you love me, I’m championing the Buddy Holly version but I’m also (I believe) hearing and enjoying a 50’s/60’s influence elsewhere on the album. Also (without being too much of a theatre director about this) Blondie is a very effective user and Debbie Harry a very fine singer of the monosyllabic line. Although I am not suggesting that ‘put up or shut up’ is quite up there with ‘to be or not to be’, I do enormously admire her delivery.
Here’s my only real caveat. I’m not sure about Fade Away and Radiate. I went back and gave it a fourth go, as I was loving everything else so much. It’s a bit “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century” for my tastes. Set phasers to ‘go to the bar’. It’s partially rescued for me by the guitar line that comes in a bit later, and then the reggae out of nowhere is gloriously unexpected.
Well, thank you.
Would you listen to it again?
I will be playing it for weeks and forever. I’m off to get a massive poster of Debbie Harry for my wall and try some other things I’ve missed. If the penance is this good, I’m prepared to weather the shame
A mark out of 10?
9
Ram Rating – 8.5
Guest Rating – 9
Overall – 8.75
So that was week 55 and that was Josie Rourke. Turns out she’d never listened to Parallel Lines before because she went out with a bloke called Neil who had curtains on his head. So we made her listen to it and she loved it and will now put Debbie Harry posters all over her walls. A great result for everyone.
Next week, Robin Ince listens to something from 1969 for the first time. Until then, here’s Picture This from Parallel Lines.