With the suits, the smiles and Debbie Harry on the cover, the album’s artwork instantly immortalised the group like the rock ’n’ roll version of an Andy Warhol soup can: a glorious, lipstick-grazed piece of monochrome art.īut Heart of Glass makes Parallel Lines Blondie’s masterpiece and set them all up for life. Even the songs on the record you don’t quite remember – Pretty Baby (all melody and harmonies), Will Anything Happen (a proto run out of The Knack’s My Sharona), and Harry’s snarl on I’m Gonna Love You Too – almost equal the hits you do. From the moment the phone rings at the start of Side One, the hooks don’t let up thanks in part to the Chapman applied sheen. Parallel Lines is pure perfect (power) pop. Their transformation over the next few years – leaping ahead of their celebrated CBGB post punk peers like Television, Talking Heads and Patti Smith – which turned Harry into a global cover star and Blondie into a proper pop band was not entirely producer driven they had the songs, oh those songs, the talent and, of course Harry's presence, but as Blondie’s Jimmy Destri later admitted, they “learnt a lot ”.Īnd learn they did.

It was so cold and rough they rehearsed wearing gloves. In 1974, Debbie Harry and Chris Stein lived in a loft in The Bowery. In 1977-8 The Gibb brothers and Mike Chapman – both from the same Australian state – respectively produced two multi-million pop monsters that helped to define the Big Apple: Saturday Night Fever and Blondie’s Parallel Lines respectively.Īrguably though, it was Blondie who truly came from Manhattan’s heart. The other was down to an Australian public schoolboy who’d spent his 20s being the glam pop mastermind behind the hits of Mud, The Sweet and Racey.

One of them came into being via a Rolling Stone article, a film producer with a soundtrack to fill and three Australian brothers mixing a live album in France. From the moment the phone rings at the start of Side One, the hooks don’t let up

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