Teenage Dreams, So Hard to Beat.

Oh, how I wanted to be Debbie Harry. She was my teenage hero -- I am just old enough to have seen Blondie first at an impressionable age. The combination of the music and the look and I was hooked. Nor had we ever seen the like of it and we all aspired, quietly, but very obviously, to be her. Not that many of us had the legs for it, frankly. But we could all manage the lipgloss and hanker for a platinum bob just like hers.

The first time I saw them, on video with Denis Denis on TOTP, with her hair like a halo, is one of the abiding memories of my teenage years (that, Geldof’s checkered jacket and the opening riff of ‘My Best Friend’s Girl’). But the music was brilliant and even though it wasn’t supposed to last and some of it was dreadful (Rapture, which I hated, marked the descent into oblivion) but Parallel Lines remains one of the great albums of all time and the songs stand up nearly thirty years on. I have it on cd, tape and original vinyl, but tragically none of them are worth very much on ebay. Not that I'd sell, of course. I love every song on that album far too much. It’s the alchemy of her voice (so clear, so sweet), those lyrics (‘incense and peppermints’) and the irrefutable catchiness of the tunes -- the riff from ‘I Know But I Don’t Know’ alone is worthy of theme tune status. 

Blondie were so hot it hurt for about two years and then crashed and burned, lost in the usual rawknroll tale of drugs, poverty and infighting. But I remained true to the cause, even in the wilderness years when people looked at you as if you were missing a crucial gene when you listed Blondie as one of your favourite bands. Thanks to Debbie I always wanted to be a blonde and even managed it for some time, but only when I was far too old to be told off by my parents. She’s now a rather unfetching shade of red, but their rebirth with Maria was marked by Herself in full Blondie mode and it was pretty glorious. I will live and die a Blondie fan and my headstone will be a glittery one, which plays Fade Away and Radiate.