Blondie hanging on the telephone6/21/2023 Did she go to work or just go to the store?’ - I remember listening to those and thinking, ‘This is the dumbest lyric I’ve ever heard.’ However, it was so dumb, it was beautiful, it was brilliant, and when Debbie then sang it in her inimitable way it suddenly sounded even funnier. “Debbie always got it right away whenever I tried to describe what to do, but a lot of the phrasing was totally down to her, she has a strange way of delivering certain phrases …for instance, in ‘Hanging On The Telephone’, the lines ‘I heard your mother now she’s going out the door. If we didn’t have that energy we’d miss the point, because the musical structure of the song is very tense - it sits you on the end of your chair, and we had to have a track that did the same thing”. I knew that the energy level on that track would make or break it. Let’s give it that sort of punk/new wave attitude’. Initially, they didn’t know quite how much to put into it, but I told them, ‘Look, this is more like the stuff on your first two records. “That track was magic from the beginning, unlike some of the others, it was an easy one to cut because it was more like Blondie’s normal, frantic sort of style, and I also vibed it up a lot. In an interview with Richard Buskin in SoundOnSound in 2009, Mike had this to say about recording “Hanging on the Telephone” during the Parallel Lines sessions in New York Mike knew how to take a good song that extra mile and turn it into a hit record. As a writer and producer at Mickie Most’s RAK studios he’d worked with Suzi Quatro, Sweet, Mud, and Smokie producing 12 monster hit records a year at one point. Chapman had been behind more hits than hot dinners in 1970s UK chartland. And Rumour 2 states that Blondie had come across The Nerves all on their own, during one of their own early tour dates on the West Coast.Īfter two good, but not great LPs, Chrysalis had decided to put Blondie into the studio with producer Mike Chapman. Rumour 1 has it that it was Blondie friend and associate Jeffrey Lee Piece, later of The Gun Club, who passed a cassette mix tape onto the band during his tenure as President of Blondie’s US fan club. So how did this delicious slice of perfect pop end up with Blondie? Originally written and recorded in 1975 at the Different Fur studios in San Francisco, the lyrics were allegedly inspired by the tense relationship Jack Lee was having with his future mother in law. Too early to be considered punk, their songs gained attention in what were becoming early punk circles, and the band played shows alongside The Ramones, The Diodes and The Screamers amongst others.ĭespite increasingly positive press coverage, after an especially arduous tour in 1977, which saw the band driving almost 25,000 miles across America in a Ford LTD, The Nerves imploded. Playing a brand of unfussy but compelling power pop, the band took the uncommon step of DIYing their own releases and shows. Originally from San Francisco, The Nerves had moved to Los Angeles in the mid 1970s.
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