This Blondie Parallel Lines review comes forty-eight years after the album first appeared in the U.K. It is a record I have lived with for most of my life. It follows a band that began before Punk in the cheap rooms of downtown New York, took a wrong turn or two, found an audience in Britain and then made one of the great pop albums of the decade with a producer who wrote hits for glam rock bands. It also covers the disco single that upset the punk purists, the iconic striped sleeve the band did not want, and the dirty shoes.

45renegade Long Reads

Blondie, Parallel Lines (Chrysalis, 1978)

Chrysalis released Parallel Lines on 8 September 1978. By then Blondie had made two albums, moved labels and changed line-up. They also had a big hit in Britain that America had mostly ignored. What they made next sold in the millions. It took the speed and noise of downtown New York punk and gave it proper choruses.

Downtown

Debbie Harry was born in Miami in 1945, adopted as a baby and raised in New Jersey. By the early 1970s she had sung in a folk-rock group, the Wind in the Willows, waited tables at Max’s Kansas City and spent a spell as a Playboy Club bunny. In 1973 she joined a girl trio called the Stilettos and met the guitarist Chris Stein, a Brooklyn art school graduate. They became a couple and a songwriting partnership. By 1974 the Stilettos had become Blondie, named after the catcalls Harry got from passing truck drivers.

Drummer Clem Burke, bassist Gary Valentine and keyboard player Jimmy Destri completed the first proper line-up. They played the same rooms as the Ramones, Television, Talking Heads and Patti Smith: CBGB and Max’s. They did not fit neatly. Most of that scene sold aggression or art. Blondie sold tunes. Their reference points were girl groups like the Shangri-Las, surf instrumentals, bubblegum pop and cheap science fiction films. Harry, with her cropped platinum hair and cool delivery, looked like a 1950s film star who had wandered into a fight. The band pushed back on the pin-up treatment with badges and T-shirts reading “Blondie is a group”.

Two albums and a contract problem

The debut, Blondie, came out in December 1976 on Private Stock. Richard Gottehrer, who had co-written “My Boyfriend’s Back” in the 1960s, produced it. The songs (“X Offender”, “In the Flesh”, “Rip Her to Shreds”, “Kung Fu Girls”) sounded like sixties pop played at punk speed and with a wink. American sales were modest. Australia reacted differently. After the TV show Countdown picked up the clip for “In the Flesh”, it became a major hit there.

The relationship with Private Stock soured, and in 1977 Chrysalis, run by Terry Ellis and Chris Wright, bought out the contract. Valentine also left that year. Frank Infante and Nigel Harrison arrived, and Blondie became a six-piece.

Plastic Letters followed in February 1978. It is an uneven record, with the sound of a band that had to deliver an album quickly. Two singles saved it. “Denis” was a 1963 song by Randy and the Rainbows, refitted with a bit of Harry’s French, and it reached number two in Britain. Valentine’s “(I’m Always Touched by Your) Presence, Dear” got to number ten. The album made number ten in the UK and only 72 in the US. It was clear which country was paying attention.

Britain

The British connection began before Plastic Letters. In March 1977 Blondie toured the UK supporting Iggy Pop, with David Bowie playing keyboards in Iggy’s band. British music papers were already friendly. British pop audiences, raised on glam and the three-minute single, understood a band that mixed guitars with hooks. On Top of the Pops Blondie were pop stars. In New York they were still a cult act.

Britain gave them what their home city had not: hit singles and a fanbase that treated them as a chart group without any embarrassment. The gap between what the band wanted to be and how much of the American industry saw them was the problem the next record had to solve.

Enter Mike Chapman

Chrysalis wanted a producer who knew how to make hits. Manager Peter Leeds and the label steered Mike Chapman towards the band. Born in Nambour, Queensland, Chapman had moved to London in the 1960s and teamed up with Nicky Chinn. Their songs for Sweet (“Blockbuster”, “Ballroom Blitz”), Suzi Quatro (“Can the Can”) and Mud (“Tiger Feet”) were built on stomping rhythms and choruses a whole playground could shout. By 1978 Chapman was producing in America, with hits for Exile (“Kiss You All Over”) and Nick Gilder (“Hot Child in the City”).

The match was not welcomed by everyone. Clem Burke was keen, but Debbie Harry knew Chapman only by reputation and was wary. Chapman put it down to geography: they were New York and he was LA. Her doubts faded once she played him early versions of “Heart of Glass” and “Sunday Girl” and he liked what he heard. The sessions began at the Record Plant in New York in late June 1978, so the British link is Chapman’s pedigree and the UK audience that had already made the band’s case.

By his own account, the band’s playing was poor when rehearsals for the album began, and he told them they would have to play better. He wanted tight, precise playing, clean arrangements and nothing that drifted. That suited Burke, a Keith Moon devotee whose drumming is busy but well controlled here. Chapman did not sand the band down into something polite. The guitars are still loud and the tempos still fast. What changed was focus. Every track has a job, a hook and a finish.

The record

Side one. “Hanging on the Telephone” opens the album. It is a cover of a song by the Nerves, written by Jack Lee, and Blondie turn it into a two-minute jolt that works as a mission statement. Harry sounds bored and desperate in the same breath, and the drums do the shouting.

“One Way or Another”, credited to Harry and Harrison, is the album’s best-known cut after the singles. Harry has said it was inspired by an ex-boyfriend who would not leave her alone, and the mix of menace and fun explains why crowds still love it. “Picture This” is straight pop with a tune you can hum after one listen, and it reached number twelve in the UK.

Then the record gets stranger. “Fade Away and Radiate”, written by Stein, is slow and eerie, with guest guitar from Robert Fripp of King Crimson. It shows that the band could hold a mood as well as a beat. “Pretty Baby” is bright and wry. “I Know but I Don’t Know” is Infante’s song, sung as a duet with Harry. It is the plainest rock track on the record, and the weakest link on side one, though it is competent and sits well in the running order.

Side two. Destri’s “11:59” is fast and tight, with his keyboards driving the chorus. Jack Lee returns with “Will Anything Happen?”, a nervous, jumpy track with a lot of tension. “Sunday Girl”, written by Stein, is the gentlest of the singles. It is wistful, bouncy and immediate, and it gave the band another British number one in 1979.

Then comes “Heart of Glass”, which needs its own section.

“I’m Gonna Love You Too” is a Buddy Holly cover, a nod to the 1950s roots that ran through the whole band. The closer, “Just Go Away”, is short, brisk and hard. It lands like a door slamming, and that is the right way to end an album that never outstays itself. The whole thing runs about thirty-nine minutes.

The disco song

Blondie wrote “Heart of Glass” around 1974 and 1975 under the title “Once I Had a Love”. Fans and bootleggers called it “the disco song”. Early versions were slower and looser. By 1978 disco was everywhere, and New York, Studio 54 included, was its capital. Blondie’s downtown peers tended to treat it with suspicion.

Chapman pushed the band to finish it as a dance record. The reference points were Kraftwerk and the work Giorgio Moroder did with Donna Summer. The track uses a Roland CR-78 drum machine, Destri’s synthesisers, chiming guitar and a cool, almost robotic vocal from Harry, with Burke playing to the machine’s pulse. It is precise and slightly chilly, and that is its strength. The lyric is about a love gone wrong, and the mechanical rhythm makes the sadness sharper.

Some fans took the disco turn as a betrayal of punk. The record-buying public did not. “Heart of Glass” reached number one in the UK and then in the US. The Disco Demolition Night riot in Chicago in July 1979 shows how hostile some rock fans were to the genre, so the band took a real risk. It paid off, and Blondie kept working with dance music. “Call Me” (1980) was a Moroder collaboration, and “Rapture” (1981), with its rap verse, became the first US number one to feature rapping.

The sleeve

The cover is almost as well known as the songs. The photographer was Edo Bertoglio, hired by Roberta Bayley, the New York punk scene’s unofficial house photographer. Bertoglio came from Warhol’s circle. Ramey Communications handled the art direction and design, with lettering by Jerry Rodriguez and illustration by Frank Duarte. The background is a set of black and white stripes, and the red title text is the only part of the image that is not black and white (apart from a subtle dark tint of a pair of red Converse). Five men in dark suits and thin ties stand in a line, and the ties echo the stripes. Harry stands at the centre in a white dress and heels, hands on hips, without a smile. On the reverse Debbies heels are replaced with facsimile teal boots.

The stripes solved a practical problem. With the band at odds, manager Peter Leeds has said he could not get a usable group photograph, so each member was given their own black or white stripe and photographed separately. The band were told they could choose their own frames, but Leeds picked the single shot in which the men grin behind a stern Debbie. Harry recalled the shock of finding the artwork finished without the band’s approval, and Chris Stein said they had wanted to look more rock and roll. The cover also reflected Leeds’s view of the group. He saw Blondie as Debbie Harry with a band, which neither she nor the band wanted, and the sleeve became a symbol of manipulation that helped end his time as manager. Harry has never rated the design.

The title itself came from an unused song by Harry, whose lyrics were printed on the first vinyl release, a neat little trivia piece.

Then there are the shoes. The back sleeve photographs each member’s footwear. Burke wears Converse in a different colour on each foot, and Harrison wears Converse with Mr Spock socks. One writer calls the casual shoes the only clue that the band are not quite what the suits suggest. Sneakers were normal wear around CBGB, so the scene link is there. The suits and the smiles were not the band’s choice, though, and the shoes look like the one part of the shoot that stayed their own.

Reception and afterlife

The album took a while to catch fire. “Hanging on the Telephone” reached number five in the UK singles chart and “Picture This” number twelve, but the real lift came in early 1979, when “Heart of Glass” pulled the album to the top of the British chart. In the US it peaked at number six. Estimates put worldwide sales above 20 million, though the exact figure is disputed. It remains the band’s biggest seller and appears on best-of-decade lists with little argument.

Chapman went on to produce the follow-up, Eat to the Beat, in 1979. Warhol painted Harry in 1980, a fitting seal for a band that had always been half pop art.

Verdict

Parallel Lines works because nobody compromised. The punk edge stayed, and so did the pop instinct. Chapman did not tame Blondie. He gave them tools to make their strengths hit harder: sharper choruses, cleaner sound, faster edits. The record still has one or two lesser cuts, and “I Know but I Don’t Know” is the obvious one. Everything else earns its place.

It also solved the band’s problem. They had been a New York curiosity with a British hit. After this album they were a global act that had beaten the punk snobs and the disco snobs together. Forty-odd years on, it still sounds quick, sharp and unforced.

Personally

I have had a relationship with Blondie since early 1978, though obviously not an actual one. Debbie was just about old enough to be my mother, something a few people miss. It began when my friend bought Plastic Letters on the strength of “(I’m Always Touched by Your) Presence, Dear”.

I have earned coin from them since I was 15, probably paid in Mintola chocolate bars. I drew Debbie portraits for friends on the inside covers of exercise books, a five minute turn with a 2B pencil. More recently I made my own pop art piece, Cut Out & Keep Debbie, an imaginary 600mm NME front cover for the week Eat to the Beat went platinum in the UK.

I am an aficionado of anything NYC, CBGB, punk and new wave, and I have played my Blondie vinyl for nearly five decades. What’s your favourite Blondie track or album? Any other CBGBs bands rock your boat? Say hi on the socials IG @ 45renegade

Thank-you to Vessy Mink my US musician and blockchain innovator friend for putting ‘The Punk Operating System’ forward and to Prof. Dr. Rodrigo Cid aka The Philosopher for publishing my introduction to The Punk Operating System – Built Without Permission in the June 2026 edition of Virtualia, a philosophy and Blockchain thought leadership magazine published by the Philosophy Department of Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto in Brasil.

I’ll link below, the entire magazine is a very interesting read on the subjects of philosophy, deregulation and tokenisation which permeate thought in the evolving blockchain and Cryptocurrency regulation arena.

Amusing wild AI generated graphics throughout, not least my section!

Virtualia Magazine. Vol.3 Nr.2

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is Virtualia?

Virtualia is an independent digital magazine published on the blockchain exploring the future of technology, artificial intelligence, creativity, digital culture, business, music and society. Each monthly edition combines essays, commentary, interviews and opinion pieces that challenge conventional thinking and encourage readers to embrace the opportunities of the digital age.

Who is Virtualia for?

Virtualia is for entrepreneurs, marketers, technologists, creatives, musicians and curious minds who want to understand how philosophy, blockchain, AI, emerging technology and digital culture are reshaping the world. It is written for people who value independent thinking over hype.

What topics does Virtualia cover?

Virtualia covers philosophy, artificial intelligence, digital marketing, SEO, Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO), innovation, entrepreneurship, creativity, music, media, digital ethics and the future of work. Every issue also explores broader cultural and philosophical ideas influencing life in the AI era.

How often is Virtualia published?

Virtualia is published quarterly, with each edition focusing on a central theme while also featuring articles, opinion pieces and practical insights into technology, business and digital culture.

Why is Virtualia different from other technology magazines?

Rather than reporting the latest headlines, Virtualia examines the bigger picture. It explores why technological change matters, how blockchain and AI is transforming industries, and what individuals and businesses can do to thrive in a rapidly evolving digital world. Its editorial style combines thoughtful analysis with an independent, often provocative perspective.

A Long Orbit.

There’s a moment during The Afterlife where the whole thing sounds like Kraftwerk and Can have conspired to kidnap Tangerine Dream then lock themselves in a European particle accelerator propelled by Red Bull and amphetamines.

I know this because I’ve recently been playing YouTube recordings of 1977 editions of the Alan Freeman Saturday Rock Show and the vibe is remarkably similar to the Pernod and Black or Motorik and Synth of those West German Krautrock influencers and any number of Seventies Prog Rockers.

The kosmische jazz rock soundz summoned by The Comet Is Coming are not so much tunes as weather systems. Saxophones spiral like sirens stretched by singularity while the rhythm section hammers away with the pitiless pulse of Seventies Neu! There’s plenty of Soft Machine lurking too especially when the valve sounding synths start bubbling like a chemistry set too close to a Bunsen burner. But where the old Canterbury lot occasionally disappeared up their own intellectual exhaust pipes, this lot remember the crucial detail – that repetition is meant to induce delirium, not exam success.

The electronics drift and pulse with a cosmic glow, but what saves the whole enterprise from prog-rock self-abuse is sheer brute force. The grooves don’t noodle, they pummel. This is dance music for people who think nightclubs should be held inside abandoned observatories just off the M25 at midnight and before any thought of ‘chilling out’.

When the album ended my Spotify ‘Radio’ continued da beat – and it could have been the same band, GoGo Penguin, Ishmael Ensemble, Sons Of Kemet all sounded remarkably similar. Finally, Avishai Cohen & Big Vicious made it start to sound more like Massive Attack because it was Massive Attack, a cover of Teardrop which reminds us that these Comets are in a long orbit, returning to earth every few decades, the same, but different.

The Comet Is Coming – The Aftermath (2019) EP or mini album of 32 mins 21 seconds

Favourite Track: The Seven Planetary Heavens

Although Summon The Fire on another album is the best TCIC track I heard.  

A crossover between my business marketing day job and five decade interest in the Punk Rock ethic.

This book began as an attempt to explain a pattern I kept encountering across different industries, decades, and technologies.

‘Long before the language of lean startups, bootstrapping, or the creator economy, punk had already solved many of the same problems. How to act without permission. How to operate with limited resources. How to build audiences into communities. How to grow without losing coherence. And, crucially, how to stop.‘

Rather than treating punk as a cultural moment or aesthetic, this project examines it as a working system. A set of practical decisions about production, attention, exchange, and ethics made under conditions of exclusion and constraint.

The aim is not nostalgia, instruction, or revival. It is orientation. To understand how independence is constructed, what it costs, and why these same structures continue to reappear whenever formal systems become rigid or inaccessible.

This is a book about choosing coherence over scale, limits over optimisation, and intent over accidental growth.

Here’s a link to my draft manuscript. The PunkOperating System

Trump is not the architect of America’s new posture. He is the solvent that dissolves the restraints which once contained it.

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The Technate Turns North

For decades, the northern flank of the Western alliance was treated as geopolitical furniture. Solid, dependable, and largely ignored. Canada was the polite neighbour. Greenland the distant outpost. The Arctic an abstraction, invoked mostly by climate scientists and defence white papers, its strategic relevance filed away for a later date.

That later date has arrived.

If the American strike on Venezuela marked a shift in how power is exercised, then the north is where the consequences may be felt most quietly and most profoundly. Not through invasion or formal coercion, but through something more contemporary and harder to contest: reclassification. Territories are no longer judged primarily by sovereignty or history, but by function. By what they provide, how quickly, and with how little friction.

This shift is often misunderstood because it is too easily reduced to personality. The temptation is to read recent American behaviour solely through the temperament of its president: impatient, unsubtle, dismissive of process and restraint. Yet personality alone does not explain what is happening. It merely accelerates it.

The United States is not reverting to empire in the old sense. It does not seek colonies, flags or formal annexation. It seeks optimisation. Supply chains that cannot be interrupted. Energy flows that cannot be leveraged by rivals. Security corridors that remain under American control. Technological advantage preserved at speed. In such a system, sovereignty is not abolished. It is conditional.

This is the emerging logic of what might be called the Technate of America. Power is exercised less through diplomacy than through infrastructure, logistics, data and security necessity. Borders remain on maps, but matter less than access. Alliances remain intact, but only so long as they do not obstruct momentum.

Trump’s place within this system is often misread. He is neither its architect nor its aberration. He is its solvent.

Where previous administrations layered power with language, Trump strips it bare. Where restraint once required explanation, assertion now suffices. He does not patiently build systems. He dissolves the assumptions that once constrained them. By acting first and justifying later, he lowers the political and psychological cost of unilateralism for those who follow. What he breaks publicly, others normalise quietly.

Venezuela was not significant simply because of what was done, but because of how little effort was made to dress it up. Once the taboo is broken without apology, it does not need to be broken again. The system adjusts.

Seen through that lens, the north looks less stable than it once did.

Canada is not a target. It is something more awkward. It is an ally that increasingly slows things down.

The United States depends on Canada more than it often admits. Critical minerals essential to advanced manufacturing and defence. Vast freshwater reserves. Energy infrastructure. Arctic access. Integrated air defence through NORAD. The northern border is not merely long. It is strategically dense.

Yet Canada remains a sovereign democracy with its own constraints. Environmental regulation. Indigenous land rights. Parliamentary scrutiny. Decisions that take time. From Ottawa’s perspective, these are features of legitimacy. From a technocratic security mindset in Washington, they increasingly resemble delay.

The tension is not ideological. It is procedural.

Trump’s impatience sharpens this fault line. He does not view Canadian sovereignty as something to be negotiated delicately, but as friction to be managed. Not through force, but through assumption. Projects framed as urgent move ahead. Timelines are compressed. Canadian consent becomes implicit rather than explicit.

The danger is not coercion. It is bypass.

Decisions taken in Washington are implemented through markets, defence frameworks, corporate investment and emergency alignment. Ottawa is informed, rarely consulted, never formally overruled, but increasingly irrelevant. Sovereignty erodes not through confrontation, but through attrition.

The Arctic intensifies this dynamic. As ice retreats, abstraction gives way to urgency. Shipping lanes, undersea cables, surveillance systems and missile defence shift from long-term planning to operational concern. Canada insists the Northwest Passage is internal waters. The United States treats it as an international strait. This disagreement has existed for decades. What has changed is pace.

In a technate, pace wins.

If Canada is the complication, Greenland is the test case.

Greenland is small, sparsely populated and strategically immense. It sits astride Arctic approaches, hosts critical American military infrastructure, and contains significant mineral reserves. It is geographically North American, politically European, and increasingly global. It is also semi-detached from its sovereign authority, governing most domestic affairs while Denmark retains responsibility for defence and foreign policy.

That arrangement functioned when interest was low and time abundant. Neither condition applies now.

Climate change has turned Greenland from periphery into prize. As ice melts, access improves. As access improves, competition follows. Rare earth independence from China has shifted from aspiration to operational requirement. Missile defence and early warning systems grow more valuable as polar routes shorten.

Here, Trump’s lack of subtlety becomes revealing rather than disqualifying.

He did not seek to deepen influence quietly. He attempted to buy the territory outright. The proposal failed and was widely mocked, then quickly forgotten. It should not have been. What mattered was not the failure, but the framing. Greenland was approached not as a partner, nor even as an ally’s responsibility, but as an asset.

Once spoken aloud, that logic does not disappear.

In the post-Venezuela landscape, the question is no longer whether such thinking exists, but how it might be operationalised without spectacle. No troops are required. No rupture with Copenhagen. All that is needed is an expanded security responsibility, framed as protection or shared interest. Investment deepens. Military presence normalises. Decision-making migrates. Denmark objects politely. Washington proceeds. NATO looks away.

This is not invasion. It is reclassification.

Greenland becomes less Danish not because Denmark is forced out, but because it cannot keep up.

Trump is often dismissed as too erratic to sustain doctrine. That misses the point. He does not sustain it. He clears the ground for it. By removing restraint, he allows bureaucratic, military and economic systems to operate with fewer inhibitions. Others supply the patience. The system supplies continuity.

This is how the Technate advances. Not elegantly, but effectively.

The great conflicts remain elsewhere. Ukraine bleeds. Taiwan waits. The Baltic states watch. These are the theatres that command attention and rhetoric.

Yet the more revealing shifts may occur far from the noise. In infrastructure plans, defence memoranda, investment flows and security assumptions. In the slow northern turn of a power that no longer feels obliged to explain itself.

Canada and Greenland are not predictions. They are indicators.

Venezuela did not announce a doctrine. It demonstrated permission.

And once permission exists, the most consequential changes rarely occur where resistance is strongest. They occur where resistance is least expected.

The north has long been treated as stable by default. It may yet prove to be the first place where stability is quietly redefined.

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Next. Do the events of January 3rd and the likelihood of a ‘Technate USA’ looking north demand a re-evaluation of Trump as a leader and the Trump 2.0 administration?

A retrospective on Echo and the Bunnymen’s Heaven Up Here, exploring the album’s epic scale, the band’s evolution from their debut, the charged atmosphere of their 1981 era and the bold creative leap that set them apart from their Liverpool contemporaries. A critical look at how the record became a windswept landmark of early eighties post-punk and the defining moment in the Bunnymen’s ascent.

By 1981 Echo and the Bunnymen had already outgrown the tag of Liverpool’s next big thing. The city was awash with bands skulking through basement venues and chasing the last echoes of post-punk, yet the Bunnymen always felt slightly apart from the scrum. They were part of the scene but never defined by it. Where other groups favoured jagged swagger or nervy pop, the Bunnymen carried themselves with a chilly grandeur, as if they had been imported from some vast, wind-stripped plateau rather than the banks of the Mersey.

Crocodiles had won them attention and a clutch of admirers but there was a sense, even then, that the band were bracing for something larger. They wanted scale. They wanted to escape the cramped rooms and conventional expectations that could easily have boxed them in. Heaven Up Here is the sound of that escape, recorded in Rockfield Studios in Wales where the weather and landscape matched the band’s mood. The sessions, monastic by all accounts, the group shutting themselves away and drawing out a sharper, more elemental version of their sound.

From the first moments of Show of Strength, you can hear that shift. The song doesn’t ease itself in but storms the gates, every instrument sounding taut and ready for impact. Les Pattinson had grown into an astonishingly melodic bassist by this point. His lines on the debut were confident. Here they are commanding. Pete de Freitas, the fated, youngest and in many ways the quietest member, drives the entire record with a precision that never loses its human edge. His drumming on Heaven Up Here explains why the band were so protective of him. He had that rare gift of making a rhythm feel both anchored and restless, a pulse that pushes the band into braver territory.

Will Sergeant is the architect of the album’s vast spaces. Critics often latch on to guitarists who fill every second with notes. Sergeant did the opposite. He left gaps, held back, let certain chords ring until they seemed to glow in the mix. On Over the Wall, his playing becomes a kind of topography, mapping out the contours of an imagined coastline. He had already shown flashes of this approach on Crocodiles but here he fully embraced it, giving the record its sense of scale without resorting to bombast.

Ian McCulloch, meanwhile, had grown into the frontman he always hinted he might become. There is confidence in his voice on Heaven Up Here but it is not a swaggering confidence. It’s something more guarded. He sounds like a man making sense of a world that is shifting under his feet. His lyrics during this era often veered into impressionistic fragments, the kind that prioritised atmosphere over narrative, yet they land with surprising clarity. On A Promise, there is a tension between the romantic and the resigned. All My Colours feels like the inside of a fever dream, equal parts yearning and disorientation.

Crucially, Heaven Up Here is a record shaped not only by ambition but by discipline. The band were not chasing complexity for its own sake. They were chiselling away at their own ideas, stripping the songs of anything superfluous. The result is an album that feels both lean and expansive, intimate yet immense. There is nothing indulgent in it. Nothing that feels tacked on. Every track serves the larger landscape the band were building.

The Liverpool environment of the time also left its mark. The city was in economic decline and cultural flux, yet bursting with creative energy. The Bunnymen were surrounded by other rising acts the best piloted by others of The Crucial Three; Wah!, The Teardrop Explodes, A Flock of Seagulls, but while some chased pop brightness or flamboyance, the Bunnymen were drawn to something more elemental. They carried with them a strand of romantic fatalism that owed as much to windswept beaches and night bus rides across Merseyside as it did to their musical influences.

Sergeant’s fondness for Led Zeppelin often surprises people until they actually listen to Heaven Up Here with that in mind. Not the bluster or blues rock, but the sense of dynamic tension, the interplay between hush and detonation, the way space is used as effectively as noise. The leap from Crocodiles to Heaven Up Here mirrors, in its own way, the leap Zeppelin made from their debut to Led Zeppelin II. A sudden widening of scope. A feeling that the band have discovered their engine and decided to rev the bollocks off it.

You could draw parallels with Joy Division’s shift from Unknown Pleasures to Closer, or The Cure’s move from Seventeen Seconds to Faith. But the Bunnymen’s progression feels more rooted in a sense of physical geography, as if the band had stepped outside northern post-punk entirely and wandered off onto a grey beach at dusk, taking their music with them. The sea imagery in their work wasn’t poetic window dressing. It was part of who they were. They sounded like the tides they grew up near.

When Heaven Up Here was released, some listeners were thrown by its severity. It didn’t offer easy singles or radio-friendly warmth. It demanded attention and rewarded patience. Over time, though, it has become one of those albums that grows larger in the memory, a record bands cite when they want to talk about artistic leaps rather than career maintenance. It remains a totem of what can happen when a young group, still burning with hunger, refuses to play safe.

By the final notes of the title track, the storm has passed yet the air still seems charged. You come away from Heaven Up Here with the sense that you’ve walked through a landscape rather than listened to a collection of songs. The Bunnymen would go on to make more polished and more commercially resonant records, but they never again captured this exact combination of youthful intensity and hardwired harder rock purpose.

Heaven Up Here remains not only a leap forward but a declaration of identity. A moment when Echo and the Bunnymen realised the size of the world they could build and stepped straight into it without flinching. It stands, even now, like a cliff face on the musical map of the early eighties. Stark, beautiful and utterly its own.

The Boy With The Guitar Strap.

Review of Andy Crofts live at Pier Road Gallery, Littlehampton.

Crofts’ own compositions; catchy, well-crafted pop songs that wear their Ray Davies influences proudly formed the heart of the evening. English Summer, Westway, Jennifer Sits Alone, Sleep, Wondering, An Ordinary Romance and more. These songs resonate as a thoughtful canon and shine in an acoustic setting stripped of embellishment and with clear enunciation.

Doors at 6.45. Leave your smart phone apps and your algorithmic advances at home, if you want proof that music still needs human hands, a heart and a mid-session tune up or two Andy Crofts delivered it with authenticity at the final PRCA Session of this year.

You might know Crofts as the Brazil-born multi-disciplinary instrumentalist formerly integral to Paul Weller’s outfit or as the main man behind indie band The Moons. But strip away studio sheen and a full band arrangement, his particular forte, what you’re left with is something far more essential: one bloke, two young colouring-in kids, an electric acoustic six-string, a new amplifier, and a well employed songbook that spans his own Home Counties folk pop and some perfectly curated covers.

The intimate setting suited him, even if as he confessed with disarming honesty that he finds these close-quarters gigs more nerve-wracking than playing to hundreds of thousands at Glastonbury. Out there you can hide behind the lights; here, if your music stand collapses, you forget a chord (D7) or your young daughter clatters off her chair mid-song, everyone notices. The beauty and terror of ‘the toilet tour’ eh?

Crofts’ own compositions; catchy, well-crafted pop songs that wear their Ray Davies influences proudly formed the heart of the evening. English Summer, Westway, Jennifer Sits Alone, Sleep, Wondering, An Ordinary Romance and more. These songs resonate as a thoughtful canon and shine in an acoustic setting stripped of embellishment and with clear enunciation.

The covers arrived like love letters from a pre-digital age. Honeybus’ “I Can’t Let Maggie Go” emerged unplugged and liberated from its Seventies white bread-advert production. The Kinks’ “Waterloo Sunset” bounced along with an unexpected verve – Terry and Julie still crossing that river in our collective consciousness, no matter how many Reels were distracted by. From Badly Drawn Boy’s ip-so fact-o singalong “Something To Talk About”, to a Crofts meditation on Lennon’s raw demo of “Watching the Wheels,” from “And I Love Her” to “Good Thing” a formerly-reggae number rendered in acoustic pop – each reimagining proved that great songs transcend their original arrangements when you ‘handle with care’ – “over to you George”.

PRCA’s faithful got exactly what live music should be: confessional, imperfect, immediate, impossible to replicate with a million lines of code.

A one-man analog breakwater against a tech tide.

45renegade.

In 1975, David Bowie did what he did best and shocked everyone by completely changing direction. Fresh off the theatrical dystopia of Diamond Dogs, he abandoned glam rock for the smoky soul clubs of Philadelphia, emerging with Young Americans, an album that bewildered fans and critics alike. Was it cultural appropriation or genuine artistic evolution? A cynical cash-grab or a brave reinvention? Five decades on, Bowie’s “plastic soul” period remains one of his most divisive yet fascinating chapters – a skeletal ex-pat English art-rocker uniquely attempting American R&B and somehow pulling it off. Here’s why Young Americans deserves another listen, and why it matters more than you might think in the Bowie story.

So here’s the thing about Young Americans: it’s the sound of Bowie burning down everything that made him a star and dancing in the ashes. After the glam apocalypse of Diamond Dogs and all that Orwellian dystopia, he relocated to America, got absolutely obsessed with soul music, and came back with what might be the most audacious act of cultural appropriation – or appreciation, depending on your politics, in rock history.

Released in March ’75, this is Bowie’s “plastic soul” period, a term he coined himself with typical self-deprecating wit. But don’t let that fool you. There’s nothing remotely plastic about the grooves on this record. Recorded at Sigma Sound Studios in Philadelphia – the same room where the O’Jays and Harold Melvin cut their classics, with backing from some of the city’s finest sessionaires, this is as authentic as a skeletal English art-rock chameleon can get when he’s knee-deep in American R&B.

The title track opens proceedings like a slow-motion car crash of strings, backing vocals, and that unmistakable Bowie croon, now deeper, more soulful, dripping with a kind of desperate romanticism. “Do you remember your President Nixon?” he asks, and suddenly you’re not just listening to a pop song but witnessing Bowie’s America, all Watergate paranoia, sexual confusion, and the dying embers of the American Dream. It’s protest music for the disaffected, too fucked up to march but too aware to look away.

Then there’s “Win,” which nobody talks about enough. Luther Vandross is buried in there somewhere in the backing vocals – yes, that Luther Vandross, before anyone knew his name, and the whole thing builds like some kind of gospel testifying session that never quite commits to salvation. Bowie’s always been good at leaving you hanging, spiritually speaking.

“Fascination” came later, added for the US release, and it’s pure cocaine-and-mirrors funk, co-written with Vandross. The falsetto, the handclaps, the sheer cheek of it all – it shouldn’t work, but Bowie’s got that alchemist’s touch. He takes these American forms and filters them through his alien sensibility, and somehow it comes out sounding inevitable.

The real revelation, though, is “Somebody Up There Likes Me.” Seven minutes of strung-out funk that sounds like Bowie’s finally stopped running from something or maybe just paused for breath. The bass line alone could hypnotize you, and by the time the strings come swirling in, you’re gone. It’s the sound of 4am in a city you don’t know, with people you’ll never see again, and everything feels both meaningless and utterly vital.

Of course, there’s the Beatles cover – “Across the Universe” which some people hate on principle. Fair enough. But Bowie strips away all the cosmic whimsy and turns it into something genuinely melancholic, like he’s found Lennon’s hymn to universal consciousness at the bottom of a bottle. It’s maudlin, sure, but it fits the record’s emotional landscape perfectly.

And we can’t ignore “Fame,” can we? The funk bastard child of Bowie’s collaboration with John Lennon and Carlos Alomar, recorded during these sessions. His first proper American number one, and a deliciously bitter pill about the very celebrity machine he’d been feeding for years. The irony of becoming even more famous by singing about how much fame fucks you up wasn’t lost on anyone, least of all Bowie himself.

In the Bowie canon, Young Americans is the hinge. It’s where he stops being a glam rock prophet and starts his journey toward becoming… well, everything else. Berlin, Eno, the Thin White Duke persona, all of it begins here with this sharp left turn into soul. Some fans never forgave him for it and saw it as betrayal. But that’s always been Bowie’s genius he never gives you what you expect, and just when you think you’ve got him figured out, he’s already three moves ahead.

The album’s not perfect. It’s occasionally overwrought, sometimes too slick for its own good, and there are moments where you can hear Bowie straining against the limitations of his voice in this register. But that’s part of what makes it fascinating. You’re hearing someone genuinely stretching, genuinely trying to become something they’re not, and somehow making that transformation itself into art.

Looking back, Young Americans feels like Bowie at his most vulnerable, stripped of the sci-fi armour and glitter makeup, just a deeply weird English guy trying to make sense of America, fame, and his own restless creative spirit. It’s not his best album that’s an argument for another day, but it might be his bravest and it’s undoubtedly enduring. And in an era where most rock stars were still doing the same shtick they’d been doing since 1968, that counts for something.

The plastic soul, it turns out, had more heart than most of the genuine articles.

Forged in a Stretford attic, dismissed by its own singer and dogged by controversy, The Smiths’ debut still changed British music forever. Forty years on, its northern jangle, bitter poetry and doomed legacy sound sharper than ever.

The Smiths – The Smiths (Rough Trade, 1984):

Cast your mind back to February 1984 and the brittle landscape of British pop. The charts are drenched in synthesisers and covered with eyeliner, samples and sequencers are elbowing guitars into the wings. Then, out of the drizzle, four skinny lads of Irish descent from Manchester lurch onto the scene; one clutching gladioli, another his Rickenbacker like a bayonet. They call themselves The Smiths, the most ordinary name imaginable. In that choice alone lies the revolution.

The partnership had begun two years earlier with Johnny Marr knocking on Steven Patrick Morrissey’s door in Stretford a moment Morrissey would later recount in Autobiography with cinematic precision: the “handsome stranger in drainpipe jeans” standing on the doorstep, “smiling with the certainty of someone who knew what was next.” In Marr, he found his melodic twin; in Morrissey, Marr found someone who could give his guitar lines a wounded voice.

They began in Marr’s attic, crafting early songs like “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle” and “Suffer Little Children.” Morrissey later wrote of those first sessions as “a new pulse in the dull heart of the city,” though he would remain forever unsatisfied with how their debut finally sounded.

The road to that debut LP was fraught. Morrissey recalled how Rough Trade, “a label without the cash or the courage to lead,” seemed both ally and obstacle. The Troy Tate produced sessions at Elephant Studios collapsed under the heat, guitars going out of tune, tempers fraying. John Porter re-recorded the lot. Morrissey, ever the perfectionist, declared the results “not good enough,” but at a cost of £6,000 Rough Trade said it would have to do.

So The Smiths* emerged: flawed, magnificent, defiantly northern.

It opens with “Reel Around the Fountain” a slow, aching waltz of shame and seduction. Marr’s guitar drips like rain from the rooftops, Rourke’s bass curls around it, and Morrissey sighs, “It’s time the tale were told…” From the first line, it’s less an album and more a confession.

Then comes “You’ve Got Everything Now”, sharp and bitter, a howl from the uninvited. “Miserable Lie” follows, schizophrenic and breathless – part lullaby, part nervous breakdown. And then “Pretty Girls Make Graves”, all glittering guitars and doomed romance, Morrissey cutting through the post-punk fog with a sneer and a sigh.

Side two delivers the anthems that defined the band. “Still Ill”, with its tremulous jangle and weary poetry, reads like Morrissey’s entire philosophy in three minutes “Does the body rule the mind or the mind rule the body? I dunno…” Then “Hand in Glove”, the debut single that started it all, a clattering burst of urgency with the immortal claim that “the sun shines out of our behinds.” It was ludicrous, brazen, brilliant – the ultimate outsider song.

“What Difference Does It Make?” gave them their first true hit, a bruised pop song with its teeth showing, while “I Don’t Owe You Anything” slows the pulse, Paul Carrack’s organ sighing under Morrissey’s rejected torch-song croon. And closing the record, the infamous “Suffer Little Children” the Moors murders rendered as gothic lullaby. Morrissey later wrote that he “could not sing it without shivering,” but Ann West, mother of victim Lesley Ann Downey, came to see it for what it was: sorrow, not exploitation.

The album hit number two, a trend that would follow them around – blocked from the top spot by Simple Minds’ attempt at stadium rock ‘Sparkle In The Rain’. The reviews were split. NME’s Don Watson sniffed at the “lacklustre sound,” calling it “a death of the punk ideal.” Others called it genius. Critic Dave DiMartino said he hadn’t “been as fascinated by an album in years.” Morrissey, impervious as ever, proclaimed it “a signpost in the history of popular music.”

He wasn’t wrong.

In Autobiography, Morrissey remembers the aftermath with mingled pride and exasperation – a record born “out of nothing but belief” yet betrayed by “the poverty of studio time.” That tension is what keeps The Smiths alive. The imperfections are its pulse.

By 1987 the band had imploded, Marr walking away, Morrissey wallowing in resentment. The nineties brought lawsuits and character assassinations that were hard to shrug off. Mike Joyce suing for unpaid royalties and winning, the courtroom exchange finishing off whatever friendship remained. Marr and Morrissey never reconciled, and when Andy Rourke died in 2023 after a long illness, the final curtain fell. The reunion everyone wanted, the one they both secretly feared was gone forever. A relief no doubt.

So this debut remains a flawed masterpiece built on attic dreams, frustration and northern defiance. From “Reel Around the Fountain” to “Suffer Little Children”, from “Still Ill” to “Hand in Glove”, it a rain-streaked declaration that ordinary lives could sound extraordinary.

Born in drizzle and doubt, it still shines like broken glass under the streetlights of Manchester.