| Released | November 1977 |
|---|---|
| Label | Chrysalis Records |
| Genre | New wave, punk rock |
| Duration | 32:58 |
Lacking the imagination to organise my records any other way than alphabetically by artist and in ascending order by date of release, I'm also presenting this series of notes on them that way.
I don't feel constrained to write them according to this system and am working through my Blondie LPs in the order I first heard them.
Blondie's 1976 self-titled debut album was the band's third to make it onto my analogue playlist after Parallel Lines and Eat to the Beat.
A more natural reverse succession would have been 1978's Plastic Letters, which includes Blondie's breakthrough UK singles.
In my early teens, I could afford a new album only around once every two months. In the interim, I raided friends' collections for additions, armed with blank tapes.
I borrowed Blondie from a friend of a friend in the spring of 1980. Even casting the net thus far was more likely to have hauled Plastic Letters, but it was the earlier album I borrowed, nevertheless.
Originally released on the small New York label Private Stock in 1976, the British Chrysalis Records reissued the LP when Blondie signed to it in 1977.
Despite the LP not having the sanction of singles chart success, I'd been primed on its content by the insert notes of my Eat to the Beat cassette, which read:
The first recording contract was signed in October '76. The first single, “Sex Offender,” (later changed to X Offender in the UK), was released soon afterwards. The single, which appeared on their debut album, “Blondie,” was produced by Richard Gottehrer. It was Gottehrer who helped give Blondie that distinctive sixties sound that lead [sic] to comparisons with Phil Spector productions. Another factor was keyboard player Jimmy Destri, who single handedly spearheaded a revival of the much vaunted Farfisa sound.[1]
This write-up provoked prurient teenage interest in the opening track, tinged with irritation that we Brits were too prudish to render it ‘Sex Offender’ as intended.
Debbie Harry recalls that Private Stock:
[…] agreed to release “Sex Offender,” but we would have to change the title. That was annoying, but then I came up with “X Offender,” which was okay.[2]
So, it seems the song was only ever released as ‘X Offender’, dating back to its New York debut.
The song's spoken intro — ‘I saw you standing on the corner / You looked so big and fine / I really wanted to go out with you / So when you smiled, I laid my heart on the line…’ — is reminiscent of the Shangri-Las' 1964 hit Leader of the Pack.[3]
Both songs are paeans to the paramours of the women at their lyrics' viewpoint. Where ‘Jimmy’ in Leader of the Pack is from ‘the wrong side of town’, X Offender's protagonist is the eponymous delinquent — a sex worker who falls for a police officer.
Its lyric draws adeptly on the language of law enforcement — ‘You read me my rights and then you said / “Let's go,” and nothing more…’ — with a particularly pleasing simile in ‘Walking the line, you were a marksman / Told me that law, like wine, is ageless…’
The album's other better-known tracks — oft-found in compilations — are the harmonious In the Flesh and the spiky Rip Her to Shreds.
Blondie deep-cut standouts include A Shark in Jets Clothing, which has Destri's ‘much vaunted Farfisa sound’ to the fore, and the keyboards are also prominent in In the Sun — ‘Surf's up!’
The album ends with a ‘concept’ track with sound effects illustrating The Attack of the Giant Ants. A slight stylistic departure from Blondie's other output, it fits with the band's late-1950s and early-1960s influences, with a title which could be that of a B-movie from the era.
It might be because chance spun the record my way when the band was a formative favourite, but for me, Blondie's debut album ranks among its strongest.
Notes and references