me, Christmas 1982, posing with my haul (and clearly very chuffed with the Blondie calendar). That sign I'm holding would stay on my bedroom door well into my mid-teens... (also - The Fall Guy!)
Welcome to the fourth post (the others are here - 2017, 2018 and 2019) showcasing one of the Christmas highlights from when I was a kid (beyond the catalogues I wrote about in 2016), seeing which annual I got that particular year. For those who don't remember them, annuals were (and still are) large size hardback books, designed for children and based on existing properties, generally comics and popular TV shows, as well as the occasional film and sport and pop round-ups.
The ones based on comics featured the same cast as the weekly editions, while the TV and film ones had comic strips, the occasional short story, fact files and interviews and - brilliantly - in the case of The Fall Guy, behind the scenes information on stunts and how they were filmed.
Published towards the end of the year, annuals are cover-dated as the following year to ensure shops don't take them off the shelves immediately after the new year (though, by then, unsold copies are often heavily reduced). Still as popular now, though kids today don't have the choice of comics we did, the only real difference seems to be that they're skinnier (and that's not me being all nostalgically misty - my ones from the late 70s and early 80s are substantially chunkier than the ones I’ve bought for Dude over the past few years).
Here, then, is another selection of old favourites, ones I received and ones I remember my sister Tracy having. I hope some of them inspire a warm, nostalgic trip down memory lane for you...
1968
Mum & Dad must have got this second-hand for me - I was a big fan of the 60's Batman show with Adam West (who, for a long time, I was convinced must be related to us) but I had this much later.
1976
One of Tracy's favourite TV shows (she would go on to work with - and compete on - horses) and just hearing the theme tune now makes me feel a slightly melancholic sense of nostalgia.
1977
1977
1977
Everybody... "Underground, overground, Wombling free, the Wombles of Wimbledon, Common are we..."
1978
1978
1979
The annuals post wouldn't be complete without an appearance by Rupert The Bear!
1979
My Dr Who...
1979
I know this probably doesn't stand up to the modern Marvel version and yes, it's probably very silly (it's been a long time since I last saw it) but this is my Hulk. And I still think the theme tune is hauntingly beautiful...
1980
I remember this (or, more precisely, I remember Dan Tanna parking his terrific car in his house!) but for me, Robert Urich will always be Spenser. I wrote about the Vega$ novelisation, by Max Franklin, which you can read here.
1981
The first Judge Dredd standalone annual - and it's still a cracking read.
1981
1981
An odd - and often spooky - TV show I have fond memories of
1983
Happy Christmas!
scans from my collection, aside from the girls titles (thanks to the Internet for those)
Regular readers of the blog will know that I'm a massive Star Wars fan and, as such, how could I resist celebrating this when it coincides with posting day?
I've written about the films (generally the original trilogy) a lot over the past eleven years or so and you can find the entries on this link, though the specific run of posts I did as part of the 40th anniversary in 2017 can be found here.
Writing these posts has been great fun, the research has often been enlightening but perhaps my favourite post is from when we went to an exhibit in London 2013 and Dude & I got to fight with lightsabers on the Tantive IV. You can read about it here.
Dude gets me in a Force choke-hold at the London Film Museum, when it was in the old County Hall building, August 2013. He's now almost as tall as I am.
And to further celebrate, here are some of my favourite trading cards that never fail to bring back wonderful memories of warm summer days during 1978 (as I wrote about here).
One of my favourite images (it also appeared in the photo-insert of the novel), I was slightly disappointed when I realised we only get to see this Stormtrooper and his Dewback from a distance.
The second in an occasional thread celebrating old-school paperback novelisations from the 70s and 80s, which are now mostly forgotten. We're not talking great art but these books have their place - they were a fantastic resource from a time when you couldn't watch your favourite film or TV show whenever you felt like it - and I think they deserve to be remembered.
This time, I'm looking at The Professionals 4: Hunter Hunted, by Ken Blake, adapted from the excellent UK TV series.
front and back cover of the Sphere paperback, 1979 reprint (cover scans of my copy)
Once again written by Kenneth Bulmer under the Ken Blake house name, this volume is based on the shooting scripts for three episodes.
The first is First Night, where an Israeli minister is kidnapped from the Festival Hall on the Southbank and, to avoid an international incident, it’s down to CI5 to find him. After an action packed opening, we then see some dogged detective work (the kidnappers are tracked by a Polaroid picture they’ve sent), which works slightly better in the episode than it does here. Great pacing, some humour and some nice observations on contemporary London.
Kathie Mason (Cheryl Kennedy) from "Hunter Hunted"
The second, eponymous episode has CI5 charged with testing the new laser-sighted 180 and Cowley hands it to Bodie & Doyle. Whilst at headquarters, they encounter Kathie Mason, an ex-colleague of Doyle’s who’s interviewing to become a CI5 agent. After a night at her place, Doyle discovers the gun is missing and it seems someone is out to get their revenge on him. Brisk, involved and good fun, this cracks along with some nice dialogue, excellent set pieces (especially the demise of Doyle’s E-type) and some good interactions between the agents. I really liked the episode itself (especially Cheryl Kennedy as Kathie) and this does it justice.
The Rack is the final episode. Following a raid on ex-boxer (now criminal and drug dealer) John Coogan’s mansion, he and his brother are taken to CI5 for interrogation. The brother has a go at Doyle then punches him, in self defence Doyle retaliates and the brother dies of a ruptured spleen. A tribunal (the ‘rack’ of the title) is then set up, wherein prosecution lawyer Geraldine Mather decides to take on the Action Squad and cut them down to size. Briskly told, with good characterisation, this works well to flesh out Doyle and his feelings over perhaps (without giving away spoilers) causing the death of a man while Cowley has a great grandstanding speech on just why CI5 is so important (and, sadly, the words ring as true today as they did forty years ago).
All three are competently written (and Bulmer continues his fascination with Bodie’s ‘famous’ face and mobile lips) and feature some nice bits of poetic prose when describing a London that has mostly long since disappeared. The action scenes are deftly handled as are the locations (judging by certain aspects - the constant rain in The Rack, for example - it seems they were written from the shooting scripts rather than seeing the episodes) and there are some smart little character pieces that flesh the dynamic duo out well (it’s mentioned again that Doyle paints). Brisk, violent, occasionally amusing, I’m not sure how these would work if you’d never seen the programme but as an unabashed fan of the series, I thoroughly enjoyed it. Recommended.
The novelisation is "based on the original screenplays by Brian Clemens, Anthony Read and Gerry O'Hara" (taken from the title page)
* * *
from left - Doyle (Martin Shaw), Cowley (Gordon Jackson) and Bodie (Lewis Collins)
The Professionals ran for five series, from 1977 through to 1983, shown on ITV. Brian Clemens, perhaps best known for The Avengers, created the series (which was originally to have been called The A-Squad) and became executive producer with his business partners Albert Fennell and Laurie Johnson (who also provided the excellent theme music) for London Weekend Television (LWT). The first series was produced by Sidney Hayers with Raymond Menmuir producing the rest, with 57 episodes made in total.
Although the first series used a lot of studio-based filming (to the extent Cowley had a secretary), Menmuir did away with standing sets and the remainder of the series was filmed in real buildings and homes. This lent a grittiness to the programmes and now, forty years later, provides a wonderful snapshot of a London that's mostly been lost to progress. The series focussed on the exploits of CI5 (Criminal Intelligence 5), led by George Cowley (Gordon Jackson) and centred around his two best agents, Doyle (Martin Shaw) and Bodie (Lewis Collins). The two actors, whose initial abrasiveness towards each other led to their casting, worked well together and a lot of episodes included dialogue ad-libbed by them.
While earlier episodes (certainly series one through to three) saw a wide range of plots and scripts, with some good directors involved (Martin Campbell was both a main and second unit director), the later ones used more script devices as time wore on. The final episodes were filmed in May 1981, by which time Collins and Shaw both stated publicly they thought the show had grown stale, though the final broadcast run ended in February 1983.
The series is repeated often on ITV4 in the UK and is well worth a watch, though the Network Releasing Blu ray restorations are your best bet. These not only have great quality image and sound but thorough production notes (in book form) by Andrew Pixley.
The Corgi collection. I had the bigger model (with figures) when I was a kid but didn't pick up the smaller version until a couple of years ago
* * *
From 1978 through to 1982, Sphere released 15 paperback novelisations (with seven of them also receiving hardback release), adapting 38 of the series' 57 episodes. Ken Blake was the house-name covering all of these with Kenneth Bulmer writing the majority of them and Robert Holdstock contributing numbers 10, 13, 14 and 15.
(Henry) Kenneth Bulmer was born on 14th January 1921 in London and worked in the paper industry before serving with the Royal Corps of Signals during the Second World War. Having been a fan of sf before his service, when demobbed in 1946 he began writing for fan magazines and his first novel, Space Treason, was published in 1952 (and co-written with A Vince Clarke). Turning freelance in 1954, he wrote dozens of novels and comic strips, a prolific output he maintained throughout his career. In the 70s, as part of the Piccadilly Cowboys group, he wrote across genres for various series (including The Professionals) under a host of pen and house names, whilst also publishing a substantial amount of work under his own name. In addition, he edited nine volumes in the New Writings in Science Fiction anthology series during the 70s, succeeding John Carnell.
He suffered a stroke in 1997 which halted a writing career that saw over 160 novels (and countless short stories) published.
Awarded the TAFF in 1955 (a fund to send prominent fans to international conventions), he was the British Guest Of Honour at the World SF Convention in Cleveland, Ohio and made a life member of the British SF Association in 1974. He married Pamela Buckmaster in March 1953, with whom he had two daughters and a son but they were divorced in 1981.
For a few years now, after finding out charity shops sometimes pulp old books because the market for them is so small, I've been collecting 70s and 80s paperbacks through secondhand bookshops, car boot sales and ebay. I set up a thread for the horror titles (which you can see here) but novelisations were a rich vein in those decades, before the advent of home video, when viewers wanted to revisit the adventures of their favourite TV show or film. I realise we might not be talking great art here but, on the whole, I think these books deserve to be remembered.
To that end, on an irregular basis, I'm going to review these "old-school" tie-ins with, hopefully, some background material on each one.
The first of an occasional thread celebrating old-school paperback novelisations from the 70s and 80s, which are now mostly forgotten. We're not talking great art but these books have their place - they were a fantastic resource from a time when you couldn't watch your favourite film or TV show whenever you felt like it - and I think they deserve to be remembered.
This time, I'm looking at Vega$, by Max Franklin, adapted from the US TV series.
Las Vegas private detective Dan Tanna is hired by a Merle & Loretta Ochs to find their runaway teenaged daughter, Marilyn Nedloe - it's not the first time she's made a break for the lights. Tanna quickly locates her, only to find she's working as a prostitute for Larry Larry Johnson and when he breaks her free, discovers she doesn't want to go home. It appears that her stepfather, Merle, has been coming on strong and Tanna doesn't like it. But Marilyn has made a mistake and turned over a trick who is connected with the mob and soon Tanna is trying to discover who murdered her and Larry Larry. In the meantime, he's trying to stop a conman fleecing the casino, act as bodyguard to a nightclub entertainer and buy a birthday gift for his secretary's daughter.
Dan Tanna is “a hard guy for hire in a hard-hearted town” according to the cover blurb and for the most part, that’s true. Although the book maintains that Vegas is trying to keep itself clean (there’s no Mafia here), it doesn’t shy away from the sleazier side of things. Marilyn Nedloe has turned to prostitution and although she’s of age looks younger and uses that to her advantage, which is uncomfortable (though never graphically explored) while some of the violence is harsh indeed. Franklin has a snappy style, the story fairly rocks along but it does come unstuck in places, where you can see the need for a commercial break slotted into the flow of action. The main story - Marilyn and Larry Larry and why they’re killed - is well handled, even if the ending is a bit brisk, but the sub-plots (the man trying to fleece the casino and the birthday business) aren’t much more than fillers. I liked Tanna (and detected a sense of Spenser about him - and the Parker books were certainly around when this was written - especially with the gallantry but that might be because of the Urich connection), though everyone seems to know him and he seems to rely on the grace of various friends in police forces across the country to get information to crack the case. The locations are well used, Vegas seems grubby in the daylight (and this was before the glitz explosion) but I thought the book let itself down in how it treats the female characters (you could argue it was the times but Franklin also wrote for “Charlies Angels”). As it is, apart from Tanna’s main secretary Beatrice - who is well realised - the rest of the women are poorly sketched, especially Angie, Beatrice’s deputy, who is essentially an attractive bit of set dressing. That aside, this is a prime novelisation, it’s brisk and no-nonsense, does what it says on the tin and is generally quite enjoyable.
The novelisation is based on the pilot episode, High Roller, written by Michael Mann. I picked up my copy from Books and Pieces in Nottingham, on the Crusty Exterior gathering there (which you can read about here).
* * *
Judy Landers, Robert Urich, Phyllis Davis and Tony Curtis
Vega$ ran for three series, from April 1978 through to June 1981 and 69 episodes and appeared in the UK in November 1978. Produced by Aaron Spelling, it was created by Michael Mann who’d worked on American TV in the mid-70s writing scripts for Police Story and Starsky & Hutch. It appears he had little more to do with the series following the pilot he wrote and he clearly went on to bigger and better things.
The series was filmed entirely on location in Las Vegas (apart from special episodes set in Hawaii and San Francisco) and starred Robert Urich as private detective Dan Tanna, a VietNam vet on retainer to the Maxim Hotel run by Phillip Roth (played by Tony Curtis). He lived in a props warehouse and parked his car - a red 1957 Ford Thunderbird convertible - inside (which is pretty much all I can remember about the series, other than the vehicles appearances in Corgi catalogues). He was ably assisted by Bobby Borso (Bart Braverman) and his trusty secretaries Beatrice Travis (Phyllis Davis) and Angie Turner (Judy Landers), while Lt. David Nelson (Greg Morris) was his contact in the police force. Tanna’s older sister Julie (played by Catherine Hickland) appears in the pilot and novelisation but didn’t feature for the remainder of the run. Will Sampson played Harlon Twoleaf, Tanna's sergeant from his army days, but only appeared in the first series.
The name “Dan Tanna” came from Aaron Spelling’s favourite restaurant (though it was called Dan Tana’s), on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood, California.
* * *
Max Franklin was a pen name for the prolific pulp fiction writer Richard Deming. Born in Des Moines, Iowa in 1915, he gained degrees from Washington University in St. Louis and the State University of Iowa, before being drafted into the army nine months before Pearl Harbour. When he left service five years later, he sold a short story called The Juarez Knife to Popular Detective magazine. It featured a tough, disabled private eye named Manville “Manny Moon” (he’d lost his leg in World War 2) who went on to appear in more stories across a range of detective pulp magazines. In 1950, though his timing coincided with the collapse of the pulp market, Deming became a full-time writer and ended the 50s writing stand-alone novels as well as paperback originals featuring characters from Dragnet. He created another series, featuring vice cop Matt Rudd, during the 60s and also wrote non-fiction.
In the early 70s, he became a key player in the tie-in market for popular TV shows, writing more than twenty paperback original novels for the likes of Mod Squad, Charlie’s Angels and Starsky & Hutch, as well as the novelisation for the 1974 film 99 44/100% Dead.
In additional to his output as Richard Deming, he also wrote as Emily Moor, Nick Morino, Ellery Queen (ten novels under the house name during the 60s), Max Franklin (for his novelisation work), Richard Hale Curtis and Halsey Clark.
For a few years now, after finding out charity shops sometimes pulp old books because the market for them is so small, I've been collecting 70s and 80s paperbacks through secondhand bookshops, car boot sales and ebay. I set up a thread for the horror titles (which you can see here) but novelisations were a rich vein in those decades, before the advent of home video, when viewers wanted to revisit the adventures of their favourite TV show or film. I realise we might not be talking great art here but, on the whole, I think these books deserve to be remembered.
To that end, on an irregular basis, I'm going to review these "old-school" tie-ins with, hopefully, some background material on each one.
Parallel Lines, released on 23rd September 1978, was the third studio album from Blondie and proved to be their commercial breakthrough in the US, where it peaked at number six in April 1979. Already very popular in the UK, the album became the groups first number one hit in February 1979.
To help celebrate its 40th birthday, here's a retrospective of the album...
Following the release of their second album, Plastic Letters, in February 1978, support had been rising for Blondie, especially in the UK (where it peaked at number 10). Denis, their cover of Randy & the Rainbows' 1963 hit Denise, was a hit across Europe, peaking at number 2 in the UK in March and number 19 in Australia. (I'm Always Touched by Your) Presence, Dear, the second single, reached number 10 in the UK in May.
While touring on the west coast of America, the band met Mike Chapman, a renowned Australian producer. Although their first two albums had been produced by Richard Gottehrer, who helped create the basis of their new wave and punk sound, Blondie’s then-manager Peter Leeds talked their record company, Chrysalis Records, into encouraging Chapman to work with the band on new music. Drummer Clem Burke was enthusiastic - “he creates innovative and eclectic music” - but Debbie Harry was more reserved, though she only knew the producer by reputation. “We were New York,” she said later, “he was LA.” Her reserve disappeared after he listened to early demos of Heart Of Glass and Sunday Girl and was impressed.
from left - Nigel Harrison (bass), Frank Infante (guitar), Chris Stein (guitar), Debbie Harry (vocals), Clem Burke (drums), Jimmy Destri (keyboards)
Track Listing
1: Hanging On The Telephone (Jack Lee)
2: One Way Or Another (D. Harry/N. Harrison)
3: Picture This (D. Harry/C. Stein/J. Destri)
4: Fade Away And Radiate (C. Stein)
5: Pretty Baby (D. Harry/C. Stein)
6: I Know But I Don’t Know (F. Infante)
7: 11:59 (J. Destri)
8: Will Anything Happen? (Jack Lee)
9: Sunday Girl (C. Stein)
10: Heart Of Glass (D. Harry/C. Stein)
11: I’m Gonna Love You Too (Joe B. Mauldin/Niki Sullivan/Norman Petty)
12: Just Go Away (D. Harry)
At the Record Plant, 1978 (from left) - Chris Stein, Clem Burke, Mike Chapman (with sunglasses), Nigel Harrison, Debbie Harry, Frank Infante, Peter Leeds
Terry Ellis, the co-founder of Chrysalis Records, asked Mike Chapman if he could record the album within six months and the producer agreed. But after starting work at the Record Plant recording studio in June 1978, his opinion changed slightly.
“The Blondies were tough in the studio, real tough,” he told Sound On Sound. “None of them liked each other, except Chris and Debbie and there was so much animosity. They just wanted to have fun and didn't want to work too hard getting it.” He was also surprised at their lack of musical ability. “[They] were hopelessly horrible when we first began rehearsing...and in terms of my attitude they didn't know what had hit them. I basically went in there like Adolf Hitler and said, ‘You are going to make a great record, and that means you're going to start playing better.’”
Whilst rating Frank Infante’s ability as “an amazing guitarist” and acknowledging this contributed to the frosty relationship between Infante and Chris Stein, Chapman tried encouraging Stein and Jimmy Destri to concentrate on songwriting - to no avail - as well as working with Clem Burke’s timing on the drums. Although he spent a lot of time improving the band’s abilities, he had little to do with Debbie saying she “was a great singer and a great vocal stylist, with a beautifully identifiable voice.” He gave them a process for each song, recording them in a similar style with the basic track being recorded and then built upon it, with Debbie’s vocals added towards the end. Often, when it came time to record, she would say “Yeah, just a minute” and he’d find her writing the lyrics. “Many of the classic songs were created this way,” he said.
Filming the Heart Of Glass video
The biggest song on the album, Heart Of Glass, was based on one Chris & Debbie wrote between 1974 and 1975 called Once I Had A Love. The band had demoed it with a slower, funkier sound using a basic disco beat which led to them calling it “The Disco Song”.
“Heart of Glass was one of the first songs Blondie wrote,” Debbie told Dave Simpson of The Guardian in April 2013, “but it was years before we recorded it properly. We’d tried it as a ballad, as reggae, but it never quite worked.” Mike Chapman credits Debbie with giving it a more disco twist, she says he convinced her and Stein of it. In an interview with the NME (dated 4th February 1978), Debbie mentioned how much she liked Giorgio Moroder’s disco work - “It’s commercial, but it's good, it says something, that's the kind of stuff that I want to do” - and Blondie covered I Feel Love (written by Moroder and Donna Summer) at a benefit for Johnny Blitz in New York on 7th May 1978. The song was released as 12” single in a 5:50 version but there were objections from US radio stations to the “pain in the ass” lyric, which the 7” version cut down on. “At first,” Debbie told The Guardian, “the song kept saying: 'Once I had a love, it was a gas. Soon turned out, it was a pain in the ass.' We couldn't keep saying that, so we came up with: 'Soon turned out, had a heart of glass.' We kept one 'pain in the ass' in – and the BBC bleeped it out for radio.”
As well as being a hit, the song created some controversy because of its disco sound with Blondie, at the forefront of New York’s growing new wave music scene, being accused of selling out. She told The Guardian, “People got nervous and angry about us bringing different influences into rock. Although we'd covered Lady Marmalade and I Feel Love at gigs, lots of people were mad at us for 'going disco' with Heart of Glass.” Chris Stein said, “As far as I was concerned, disco was part of R&B, which I'd always liked.”
The album was recorded in six weeks, well ahead of schedule and Blondie shared their producers belief that it would reach a wide audience. Chrysalis weren’t so convinced and executives told the band to go back and start again, only dissuaded by Chapman - now mixing the record in LA - who assured them the singles would prove popular. He later said, “I didn’t make a punk album or a New Wave album with Blondie. I made a pop album.”
Aside from the music the cover, now recognised as iconic album art, caused issues with the band too. It was Peter Leeds’ idea and problems with him had been growing for some time, based around his thinking that Blondie was Debbie Harry with a band (which neither she nor the band wanted). “I was not fond of Peter,” Harry told the Q Magazine Special Issue: The 100 Best Record Covers Of All Time in 2001. “He told the boys that they could all be replaced, I was the only important one.” She saw the cover as a symbol of manipulation and said, “I don’t think it’s a great design, personally.”
Roberta Bayley, one of the ‘official’ photographers of the New York punk scene, was an old friend of Debbie’s and she hired Edo Bertolgio to shoot the cover. He was a part of the Andy Warhol scene and, said Bayley, “the coolest downtown photographer I knew.” Separate photographs of the band members were taken and Debbie later said Leeds had tricked the boys into pulling silly expressions, while she was encouraged to scowl. Leeds then had the cover put together without showing them.
A cover shoot outtake, by Roberta Bayley
“Everyone just flipped out,” she told Q. “We were shocked that the artwork had been completed without our approval and that the decision had been made without the band.”
“We were all pissed about how we were smiling in the cover photo” Chris Stein wrote in the 30th Anniversary liner notes. “We picked out the shots that we liked but our manager picked the one shot he liked and went with that. Everyone was annoyed because we wanted to look more rock & roll”.
The incident brought things to a head with Leeds and in 1979 the band decided to part ways, replacing him with Alice Cooper’s manager Shep Gordon.
The other matter was the dress, which I thought she looked cool in (I had her poster on my wall for years). “Stephen Sprouse designed [it] and most of Debbie’s stage clothes,” Bayley said. Debbie told Michael Odell in Q Magazine in June 2011, “I got a lot of shit for that dress.” It seems her hair, stare and fist-on-hips stance were punk but the dress wasn’t. “In the UK, especially, the dress created two camps,” she said. “People who wanted to fuck me and the ones who wanted to kill me for not being punk enough.”
The title of the album comes from lyrics, written by Debbie and included in the liner notes, for a song that doesn’t exist.
The lines I have written that you read between
The lines on the pages
The lines on the screen
Of lines spoken - I say what I mean.
It's parallel lines that will never meet
Ship in the desert
Ships in the night
Ships that pass in the night
Evangeline stream - Evangeline's dream,
It's parallel lines that will never meet.
The album yielded six singles:
Picture This (Harry/Stein/Destri), backed with Fade Away And Radiate (Stein), was released on 26th August 1978. It peaked at number 12 in the UK singles chart, charted in the Swedish and Irish Top 20’s but was never released in the US.
I’m Gonna Love You Too (J. B. Mauldin, N. Sullivan, N. Petty), backed with Just Go Away (Harry) in the US and Fan Mail (Destri) in Holland, was released in September and only made the Top 10 in Belgium and the Netherlands.
Hanging On The Telephone (J. Lee), backed with Will Anything Happen (J. Lee) in the UK and Fade Away And Radiate in the US, was released on 30th October. It peaked at number 5 in the UK chart, was Top 20 in Belgium, Ireland and the Netherlands and Top 40 in Australia and New Zealand.
Heart Of Glass (Harry/Stein) was released on 3rd January 1979 in 7” and 12” versions. For the 7”, it was backed with Rifle Range (C. Stein/R. Toast) in the UK and 11:59 (Destri) in the US. The 12” for both added the instrumental version. It peaked at number 1 in the UK, US, Australian, Austrian, Canadian, German, New Zealand and Switzerland charts, was Top 10 in Belgium, the Netherlands, Ireland , Norway, South Africa and Sweden and Top 20 in Finland. It was number 2 in the 1979 UK Year End chart and 32 in the UK decade chart. The BPI has recorded over 1.3m UK sales.
Sunday Girl (Stein), backed with I Know But I Don’t Know (Infante), was released in early May 1979. It hit number one in the UK and Irish charts, was Top 10 in Switzerland, Norway, South Africa and Austria and Top 20 in the Netherlands, Sweden, Finland and Belgium. In the UK, it was number 8 in the annual chart. A UK 12” was also released, adding a French version of the title track.
One Way Or Another (Harry/Harrison), backed with Just Go Away, was released on 14th May 1979 in the US and Canada only (peaking at 24 in the former, 7 in the latter). Rolling Stone currently ranks the song at number 298 in it’s 500 Greatest Songs Of All Time list.
Mike Chapman and Debbie Harry
The album was a huge commercial success, eventually breaking the band worldwide and was well received critically.
Rolling Stone gave it 4.5/5 stars (saying the album was “where punk and New Wave broke through to a mass US audience”), Blender gave it 5/5 (their critic Christgau wrote it was “a perfect album in 1978” with “every song memorable, distinct, well-shaped and over before you get antsy”) and Q gave it 4/5 (“a crossover smash with sparkling guitar sounds, terrific hooks and middle-eights more memorable than some groups’ choruses”). Spin Alternative Record Guide gave it 10/10 (Sasha Frere-Jones called it “the perfect pop-rock record”), AllMusic gave it 5/5 and Slant Magazine gave it 4.5/5. Christian John Wikane from PopMatters called it “a creative and commercial masterpiece by Blondie - indisputably one of the great, classic albums of the rock and roll era” and Scott Plagenhoef, of Pitchfork Media, wrote that the album popularised “the look and sound of 1980s new wave”.
Parallel Lines was ranked at number 18 on NME’s 100 Best Albums Of All Time (and 45th on their 500 list), Rolling Stone ranked it at number 140 on their 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, Blender had it at number 7 on their 100 Greatest American Albums of All Time and it was at number 94 on Channel 4’s 100 Greatest Albums Of All Time.
Parallel Lines was number 1 in the UK (for 4 weeks, remaining on the chart for 114 weeks), number 2 in Australia and Canada, 3 in New Zealand, 6 in the US, 7 in the Dutch charts and 9 in the German and Swedish charts. It peaked at number 16 in Norway and 24 in Austria.
The album was certified 4xPlatium in Canada and Platinum in the UK and US. Several sources (including Blondie themselves) say the album has sold over 20m copies but with 1.7m sales in the UK, it’s probably closer to 6m (which is still an incredible achievement).
I’m a long-time fan but listening to the album again, as I wrote this, I still think it’s an excellent collection of songs, with a tight, poppy production, great musicianship and that wonderful breathy voice of Debbie’s. Is it their best album? You know, I think it probably is - it’s certainly the one that I would say perfectly encapsulates who they were. I probably first heard it back in 1979 (my entry to Blondie was a cassette version of their “Best Of”) and I’ve been thoroughly impressed with it every since.
Happy birthday, Parallel Lines - and here’s to many more years of listening pleasure.
