More about: Blondie

The year was 1980. The raucous days of punk were subsiding and Blondie were riding high on the success of their 1978 seminal album Parallel Lines. Yearning to stay at the forefront of all things interesting and current, they took it upon themselves to shake up their sound, venturing into the more dance-friendly territory that was gradually dominating the charts. 

The video for ‘Atomic’ - the fourth single taken from their fourth studio album Eat to the Beat - sees the band at their most zany. Rocking out in a futuristic and slight dystopian junkyard disco draped in Cyberdog-Esque regalia and a suitable amount of sparkle, Debbie Harry and co. amplify a concoction of Surf Rock attitude mixed with pop inflection, held together with a thin but prominent thread of pre-Goth spookiness. Kicking things off with a futuristic looking negative-filtered shot, a young man rides horseback towards what resembles a disused warehouse adorned with a sign that reads ‘Blondie In the Flesh’. Admission, costing only what one can assume is fairly reasonable ‘25 Units’ (one imagines that this is our future currency) allows him entrance to the psychedelia party of the century. 

Sashaying amongst the chaos and the riffraff of metallic pipes, coloured streamers and a hefty amount of neon, Debbie Harry, donning a mustard yellow ‘Vulture’ T-Shirt, graces the stage. Accompanied by the group dressed in an assortment of eccentric outfits that wouldn’t be entirely out of place in the world of Mad Max, Harry leads the band in her laidback, cool but captivating signature manner. Joined halfway by a lone stage invader wearing a space-age helmet, Harry disconcertingly but absorbingly boogies robotically to the rhythms of Clem Burke’s percussion, jerking back and forth creating a bizarre and alluring demonstration of moderate performance art. However, while the video may brag an electric performance by one of the top acts of the late 1970s, you long for a touch more of the strange to really make it sizzle with uniqueness. 

Nevertheless, the video for ‘Atomic’ is a fine example of everything that made Blondie’s later New Wave work so poignant and fun. With off-beat lighting and shady looking characters (and a large number of trippy camera angles to complement the hip oncoming 1980s), ‘Atomic’ parades the rough and earthy characteristics that decorated the band’s boisterous legendary New York heritage and wild uncompromising attitude.

More about: Blondie