BLONDIE'S EAT TO THE BEAT @ 45

Two bars of count-in a snare roll and Dreaming explodes with a collision of '60s girl group kitsch and late '70s archness. Debbie Harry enters in high style with a full throated melodic shout about a chance meeting and the wonder of living as though dreaming. The middle eight gears up the pace enough for her "whoo!" in between lines. Three minutes of sheer pop bliss with just enough poignancy to make it last for decades and beyond. One of my favourite songs of its era.

The Hardest Part is a revisit of the kind of attempted funk there in the first album onwards but this time polished to a bubblegum naffness. Harry's strident vocal adds more pressure but its neither a tough rocker nor a campy disco workout. It's almost as though they were listening with the next track. Union City Blue is a retread of Dreaming but with less energy.

Shayla adds a gleam to a magical realist story of an ordinary life transported by imagination. While it might have flubbed down into the previous track's routine, there is just enough sparkle to save it between the whimsy of the lyric, the loping low string guitar and easy pace. Eat to the Beat sounds like a pastiche of British punk with mixed messages about masturbation and snacking.

Accidents Never Happen is like something from the band's best Plastic Letters, with an intriguing minor key cool and a smoky vocal. The synthesisers and machine perfect rim shots complete the image of a band who can be witty, compelling and rock out all at once. Die Young Stay Pretty is in joke reggae. Slow Motion features a vocal bathed in reverb which is at odds with the rest of the album in a song that doesn't quite know where it's meant to be.

Atomic is where it shifts. It's an electro-disco workout in celebration of teen lust that doesn't let up. This is the Blondie of X-Offender and Heart of Glass as well as Picture This, with its face pressed hard against the port hole to the '80s. It is pop perfection and points to one of their purest pop triumphs, the following year's Call Me.

Sound-A-Sleep revisits Fade Away and Radiate from Parallel Lines and forms a pleasant lullaby with a few slightly spiky images thrown in. I could listen to it anytime. Victor is the kind of glam stomper that Adam and the Ants and ten Pole Tudor were about to own. It's fun but I wouldn't make a bee line to it. Living in the Real World is another punk pastiche but sounds like the kind of song that American film makers of the following decade would drop into a teen romance to give it a hip, young punky ambience. End.

Eat to the Beat, even with its highlights, is a sheer drop into the kind of pop flirtation that didn't just help the bank balance but removed the band from the roll call. No one at this time except the most hardened and industrial reviled the pure pop heights that Blondie could soar to but when it started sounding like high-life cabaret instead of compelled fun. That said, they knew what they were doing.

After the success of Parallel Lines they stuck with producer Mike Chapman who took them further into the kind of tough edged pop he'd mastered with Nicki Chinn in the '70s with the likes of The Sweet and Suzi Quattro. Parallel Lines runs out of fuel on its second side like most Blondie albums but the parade of bangers on the first side and the mega hit Heart of Glass wiping the table of side two makes things feel balanced. Eat to the Beat is better balanced but it's also blander. The highlights are rule-proving exceptions.

Blondie produced and released a video album of every track, embracing the future while its choice of form was still uncertain. Nevertheless, it was forward looking and showed the band's determination to break through and stay on top. Well, better a blander Blondie than a Cryogenic Eagles, eh? That was never the choice, though. As U.S. pop culture in the early '80s consumed the riskier post punk from the U.K. it had been defused at customs and was open for copying by people who wouldn't have thought of it in the first place. The rest was the maintenance of position by those who were already there and anyone who sounded enough like them. Billy Joel released his big Noo Wave album the following year and it probably enjoys a warm nostalgia among its fans. I hate it unreservedly. It wasn't Blondie who made Billy Joel do that terrible thing, it was more his anxiety that they might have been the future, them, teh Ramones and all that Talking Heads weirdo stuff.

I recall it the way I recall most Blondie albums, as a series of singles on Countdown. They had power and rang out over the crowds at high school parties I went to. It was fun and sounded like it. The University parties I also went to never put this on the turntable. Those parties were a mix of late boomer picks from punk and environs, less fun (sometimes outright embarrassing) but held more interesting conversations and more songs about buildings and food.

As if we needed it, Eat to the Beat reminded us that Blondie was an American band and on a path to establishment like almost all of the others. There's no sin in that but it comes at a cost. Eat to the Beat is a record by a band unprepared for that.