BLONDIE – "The Tide Is High"

It’s hard to dislike this, but its a bit minor – the type of exercise that would be best discovered as a B-side, rather than the trailblazer for a major new album.

That said, there was a surprising clip on the BBC’s Blondie documentary a few years ago of them performing this on a late night New York amateur cable station, with – I think – squeaky toys and toy drums for instrumentation. Played by an underground art project to a coitery audience, this made a lot more sense than as a glossy pop project.

Blondie’s most boring single (until the reunion, at least).

One of two consecutive number ones to refer to being “number one” in the lyric – 13 year old me saw this as significant. I’m not sure how intentional it was from either act, particularly as this was a cover.

I remember John Peel digging out the John Holt original, performed by the Paragons, and implying that Blondie were somehow less than virtuous by covering an old reggae tune (but I may be doing JP a disservice here, it’s a long time ago. It’s not a stance that would have made much sense given plenty of UK acts played by Peel covered reggae themselves, notably The Clash. Then again, Peel was never one to champion acts once they became commercially sucessful, with one or two well know exceptions).

Anyway, as a huge Blondie fan I had been looking forward to this record for sometime and therefore I willed myself into liking it, even though it all felt a bit underwhelming.

The 7″ version does acutally fade before most of Debbie’s ad libs and the howling laughter that accompanies the LP version (which from memory tacks on a wholly unnecessary percussion intro)

I rushed out and bought this on day of release – the pic sleeve was not the one shown above, but an extract of the forthcoming “Autoamerican” sleeve – a painting of Debbie in mini-skirt leaning against a wall.

The album was savaged by the press. I got it as a Christmas present – hated bits of it, and loved others (“Rapture” was the obvious highlight).

I’ve come to love the Paragons version that this feels almost redundant.

Still Blondie’s does have possibly the most WTF video of the entire decade.

Covered by many, including Billie Piper no?

Lee, “AutoAmerican” is a real mixed-bag of styles so in that sense “Tide Is High” fits in nicely!

Take your pick from – electro instrumental (“Europa”), 40s style jazz standard (“Here’s Looking At You”), rap (“Rapture”), a Lerner & Loewe cover (“Follow Me”), classic Blondie disco (“Live It Up”) and the Oriental sounding funk of “Do The Dark”.

It’s ambitious – some works, some doesn’t. I actually can’t abide “Here’s Looking At You” but hearing Debbie intone

“Based on the desire for total mobility and the serious physical pursuit of religious freedom, the auto drove mankind further than the wheel and,
in remote areas even today,
is forbidden as a device too suspect for human conveyance”

over sinister synthesizer chords works for me…

The 1982 comeback single “Island of Lost Souls” was very much in the same vein as TTIH – an upbeat, gentle reggae lilt.

Every track on a Blondie greatest hits puts a smile on my face – especially the duet with Iggy Pop on “Well Did You Evah!” This one’s no exception, and shows that they can do slinky and exotic too. She looked as hot as ever in the video, although that cover pic is a bit ropey. And that’s it for Blondie number ones for close on two decades.

Steve M – are you thinking of the Atomic Kitten cover rather than Billie?

#7 – my eight-year old self quite liked this, but thought that it wasn’t as exciting as ‘Atomic’.

“I quite liked the morning after, but it wasn’t as exciting as the Lord Mayor’s Show.”

There are some half-decent things happening in “The Tide Is High”, rhythmically at least, but it’s a very limp single, isn’t it? Aside from being fiendishly catchy, it doesn’t do much that an A-side should. Just sort of sits there scratching itself in front of you, then wanders off smirking at the knowledge that it’ll be in your head for the rest of the day. And this is not enough: I remember an old letter to Melody Maker from a bloke who’d been working near Camden station, saying that the all-day cry of “lighters, three for a pound” had stuck in his head all week, but this didn’t mean it had improved his life in any way, neither was he on his way home to listen to a recording of it.

It’s a shame, bearing in mind what came before. This is the cut-off point for Blondie and me, really, as it was for many – I like the texture of “Rapture”, but as I’ve never been in love with Debbie Harry, I really can’t bear her “hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle”-style rap. Like most of the hits of this period which don’t mean much to me, what I mostly associate with “The Tide Is High” are obscene playground variations, none of which bear repeating here, but all of which were, ultimately, far more entertaining.

“are you thinking of the Atomic Kitten cover rather than Billie?”

no! i was deliberately not mentioning the AK…

Was it just the UK radio edit which cut out the embarrassing “eats cars/eats bars” bit of the rap?

I have something here which claims to be the “original radio version” of “Rapture”, which is in fact a minute longer than the other version, and features the rap in all its glory. I don’t have any background on this – not really a Blondie historian – maybe someone else will?

Does any song nosedive quite as badly as “Rapture”? The first two minutes are luscious: the groove is immaculate, THE BELLS, the entry of the vocals, like stepping into a moonbeam… and very few lyrics of its type are quite as good as “face to face / sadly, solitude / and it’s finger-popping / twenty-four hour shopping in rapture”. And then suddenly, the dish runs away with the spoon. Is she freestyling for most of that rap? I could swear she is (not just because the rhymes are so trite, but because of that weird, hesitant delivery).

Anyway, I object to the second half of “Rapture”, because it’s such a desperate let-down, but also because I hate records that make me want to go off and listen to other records while they’re still playing, in this case “Sun Eye” by T Rex (“Lithon The Black, the rider of stars / Tyrannosaurus Rex, the eater of cars” – now that’s a lyric).

i think rapture is actually my favourite blondie song — i’m not unfond of tide either, the tone others are (not unreasonably) calling listlessness i always heard as a kind of lazy unbothered ease (which is there in a lot of her earlier songs, as a kind of inflection she hinted at but didn’t indulge)

Hip-hop is still fun.

As is D Harry’s rapping on ‘Rapture’ – there are only a few select examples of a non-rapper rapping and getting away with it, but sadly I think she has to take some of the blame for the all the non-rappers who followed in her footsteps to disastrous effect.

As for ‘The Tide Is High’, I thought it was OK in a blehhhh 6/10 way until I heard the original – it’s not, like, particularly great, but it’s amazing how much lightness and life Blondie sucked out of it (and surprising, as that’s not really something you could fault them with on their own material).

I agree, nothing to see here.

Interesting discussion on Rapture though. I had written it off until I saw it used in ‘We Own The Night’ and was amazed at just how beautiful it is. Listening to the full version again, I’d be amazed if it doesn’t exist as a massively curtailed edit, maybe pruning the rap down to six lines or so (‘Go out to the parking lot … Get up!’). Is there such a thing? I’d make it myself if I knew how.

Does anybody else like ‘War Child’ off ‘The Hunter’, the last hit from the original run of Blondie? I haven’t got it to hand to refer to, but the 12″, where Clem Burke’s drumming is fully indulged and Harry barks “I’m a WAR CHILD! I’m a WARRIOR!” is quite exciting…

Although this hit version of the song is sung by a woman, the lyrics give it away as a man’s song, just like ‘Take A Chance On Me’.

Coincidentally the terrific Heatwave blog has just posted the latest incarnation of this song, and it’s much much better than Blondie’s – Kardinal Offishall and Keri Hilson have a fantastic new single, all booming drums and crunching synths, which interpolates the ‘Tide Is High’ hook – Hilson’s sweet take on it, esp when juxtaposed with the arrangement and Kardinal’s surprisingly ruffneck MCing, is definitely preferable to the perfunctory Blondie version.

Sadly that post also reminded me that Atomic Kitten also covered ‘The Tide Is High’ once – I had managed to excise that horror from my brain 🙁

It’s easy, it’s familiar, that’s it.

Uhhh I think it is slightly more likely that dancehall/reggae-affiliated artists like Kardinal Offishall would be using The Paragons as their reference point rather than Blondie!

Well I said I could be wrong. I’m old, cut me some slack. I’ve never even heard Atomic Kitten’s version.

Re: 34 – possibly, maybe even probably, but not necessarily. After all, Blondie were massive everywhere, and the Paragons – terrific as they were, not. On the other hand, there is an early (great) DJ version by U Roy, so Kardinall Offishall is far from the first to set his rasping against that tune.

Obviously their worst (first time round) #1, this was an odd one. Two years earlier they’d have got away with it, but Two Tone had brought a lot of ska and other reggae styles to the airwaves, so the Paragons’ infinitely superior version was familiar to many.

I always had the opinion this was bought by Blondie fans rather than pop fans. I didn’t buy it although I had bought all four of their earlier #1s (got sick of “Call Me” pretty damn quick tho’)

A quality control lapse, or the beginning of the end??

Possibly both.

@ Billy Smart # 26:

I love ‘War Child’. Last gasp of the group, and the best song off ‘The Hunter’ by a mile.

Don’t get the criticism for TiH on here. Yes, it’s lightweight reggae, yes, it doesn’t have the muscle of their previous hits. But they were trying to adapt to survive in the especially harsh environment of the rapidly changing new wave scene. On first listening you can hear that this is a guaranteed number one hit; it’s catchy, it’s fluffy, it’s exactly what it should be to go straight to the top of the charts, which is exactly what it did in both the UK and US. Ok, it’s not Blondie gold, but it is Blondie silver, which makes it better than 90% of music both then and now (cliche alert?). Sure, they were scratching around for ideas, and ‘Automerican’ proved they were crumbling creatively, but they were also looking for a way to finance their drug habits, and hits were the way to do it. TiH sits on a best of Blondie perfectly well along with all the more meaty songs. Sure it’s a bit of fluff, but at this point Blondie were easily as good as The Police… at least until the album came out. Besides, six months after this single came out Adam and the Ants were Kings and everybody else looked old-fashioned; Debbie made the piss poor album ‘Koo-Koo’, which meant two duff albums in a row; by the time ‘The Hunter’ album came out, it was strike three-you’re out. At least on a musical level it was; the group had a lot of personal issues to sort out, but if the public ever cared, they had given up by the time of The Hunter.

My big issue with this song has more to do with the music we hear; I constantly find myself wondering just how much of it is played by the band, and how much is played by session musicians?

referencing “the sea” I meant…

…and American Life era Madge.

And it’s goodbye John Holt of the Paragons, writer of this song. Not to be confused with John Holt, Professor of Experimental Physics at Liverpool University in the 1970s (and for some time before) who lectured on Special Relativity to first year undergrads in an alarmingly tedious manner (he lived on until 2009 though, apparently).

Tom is spot on with his review and I agree with his mark of 6/10.