De Montfort Hall, Leicester
Blondie, America’s greatest enduring punk turned pop band, are back on the UK scene with a vengeance. Touring the UK to launch their 8th studio album The Curse of Blondie, ticket sales alone prove that there certainly aren’t any negative forces acting on the band here.
The new album has already been heralded a feat of musical engineering with 14 powerful songs demonstrating that Blondie are still alive and well. Twelve months earlier though demon forces were more than apparent when I was bitterly disappointed with the band’s performance at the Nottingham Arena on their European Tour when they were technically sloppy and Debbie Harry’s vocals as thin as sliced cucumber.
I have to admit that as a result I was initially pretty reticent about how well they would perform at this gig at Leicester’s De Montfort Hall, but very few bands have caught my imagination in quite the way that Blondie has and having been a keen aficionado of the band since my early formative teens, I was keen to hear their new material.
And so were many more Blondie fans with a packed Hall buzzing in anticipation of a glimpse of the infamous Ms Harry but they were forced to be patient as the boys teased them with a 5 minute instrumental medley before leading in to Atomic when the blonde bombshell herself finally appeared. Clad in a pillar-box red dress with Cinderella style tattered hem, fishnets and red kitten heals, Debbie proved she can still cut it in the sex stakes despite her increasing age.
Looking sleeker, fitter and more confident than she had in 2002, this was a promising start and with her hair wafting in wind from a fan perched at the front of the stage Debbie danced and strutted around for most of the gig. The slack performance of yesteryear was gone, the band were much tighter and Clem Burke’s stick aerobatics at end of each song made sure any curse was well and truly lifted.
As expected, the set list included many of their old hits; Dreaming, Hanging On The Telephone, Accidents Never Happen, Heart of Glass, Maria, but it was disappointing to hear that they had been re-arranged into a lower key to try to avoid any embarrassment with any high notes, although not always with success, and on Sunday Girl the pace was slowed so much that Debbie was practically talking. Perhaps age has taken its toll on her after all?
Noticeably better vocals were present on the tracks from the new album which had clearly been written for a post millennium Debbie; the current single Good Boys, Hello Joe (which was written about the late Joey Ramone), The Tingler, Rules For The Living, End To End, are all trademark Blondie songs brought bang smack up to date.
Blondie still rock! If it hadn’t been for the re-arrangement of the early Blondie hits, you could have been forgiven for thinking that the clock had been turned back to the early ’80s. Perhaps The Curse of Blondie will turn out to be their good luck charm.
