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When does destruction allstars come out5/17/2023 ![]() ![]() (I can still recall Harry delivering the elegy for times past at CBGBs with “End of the Run” - sample lyrics: “Now the days are much shorter and the people from the good part of town all come around, but the something is missing even though there’s more there now. When my dad took me to my first concert, to see Harry’s “Def, Dumb and Blonde” tour, the repertoire and musicianship set a high bar, but it was something of a bummer to think that, aged 9, I’d arrived late to the party. The current touring outfit for the official Blondie features just two original members (Burke and Harry), the same number to appear in the singer’s solo touring band of the late 1980s and early ’90s. Burke, the youngest and most energetic member of the reunited New York hitmakers, and Valentine have both independently played gigs with U.K. In the third decade of the 21st century, the line between original and tribute band is more fluid than ever. tour that half the bands they played alongside in New York had also crossed the Atlantic. Blondie was shocked to discover on that first U.K. Conversely, many of the bands from CBGBs found more appreciative audiences in England. ![]() The British-born Idol (whose pop sensibility and chiseled cheekbones limited his street cred in London) became a superstar on moving to New York, in 1981. Now, more than three decades later, a 76-year-old Iggy will play his largest-ever headline show in the U.K., at the 30,000-plus capacity Crystal Palace Sports Stadium, with Blondie and Generation Sex (featuring Billy Idol and Tony James, of Generation X, alongside Steve Jones and Paul Cook, of the Sex Pistols) as opening acts. In 1990, Debbie Harry and Iggy released a duet of Cole Porter’s “Well Did You Evah!” for an AIDS fundraiser. to play with the yet-to-be-famous Eurythmics. Blondie guitarist Chris Stein later produced Iggy’s experimental 1982 Zombie Birdhouse album, often setting freeform poetry against electronic- and Afro-beats Burke played drums, then decamped to the U.K. The band destined to become CBGB’s biggest global export was initially dismissed as novelty runts of the cliquey New York scene, but Iggy and Bowie saw something in Blondie, the self-titled 1976 debut album. Īn invitation to appear as the opening act on Iggy’s 1977 North American “The Idiot” tour (for which Bowie played keyboards) constituted Blondie’s first live nationwide exposure. The record on the turntable as he hung himself at home was Iggy’s The Idiot. And less than a week before the Manchester band Joy Division was due to make their New York debut, in May 1980 at the Hurrah nightclub, lead singer Ian Curtis died by suicide. They had already decided that they hated us…” Later that same year, bandmate Sid Vicious was arrested for murdering girlfriend Nancy Spungen at the Chelsea Hotel - he died shortly afterward of an overdose. The encore at the final concert by the Sex Pistols, in San Francisco in January 1978, as they were splintering apart, was a cover of the Stooges’ “No Fun.” Lead singer Johnny Rotten had pointedly avoided New York on the tour, as he disliked the self-appointed custodians of cool: “I thought it would have been silly to go play New York. The albums they made together in Berlin in the late 1970s, The Idiot and Lust For Life, rank highly on both of their resumes, confirming Iggy as the godfather of punk in both the U.K. Iggy had been rescued from obscurity by David Bowie, who always had a knack for spotting underutilized talent. Iggy, who was born James Newell Osterberg Jr., in 1947, released Lust For Life in 1977, following a period in the wilderness after the dissolution of The Stooges in 1974. With his drum kit raised high at the back of a low stage, Burke returned to Liverpool earlier this month to play at the reconstructed (in 1984) New Cavern Club, as part of the Lust For Life all-star group, an homage to Iggy Pop’s classic album of the same name. A highlight of Blondie’s lackluster final record (until re-forming, in the late 1990s), 1982s The Hunter, was “English Boys,” a plaintive tune about the 1960s British Invasion, written in the aftermath of John Lennon’s assassination. tour by Blondie show vocalist Debbie Harry and bassist Gary Valentine looking across the River Mersey and visiting the ruins of the mystical Cavern Club, where the Beatles started out. Liverpool and New York rank among the world’s most iconic musical cities: Photographs from the debut 1977 U.K. That record energized the punk scene centered around CBGBs with its attitude that musical virtuosity was less important than energy and style. Feelgood, the leading band of the so-called pub-rock scene, in tow. In 1976, Blondie drummer Clem Burke, an Anglophile with a Mod haircut, returned to the East Village after a trip checking out the music scene in the U.K. ![]()
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