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| ===== Recipe ===== | | <div class="clearfix"> |
| Take the nursery rhyme Three Blind Mice<blockquote>3 blind mice</blockquote>Rearrange it in the minor key<blockquote>Sad 3 blind mice</blockquote>Brighten it up again with a classic 70s sequencer<blockquote>Atomic Sequencer</blockquote>A really excitable drummer<blockquote>Drums then Atomic 3 blind mice</blockquote>Add a drum roll
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| And after that there’s only one thing for it: Ennio Morricone<blockquote>Atomic intro</blockquote>Blondie’s Atomic:
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| Third single on the 1979 album ''Eat To The Beat''
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| Not a difficult second album: it was their 4th
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| Following ''Parallel Lines'', it seemed like it ought to be.
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| ===== Parallel Lines =====
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| Produced by Anglo-Australian pop “hit single” maestro Mike Chapman – Suzie Quattro, Racey, the Knack, The Sweet, Mud.<blockquote>Racey: Lay your love on me</blockquote>Chapman was a perfectionist, brought some real discipline to the band<blockquote>Clem Burke: “On Parallel Lines, producer Mike Chapman was very much of a taskmaster; he’d be in the studio conducting us to keep the meter, almost like a Phil Spector type of thing. He worked really hard at making that record perfect, and it ended up being Chrysalis Records’ biggest seller ever.”</blockquote>It worked: Blondie went from punk outsiders to pop monsters with knockout singles like<blockquote>Sunday Girl
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| Hanging on the Telephone
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| One way or another</blockquote>And, of course, the standout, million-selling single<blockquote>Heart of Glass</blockquote>I put a rock into that can and all they played was DISCO man.
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| Heart of Glass featured a drum machine – one of the first to feature on a pop single: the Roland CR 78.<blockquote>heart of glass drum machine</blockquote>Suddenly Blondie was not BAD: they were Nationwide.
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| But imagine the pressure to follow up Heart of Glass: JUST DO THAT ONE AGAIN<blockquote>Heart of Glass vamp.</blockquote>But the band had other ideas.
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| It sounds like the band had other ideas ''from each other''
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| Jimmy Destri got out his CR 78 sequencer again<blockquote>Atomic Sequencer</blockquote>But Clem Burke wanted to be back in CBGBs with the Ramones<blockquote>Ramones</blockquote>Meanwhile, Chris Stein had been watching Spaghetti Westerns<blockquote>Man with Harmonica</blockquote>And Debbie Harry just wanted something magnificent.
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| What we got was an extraordinary mishmash of
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| styles
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| moods
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| keys
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| ''Atomic'' subverts all the rules of composition:
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| It doesn’t even have a sensible verse and chorus structure.
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| Everything the song is DISSONANT. Tension.
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| Between
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| * rising and falling,
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| * fast and slow,
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| * major and minor,
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| * human and machine
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| ===== Synopsis =====
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| Three blind mice meet a marching band, they run into Sergio Leone in a New York disco, he takes them on a subterranean rollercoaster with a punk rock drummer
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| dreaming
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| at the helm on a quest to see this otherworldly blonde goddess murmuring expectantly about the on-rushing apocalypse.
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| Drone with major minor pad
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| All this in an ambiguous spacetime flux, flipping madly between major and minor, switching up tempos, and exploring unseen and inhuman dimensions in between.
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| If this is nuclear holocaust — an atom-age rapture<blockquote>Rapture</blockquote>Then I want some.
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| ===== Part 1: 3 blind mice =====
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| What? Why start there?
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| A triumphal ascent, set to a martial, marching cadence to signify their — our — steady progress to our certain evisceration. Did you ever see such a thing in your life?<blockquote>atomic cr 78</blockquote>The beat is mechanical, like a machine beyond mortal control, a crazy escalating upbeat,<blockquote>3 atomic blind mice</blockquote>if we have not deduced what the nice found out, we are in a minor key. We can’t say we weren’t warned, but we are on a treadmill, things are beyond our control.
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| At the crescendo — are we happy or sad? — a parade ground drumroll — a sure-shot snareshot — stop —
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| What is coming, and is this it, a firing squad? A premature end? An adolescent spurt? A jolt, un ''petit mort'' — sex is death & death is sex, a little cresting wave — ?
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| ===== About that sequencer =====
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| It is 1979. The Roland TR808 powers the 1980s electronic revolutions has not been invented yet:<blockquote>Sexual healing</blockquote>Its predecessor, Roland’s CR 78, was a weird, clunky box - hard to programme but some groovy pre-set patterns. Like this:<blockquote>Heart of glass CR78</blockquote>But only faster, more metallic, more driving, more machine age:<blockquote>Atomic CR 78</blockquote>These days you can create this all on a laptop with standard software. Compare this, looped off the blondie track (during the middle of Nigel Harrison’s weird bass solo - to which we will return) with this, whistled up in Logic pro:
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| Logic CR 78 sequence.<blockquote>It wasn’t just a drum machine</blockquote>But even so it is not the CR 78 that propels this song but That we put down to the force of nature which is Blondie’s drummer Clement Anthony Burke.
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| If Chapman was taking the band in a commercial direction, Burke was like a reluctant passenger.
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| Everything about his drumming is urgent, insistent, impatient, as we find out as the mice give way to the VAMP
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| ===== The Vamp =====
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| We open on a wide empty dustbowl, a kerrang of spaghetti western guitars
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| the rollercoaster clunges down into the abyss.
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| Now Clem Burke sets the pace, hauling frantically at the beat, a brisk four-on-the-floor stomp,
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| {{Quote|Atomic vamp drum beat}}
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| dragging the band along at 135 — you know he’d go 150 if they’d only get a leg on — just two measures in and he’s given up on the quarter notes and is impatiently drumming his fingers with sarcastic hi-hat triplets
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| {{Quote|quarter notes triplets}}
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| as if to say, NO RUSH GUYS JUST WHEN YOU ARE READY.
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| Come on, man, we haven’t got all day — don’t you know there’s a sweaty disco cataclysm going down?
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| But Stein and Infante and their cool-hand Ennio Morricone guitars will not be rushed.
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| There is a new sheriff in town, his vibe is dreamy double-tracked twang and I want to believe that this is where
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| {{Quote|wicked game}}
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| James Calvin Willsey learnt everything he knew, God rest him.
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| {{Quote| fade in Atomic CR 808 + keyboard swells}}
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| But underneath it all this tension:
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| —
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| Fast against slow. Happy in the face of sad. Lively, but morbid. Descending dark depths but somehow aspiring to the heavens. Is there a mounting, rising angelic keyboard swell?
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| For all the sombre sombrero guitar, that marching four-beat has got a place to be and Burke lets loose a machine-gun snare to tell us we’re arrived —
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| ====Verse====
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| Kaboom! There it is!
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| {{Quote|atomic verse}}
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| Suddenly we’re exultant: it’s a breezy major. We notice the bass for the first time.
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| For all the bossanova sequencing, dance music is all about the sync of the bass and kick drum and here it is. Harrison can't decide whether to play it straight, as he does in the first two measures or a walking disco as he does in the third, but the menace is gone. It's triumphant, like an army riding back to the citadel, and people disco dancing in the street , the disco bass leads, and the drummer, Burke, is back in the pocket like he’s saying I told you so. He’s just doing the cha-cha, cheerleading now, for here is the golden goddess.
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| ====The Chords==== | |
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| In the verse we have E minor – not quite, but nearly the saddest of all keys . An E minor to a melancholy C, to a dolorous D, to a morose A, and then a D, augmenting back to the E.
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| But at the same time, listen to the progression rise. There is hopeful expectation of something better?
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| That better something arrives in the shape of the long awaited visitation from heaven:
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| “Uh-ha, make it all right,” she sings.
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| After all this cultivated dissonance this seems trite and, on paper, a bit disappointing, but the way she sings it, and how Destri garlands it with pealing church-bell keyboard lines, hosannas like it’s the Eighteen Twelve, you know she’s right — uh-ha, make it magnificent.
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| Everything is so major and positive, even the chord progression is rising chromatically up some stairway to heaven, and beautiful hair (again: on paper —) so we know we are building to something bigger, and kaboom! there it is! A throbbing arpeggiator explodes onto the soundscape and, mixed in with the blood and ecstasy are some gorgeous minor third harmonies. We are back in the minor. The ride reaches its apex and we are falling: the roller-coaster thunders down into the depths, for you can’t understand joy if you don’t know sorrow tonight — stop.
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| Atomic.
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| This broadcast is entirely fan-fictional. Any coincidence between it any any real events is accidental, and highly unlikely.
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