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Recipe

Take the nursery rhyme Three Blind Mice

3 blind mice

Rearrange it in the minor key

Sad 3 blind mice

Brighten it up again with a classic 70s sequencer

Atomic Sequencer

A really excitable drummer

Drums then Atomic 3 blind mice

Add a drum roll And after that there’s only one thing for it: Ennio Morricone

Atomic intro

Blondie’s Atomic:

Third single on the 1979 album Eat To The Beat

Not a difficult second album: it was their 4th

Following Parallel Lines, it seemed like it ought to be.

Parallel Lines

Produced by Anglo-Australian pop “hit single” maestro Mike Chapman – Suzie Quattro, Racey, the Knack, The Sweet, Mud.

Racey: Lay your love on me

Chapman was a perfectionist, brought some real discipline to the band

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.”

It worked: Blondie went from punk outsiders to pop monsters with knockout singles like

Sunday Girl

Hanging on the Telephone

One way or another

And, of course, the standout, million-selling single

Heart of Glass

I put a rock into that can and all they played was DISCO man. Heart of Glass featured a drum machine – one of the first to feature on a pop single: the Roland CR 78.

heart of glass drum machine

Suddenly Blondie was not BAD: they were Nationwide. But imagine the pressure to follow up Heart of Glass: JUST DO THAT ONE AGAIN

Heart of Glass vamp.

But the band had other ideas.

It sounds like the band had other ideas from each other

Jimmy Destri got out his CR 78 sequencer again

Atomic Sequencer

But Clem Burke wanted to be back in CBGBs with the Ramones

Ramones

Meanwhile, Chris Stein had been watching Spaghetti Westerns

Man with Harmonica

And Debbie Harry just wanted something magnificent.

What we got was an extraordinary mishmash of

styles

moods

keys

Atomic subverts all the rules of composition:

It doesn’t even have a sensible verse and chorus structure.

Everything the song is DISSONANT. Tension.

Between

• rising and falling,
• fast and slow,
• major and minor,
• human and machine

Synopsis

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

dreaming

at the helm on a quest to see this otherworldly blonde goddess murmuring expectantly about the on-rushing apocalypse.

Drone with major minor pad

All this in an ambiguous spacetime flux, flipping madly between major and minor, switching up tempos, and exploring unseen and inhuman dimensions in between.

If this is nuclear holocaust — an atom-age rapture

Rapture

Then I want some.

Part 1: 3 blind mice

What? Why start there?

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?

atomic cr 78

The beat is mechanical, like a machine beyond mortal control, a crazy escalating upbeat,

3 atomic blind mice

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.

At the crescendo — are we happy or sad? — a parade ground drumroll — a sure-shot snareshot — stop —

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 — ?

About that sequencer

It is 1979. The Roland TR808 powers the 1980s electronic revolutions has not been invented yet:

Sexual healing

Its predecessor, Roland’s CR 78, was a weird, clunky box - hard to programme but some groovy pre-set patterns. Like this:

Heart of glass CR78

But only faster, more metallic, more driving, more machine age:

Atomic CR 78

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: Logic CR 78 sequence.

It wasn’t just a drum machine

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.

If Chapman was taking the band in a commercial direction, Burke was like a reluctant passenger.

Everything about his drumming is urgent, insistent, impatient, as we find out as the mice give way to the VAMP

The Vamp

We open on a wide empty dustbowl, a kerrang of spaghetti western guitars

the rollercoaster clunges down into the abyss.

Now Clem Burke sets the pace, hauling frantically at the beat, a brisk four-on-the-floor stomp,

Atomic vamp drum beat

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

quarter notes triplets

as if to say, NO RUSH GUYS JUST WHEN YOU ARE READY.

Come on, man, we haven’t got all day — don’t you know there’s a sweaty disco cataclysm going down?

But Stein and Infante and their cool-hand Ennio Morricone guitars will not be rushed.

There is a new sheriff in town, his vibe is dreamy double-tracked twang and I want to believe that this is where

wicked game

James Calvin Willsey learnt everything he knew, God rest him.

fade in Atomic CR 808 + keyboard swells

But underneath it all this tension: — 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?

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 —

Verse

Kaboom! There it is!

atomic verse

Suddenly we’re exultant: it’s a breezy major. We notice the bass for the first time.

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.

The Chords

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.

But at the same time, listen to the progression rise. There is hopeful expectation of something better?

That better something arrives in the shape of the long awaited visitation from heaven:

“Uh-ha, make it all right,” she sings.

After all this cultivated dissonance this seems trite and, on paper, 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.

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. We are back with the machines. The roller-coaster thunders back down into the depths, for you can’t understand joy if you don’t know sorrow tonight — stop.

Atomic.

The drone keyboard

This is 79, still early doors for polyphonic synthesisers. Really early ones would only play one note at a time. Destri creates two classic effects — the arpeggiator effect, created by running a pulse signal from the back of the cr78 which triggered the synth and this flanging, phasing swell This broadcast is entirely fan-fictional. Any coincidence between it any any real events is accidental, and highly unlikely.