BLONDIE Eat To The Beat (Chrysalis)

Richard Riegel

Blondie has arrived this year, as surely as I keep feeling Deborah Harry’s cover-girl visage staring me up from the People and Us magazines stacked by the sugarless gum at my supermarket checkout. Blondie has suddenly grabbed off, the brightest stardom to come to any of the veterans of the New York punk renaissance of 1976-77, and the band’s acceptance by the masses only demonstrates again how lost that whole scene is by now. The new wave revived all of us when it first splashed into our faces, but there’s no time for cheap nostalgia with the 1980 calendar page about to fall.

Thankfully, Eat To the Beat ushers in the pop-tarted 80’s in lttuch the way the Stones’ Let It Bleed once signalled the end of the rockin’ 60’s (as with the earlier