#ThrowbackThursday. We go back to 1979 when Blondie’s Heart of Glass was at Nº1 in 13 countries including the US and the UK. It was featured on the band’s third studio album Parallel Lines which also reached Nº1 in the UK and was the band’s commercial breakthrough in the US, where it reached Nº6 in April 1979. As of 2008, the album had sold over 20 million copies worldwide.
According to Rolling Stone Magazine, Debbie Harry and Chris Stein wrote the song in their dingy New York apartment and keyboardist Jimmy Destri provided the synthesizer hook. The result brought Punk and Disco together on the dance floor. Destri commented, “Chris always wanted to do Disco. We used to do Heart Of Glass to upset people.” Debbie Harry explained further “When we did Heart Of Glass it wasn’t too cool in our social set to play Disco. But we did it because we wanted to be uncool. It was based around a Roland Rhythm Machine and the backing took over 10 hours to get down.”
The music video shows the band performing in an empty disco and was a massive hit at the time. Blondie was one of the few American bands that made videos in the years before MTV. They did so because it meant they could be featured on shows in different continents when they couldn’t travel there. Currently, Heart of Glass is ranked Nº 56 in the UK’s official list of biggest selling singles of all-time with sales of 1.28 million copies.
