In March 2019, I was fortunate enough to be invited to be the only overseas journalist who accepted the invitation to cover Blondie’s first concerts in the Cuban capital, billed as a ‘cultural exchange’ to get around travel restrictions reimposed on Americans by a certain orange ogre.
Counting the days until the release of the band’s 12th studio album, due in 2025, we mark another milestone in the meantime. Drummer extraordinaire Clem Burke’s has become rock’s newest septuagenarian, and, what follows is an extract of one of the interviews I conducted with Debbie and the lads at the Havana hotel we were shacked up in.
From New York to Los Angeles, where he now resides, Clem is a city boy through and through, and the living breathing embodiment of everything that comes to mind when we think about US post-punk and new wave — having been on the scene to witness the nascent age of doo-wop and the emergence of early rock ‘n’ roll, through to the envelope pushing (but still quintessentially NYC) flavour of the Velvet Underground and on to the infamous downtown CBGB’s scene.
Suffice to say, a conversation with this superlative sticksmith is an understanding that you are conversing with someone steeped in a deep musical lineage. Indeed, it permeates every sentence. There’s plenty more where this came from.
CB: … Eat To The Beat, that definitely… you know, the studio, the Power Station had that major ambient sound, you know, that huge studio floor, the drums sound really big, with the fills on Atomic and different things, it was really nice.
SP: And — there some sort of debate about this in England — but either either Blondie or Gary Numan was the first act to ever do a video album. I think you were maybe a few weeks apart or something.
CB: I think there was something about The Kinks as well. Yeah, the funny thing that happened was there was was some kind of glitch because the person we got to play harmonica on the Eat To The Beat song… I guess for whatever reason we got him to appear in the video. It wasn’t like he was like looked like Marlon Brando or anything (laughs). So there was a hold up because of that, about the rights about him being in the package. I recall that, and I think there was there was somewhat of a hold up due to that.
SP: The Hardest Part… It’s a pretty filthy song, isn’t it?
CB: That’s a good one. Well, double entendre, yeah. Actually, when we did the launch for that we tried to get an armoured car to drive down Rodeo Drive. At the time, and maybe probably still, it’s impossible to rent an armoured car. Because, you know, if you have an armoured car you could… especially now, in this day and age… you could get… so we wound up using a tank.
SP: And Basquiat was in…
CB: The Rapture video.
SP: And Atomic as well?
CB: Yeah, he’s in Atomic too. He has the horse at the beginning. Yeah, it’s crazy when you.… Just went to that, last year, the retrospective in London, of Basquiat.
SP: At the Barbican? That was pretty special.
CB: It was showing a film called Downtown 8, I don’t know if you know about that? Glenn O’Brien, another one of our friends, directed it and it stars Jean-Michel. I’m in it, Chris [Stein] is in it, Debbie [Harry] is in it. Actually, a lot of the No Wave musicians at the time are in it, and apparently they lost the soundtrack to it, so there was no dialogue. They eventually dubbed the dialogue, but they showed it at the Barbican. It was kind of cool to see that.
SP: It was a lovely show. There was a show that they had a few years before that, at the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park, which was, I think, the first major exhibition of his work after his death, and it was actually sponsored by Madonna.
CB: Right, she was a friend, yeah. Of his. Jean-Michel… My girlfriend at the time and I went to a wedding at The Pierre hotel and this other friend of ours, this woman that we met, was there and said, “After the wedding, I’m gonna go and meet my friend. You guys wanna come? He’s picking me up.” And we walk across the road to The Plaza. All of a sudden this limo pulls up, and we go inside. It’s Jean-Michel, and the whole whole car is full of pot smoke, and we just drove around Manhattan smoking pot or something. Crazy. That was when he was starting to get… he hooked up with Andy [Warhol] and all that.
SP: Did you see Julian Schnabel’s film?
BC: No. The Basquiat movie? Oh, where Bowie plays Warhol? Yeah, I did see that briefly. It’s so hard to… a lot of times, with the demise of the video store, you know. I used to have a brilliant one down the street from my house. I could just go in there and they had all the art movies and it was right front of you, you can pick and choose. Now, you know, I mean, I’m sure they’re all out there…
Steve Pafford
This interview transcript has been edited for clarity
Blondie, Greatest Hits (2002) official EMI sleeve notes by Steve Pafford are here
