The Blogazine

On a spring day of 1978 (7th of May), Blondie, a new wave band from New York featuring model-turned-lead singer Debbie Harry, were performing on the bill of a benefit gig held by New York punks, The Dead Boys, at the Lower East Side club CBGB. At the time, Blondie’s new single “(I’m Always Touched by Your) Presence, Dear” from the album Plastic Letters had just reached the Top 10 in the UK, but they were still relatively unknown back home. Shocking the club’s punk audience with their cover of Donna Summer’s blissful disco hit “I Feel Love”, the band managed to cause a bit of a stir that night.

With The Rolling Stones also just starting to dabble in the genre with hit song “Miss You”, it seemed that something was going on, but Blondie was the first band of the New York punk generation that embraced the new Disco sound with their own dance masterpiece, “Heart of Glass”, recorded three weeks later in Record Plant Studios.

Working on their third album Parallel Lines with producer Mike Chapman, who was getting desperate for a hit song in the US, the band unearthed a song they had written in 1975 called “The Disco Song”, which was later renamed “I Had a Love”. Although Chapman liked the song, he thought it needed to be brought up to date. Drawing on their Disco influences such as Kraftwerk, Chic and I Feel Love producer Giorgio Moroder, while using a Roland CR-78 drum machine the band had just bought, they recorded a uniquely melancholic, but upbeat disco hit.

Renamed again to “Heart of Glass”, and after making a video promo for the song at New York’s upmarket Studio 54 club, “Heart of Glass” jumped to number 1 in the UK when it was released as a single on January 3, 1979. Perhaps more importantly though, it also topped the charts in the US as producer Chapman craved for, making the band into global pop superstars almost overnight.

Following the song’s immense success, Pop artist Andy Warhol threw a celebratory party for the band at Studio 54. In 2011, his portrait of Debbie Harry sold for $5.9.