1. BlondieParallel Lines

They were just huge. I always think of the band as Debbie Harry. I wasn’t into that stuff back then, I really wasn’t, but when I listen now, it’s not nostalgia, but it makes me happy, I really appreciate the skill that went into the songs they did. It was magic – a sprinkle of fairy dust hit on every track. It’s a bit like ABBA was, Blondie had that magic touch.

I was dancing then, and quite a few of the girls were dancing to Blondie. I was hearing all the stuff that was in the charts. Some of the guys who DJ-d were into importing 12" singles when they were just starting to come out, all the disco stuff, so I heard a lot of them when they came through – ‘Native New Yorker’ [by Odyssey]. It wasn’t just a pub at the end of the street because you had DJs who were into music. One of them brought out the Pink Floyd album with the inflatable pig and said ‘if you can tell me who did this I’ll buy you a drink’, I said ‘it’s Pink Floyd, my mate did the cover for that’. He said, ‘not you, you’re just a dancer’. Someone had ‘Blue Monday’, and all of a sudden my peers were appearing in the pub where I was stripping. They didn’t play any TG, though I think I might have danced to ‘United’ once. I had to please the clients. 

Clem Burke was the drummer and he went on to work with Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart when we were working with them. It’s funny how you go from Throbbing Gristle and that underground scene to people we were working with being in the charts, they were just beginning as Eurythmics then. Could us and Annie and Dave have become a British ABBA? I’ve never thought of it like that, two couples – it was just an opportunity for likeminded people to do work together. That’s what it was like back then, you worked together but didn’t have a motive in mind.