An Apple A Day #1 - 'Heart of Glass'

Here is a vivid, but hazily detailed, memory. I was sitting alone in our VW ‘Beetle’ (KJV 521F). It was dark, I think. I was alone. I must have been a little cold… this was early in the year 1979 and the car heater was pretty much knackered. I can’t properly remember what I was waiting for. It could well have been for Jan to finish work and have me drive her back to our love nest for a quick sherry and three hours ofbook marking and assessment.

Anyway, the radio was on… must have been Radio One back then. I don’t recall ever being too much bothered by the Top Forty. I had always surrounded myself with so much potentially ‘non-chart’ music that a record’s sales success was an irrelevance.

Someone spoke from the tinny speaker and announced a new single release from Blondie. I was two years into marriage, beginning to adopt squeaky trappings of responsibility and was allegedly sort of too old to have been grabbed by the punk era. The next thirty seconds of my listening did grab me completely and formed the unassailable conviction that the track I was hearing would be top of the hit parade very soon. The remaining minutes confirmed my thoughts and I determined to actually keep an eye on the charts for the next few weeks.

All came to pass as had been foretold, of course. I’ll not detain you with a critique of the track. The band and others have supplied more than enough reaction already.

I’ll simply admit to enjoying the music still… and the fact that it is now played without the BBC beeping out Debbie Harry’s ‘arse’.

Click the picture for a Spotify link to the UK single release plus the B side. Or here for a YouTube offering (you'll be restricted to the album version there by the looks of it).