Blondie: One Way or Another

Who doesn't like Blondie? I mean they may not be your favourite band or anything, but does anybody not find themselves singing or bopping along to a Blondie track? Personally I wouldn't trust anyone who says they hate Blondie. This 2006 documentary is a rare treat for a number of reasons. Running at just under an hour and 15 minutes it manages to not scrimp on details, refusing to be a back patting type of doc, it reveals all and is the better for it.

Trajectory traces the band from their humble New York based beginnings, through the monster hit records and a willingness to conquer various genres of music, to the world fame and their subsequent rebirth in 1999. But that isn't even half the story...

Thankfully we get the full story here. The luck involved as regards the success of the early record "X Offender", the fluke like sound that would form the basis of "Denis", the tetchy years of producer Mike Chapman - the unbelievable tenure overseen by manager Peter Leeds - and oh my, the story behind the "Parallel Lines" album cover. There's the whiff of plagiarism with "Rapture", and then inevitably an implosion involving drugs, money and illness, the latter of which proving to be a spark of love that's a rare ray of light during the band's darkest period because acrimony and bitterness was starting to haunt and consume the band.

The junkie years are most potent, it's refreshing to find one of the world's most famous bands - pinup girl and all - talking about their addiction problems, which is given even more dramatic heft due to the backdrop of financial ruin. The story is often sad, but it needs to be. Sure the old footage (especially the early black and white performances) is a joy for fans, as is all those wonderful videos of their hit singles, but it's the dark half of Blondie - culminating in the bitter appearance at the "Rock "N" Roll Hall Of fame in 2006 - that marks this out as a true nitty gritty music documentary. 9/10

This is an example of a well made documentary, and shows how they should be made. Its charts the rise and fall and rise again of the so-called "new wave" band Blondie, during the late '70s and early '80s - and early noughties too. For those of you that don't know the term "new wave", it applied to any band of the era which supposedly disowned their punk roots and sold out to become rich and famous, or any musicians who simply took the punk stylings but wrote and performed highly commercial songs. At one point, Debby Harry and another member are taken back to the apartment that they rented in a rundown tenement building years before, and recall how the place was rat infested in the days before they topped music charts around the world. They also realise with irony, that a new band starting out would not be able to afford to rent such a place, in the now gentrified area of New York city.

Although this programme was a means of promoting their new releases of the time, one can overlook this as it is very entertaining to watch.