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Malcolm Povey

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Pindaric for Blondie

Can’t discuss the music, or the voice, but Blondie's Atomic is the perfect pagan lyric. Playing it making breakfast gets my old bones dancing like no other rock, pop or whatever you call it.

It’s the insistent present tense, the absolute lack of concern for time passing, "Make me tonight" and the desire for vividness, not lastingness, "Make it magnificent”, the secret of pop, sport, youth, "Make it magnificent". The absolute opposite of what I love best, poetry, where everything is suffused with time passing, poetry, the solitary versifer's attempt, by embracing the tide, to stop the tide.

But the best line, the one that makes me press rewind, is "Oh, your hair is beautiful". It wouldn't work in a poem, but sung in that yearning, gonna make you, tone, it’s the works. “Oh, your hair is beautiful.” Youth in a nutshell. No one will ever say that to me, bald, again. Can't actually remember if they ever did, but "Oh, your hair is beautiful,” so much better than all that stuff about relationship. Hit me, Blondie, with the magnificence of the present, while I fry bacon.

                                                                         

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