Hunter, The - Blondie > Reviews > HUNTED TO EXTINCTION

Author's product rating:   

Originality	Definitely a cut above the rest
Lyrics	Thought-provoking
Quality and consistency of tracks	One hit and lots of B-sides
How does it compare to the artist's other releases	Weak
Value for Money	Poor

Advantages:	Rare moments of genius
Disadvantages:	The coolest band on earth's descent into mediocrity

Recommend to potential buyers:

no

Full review

Having conquered the world with hit albums 'Parallel Lines', 'Eat to the Beat' and 'Autoamerican', Blondie were an exhausted band with members who couldn't stand the sight of each other. This album, 'The Hunter', was released in 1982 and is the last album they released. Of course, we now know that this was not to be the case, as the band reformed in 1998 and released two more albums ('No Exit', which isn't very good, and 'The Curse of Blondie', which is a bit better).

Blondie were such a cross-appealing group, they could appeal to all sorts of people – that’s what made them cool. They skinny-tied new wave cool brought them much appreciation from the punk/new wave crowd, the NYC art scene (Andy Warhol and Jean-Paul Basquiat were fans) and the fashion industry, with designers falling over themselves to appropriate the Blondie style. The band even had respect in the hip-hop community as a result of Harry and guitarist Chris Stein’s adventures in the burgeoning NYC hip-hop underground, culminating in their 1981 smash ‘Rapture’ (the first white rap song, the first rap song to go to No. 1 in the US charts and the first female rap song - a plethora of firsts there). They were praised as heroes by the punk community. And, encapsulating all of this, your average Joe, your everyday pop fan with no interest in art or rebellion, took the band to their heart and clutched them there, loving every moment of their pop-soaked genius, posters of la Harry adorning their walls, be they boy or girl – boys loved Harry for her stunning good looks, girls loved her for her combination of chic and street cred.

But come 1981-82, Blondie was a band in crisis. Quite simply, the band hated each other in these days. Comprised of Harry, Stein, rhythm guitarist Frank Infante, bassist Nigel Harrison, keyboardist Jimmy Destri and drummer Clem Burke, the sensational six found themselves constantly at each other’s throats during the recording of 1980’s art-pop experiment ‘Autoamerican’. Destri and Stein would clash more often than most, while Infante and Harrison were increasingly resentful that they were being left out of the band, their songwriting contributions ignored by the Stein/Harry axis. Infante filed a lawsuit against the band in 1981 for leaving him out of ‘band decisions’, though it was settled out of court. He appears on the cover of ‘The Hunter’ but hardly plays a note on the album, as producer Mike Chapman notes. Chapman, who was now on his fourth Blondie album after ‘Parallel Lines’, ‘Eat To The Beat’ and the aforementioned ‘Autoamerican’, was also clearly tired of the whole process and needed to recharge his batteries. There was also the sense that the band had lost faith in him, as they tried to court Giorgio Moroder to be producer for ‘Autoamerican’, and when that fell through they settled for Chapman again.

As the members have said frequently in interviews, they had effectively split up already and had ceased to communicate with each other. Harry had already released a solo album (the disappointing ‘Koo Koo’), giving credence to popular thought that she was set to quit the band and each of the other members busied themselves with their own side projects. However, the label, Chrysalis, demanded that they release one more album to fulfill their contractual obligations to them. So, for one last time, Blondie would put away their hatred for one another and re-enter the studio to bash out one more album.

And from all accounts it was a disaster. Chapman’s sleevenotes indicate the stressful time he and the band endured to create this album. And it is certainly true that at times the band just seem like they cannot be bothered, like the fun and the inspiration just isn’t there anymore. When you combine that with the increasingly artsy and vaguely pretentious leanings Harry and Stein were exploring, this could be a recipe for disaster. But Blondie just about manage to pull this album from the brink of the abyss and rescue it from total damnation. However, this is still not a good album by any stretch of the imagination. It is undoubtedly Blondie’s weakest album and is a sad farewell for this incarnation of the band. They really could have gone out on a much higher note than this, but it just wasn’t to be. What is most striking about the album is the thought that if Blondie didn’t want to make this album and only created it because they were contractually obligated to, then maybe they intentionally made the most obscure, highbrow, experimental album they possibly could because they knew it would be their last album and had nothing to lose; the ultimate pop art statement. Just a thought.

The album most certainly belongs to Harry and Stein; it seems they have just about taken over the band (it could justifiably be argued, of course, that it always was Harry and Stein's band, although the other members would undoubtedly take issue with that). Of the eleven songs here Harry and Stein played a role in the writing of nine of them. Nigel Harrison gets a co-writer credit on ‘Warchild’ and ‘Orchid Club’ and Jimmy Destri shines with ‘Danceway’ but it seems that this was Harry and Stein’s baby.

The album opens with ‘Orchid Club’, which has a heavy drum beat supplied by the magnificent Clem Burke, consistent and pounding, hard, nasty and aggressive. Harry swoons over it, her vocal delivery sounding by turns yearning and dangerous. While the song is undoubtedly original (I am yet to hear another song like it), ‘Orchid Club’ just goes on for just too long and this subdues its overall impact, and after a while we start to wonder just how long this epic is going on for. The band seemed intent on exploring their experimental side, or at least Harry and Stein did, and while this was fine over the band’s evolution period, at this point it sounds jarring and confused. Stein at this time was suffering from the early stages of a rare genetic disorder called pemphigus, which was gradually wearing him down and indeed on the cover he looks visibly tired, as do they all. The writer and critic Victor Bockris said of the cover to ‘The Hunter’ that it is among the worst album covers of all time and I would tend to agree. The six individuals presented here are just that; six individuals, not a band anymore. Debbie has this hideous wig on and over-done make-up, a disguise, and the guys look deeply unhappy and tired. The illness is visible in Stein.

‘Island of Lost Souls’ is Blondie parodying themselves and their success with their No. 1 reggae smash ‘The Tide Is High’ (the genius of which was been effectively muted by a hideous version by the dreadful Atomic Kitten). One cool thing about Blondie is their willingness to charge into the unknown and explore different musical territory. This has a strong calypso feel, with horns and percussion aplenty, and Harry sings of isolation, loneliness and despair amid the happiest backdrop you’ve ever heard, it’s really quite clever: “In Babylon on the boulevard of broken dreams/My will power at the lowest ebb/
Oh what can I do?/Oh buccaneer!/Can ya help me put my truck in gear?/Can ya take me far away from here/Save my soul from sin?”. This was released as a single in 1982 and reached a disappointing No. 11, a signal that Blondie’s tight grip on the charts was loosening (this after four straight No. 1’s with ‘Atomic’, ‘The Tide Is High’, ‘Rapture’ and ‘Call Me’). The video featured Harry lost on an island, wandering around with nowhere to go, video and lyrics both offering up heavy symbolism of the state of the band at this point in time.

‘Dragonfly’ sounds typically 80’s, again with a calypso-style percussion and aggressive, wandering guitars that punctuate Harry’s pleading, warning vocals. The lyrics make absolutely no sense (“Dragons fly/They symbolize in myth and saga breathing fire/Look up there's one flying higher!/Faster than the SSC/Is science hiding witchery?”) and the song occasionally sounds a little bit too cheesy 80's to be credibly cool. Again, the song suffers because it goes on for just too long and becomes this artsy, long, drawn-out epic that will severely bore the listener. Blondie’s knack for short, snappy, compact moments of pop genius had been overtaken for the desire for credibility in the artscene, it appears, and this smacks of pretentiousness. ‘Dragonfly’ is a strong song made weak by its own length.

Blondie were commissioned to pen a theme for the upcoming James Bond theme ‘For Your Eyes Only’ in 1982. ‘What?’ I hear you cry, ‘They didn’t do the theme for that film!’. Well, they did, in a way. They were actually commissioned to write a theme tune for it, and this is what they turned in. The producers didn’t like it, told Harry and Stein to rewrite it, Harry and Stein refused and the task fell to Sheena Easton to sing the song that would open the flick (which, if you’re interested, is probably the best of all the Roger Moore flicks, with the exception of ‘Live and Let Die’). While Easton’s theme is crap, this is not much better, a sprawling, lazy mess of a song with some bad lyrics that just sounds unbelievably lame and not the same band who had given us some of the finest songs of their time. The band seem like they are just going through the motions and Harry sounds completely disinterested. Really bad stuff.

‘The Beast’ follows in the vein of ‘Orchid Club’ and ‘Dragonfly’ by being a long, drawn-out epic, a dark and nasty sequel to their hip-hop smash ‘Rapture’ that is just too darn long and really boring, something not often said about this band. What I think is noticeable is how the band seem to be aware of their own failings and make no effort to improve upon it, they knew they were coming to the end of their career and were doing very badly indeed commercially. ‘The Beast’ is representative of the artsy strain of the Blondie manifesto, a dark, bold experimental number which just goes on and on and on with no fast conclusion.

Nigel Harrison gets a writing credit with ‘Warchild’, co-penning it with Harry, and it is a very strong track. The electro-synth pulses which open the song lead into some of Blondie’s most powerful lyrics talking about Cambodia. The lyrics are impacting yet subtle ('My occupation is being occupied/I stop at the corner to be identified/Across the border they pretend victory/I'm playing in the rubble and dream of destiny’) and the beat of the song, combined with some more horns and restrained guitars make for an excellent song. Clem Burke drums his heart out as well, giving one of his best performances in the band’s history. This was Blondie’s last single in this incarnation, peaking at an appalling No. 39 in the UK charts. They had simply lost the public’s imagination.

Blondie explore some calypso, jazz, rap and scat on the daft and crazy ‘Little Caesar’, yet they pull it off with their trademark verve and style and somehow manage to make a blend of the styles above seem credible. The song is actually quite good with some funny lyrics, it sounds intentionally ironic and camp (“My name is Little Caesar./My friends call me LC/My Daddy's named the same and passed it on to me”) and the feel is happy-go-lucky yet with some darker undertones (“You'll find I'll linger in your mind/You can't forgive me/You won't forget me/You can't live without me/Can't live without me”), suggestive of a theme of madness and obsession.

The best track on the entire album is undoubtedly the Jimmy Destri-penned ‘Danceway’, a gorgeous, energetic, rip-roaring dancefloor filler that sounds both classic and contemporary. It sounds like it should be accompanying a John Waters film or any film featuring a member of the 80’s Brat Pack, and yet it just shines and stands out as a classic, which should undoubtedly have been released as a single.

‘(Can I) Find The Right Words (To Say)’ is a poor song made worse by the fact that the band seem to be clearly uninterested. A lazy work that sounds like it was conceived in two minutes, this is not at all representative of Blondie’s best stuff and symbolizes their lack of interest in functioning as a band anymore. ‘English Boys’ and ‘The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game’ close the album on an exceedingly poor note, sounding dull and half-baked. The lyrics are unintelligent and lacking in inspiration and the band just seem tired and bored. If ever there was a right time to split up, this was it. The songs sound dark, moody and nasty, Harry sounding extremely ill-tempered throughout the whole album pretty much. ‘English Boys’ is just too wafer-thin and fragile to merit repeated listens. Harry and the band sound like they just cannot wait to pack up their instruments, leave the studio and never speak to each other again, and the lack of interest in the project is tangible, most noticeable on these three forgettable songs.

Blondie’s back catalogue was recently re-mastered and re-released with bonus tracks, and while each of their five others came packed with some quality new tunes, ‘The Hunter’ comes with only a remix of ‘Warchild’, which takes the original and makes it over-long, dull, tepid and uninteresting. A shame, because some studio cuts would have been cool. Or perhaps there were no cuts, perhaps Blondie just put everything out on the album and quit? Who knows. The new sleeve notes by Mike Chapman and some unseen photos make for good reading though, an insider’s account of the band’s disintegration.

Blondie would embark on a short tour to promote the album but they didn’t manage to get enough bums on seats and many gigs were cancelled as a result. Guitarist Infante didn’t join them on that tour, having been fired from the band shortly after ‘The Hunter’s’ release. Post-1982, Stein’s condition grew worse and he would be admitted to hospital to recover from the disease which was wearing him down. Harry put a hiatus on her solo career to help nurse him back to health. Thankfully Stein recovered. Stein would create his own record label, Animal Records, and would produce work by Harry, the Gun Club and Iggy Pop. Harry’s solo career continued but would be vastly underwhelming, with a few exceptions, while the likes of Madonna took her mantle and stormed up the charts with a complete facsimile of Harry’s act. Harry would also begin an acting career, for which she has become critically acclaimed, with star turns in ‘Videodrome’, ‘Hairspray’ and ‘Heavy’ and would join the jazz band ‘The Jazz Passengers’ in the mid 1990’s. Destri would release a poorly-received and under-rated solo album (which Burke, Harrison and Infante would contribute to) before going into production and finally retiring from the music business. Burke and Harrison formed the short-lived Chequered Past, before Burke would become the drummer for the Eurythmics, the Ramones and Nancy Sinatra, among others.

While it seemed like it at the time, ‘The Hunter’ isn’t Blondie’s big goodbye. It would have been a pity for a band so smart, so cool and so darn brilliant to sign off on such a weak note. The band reformed in 1998 after sixteen years pretty much out of the spotlight, this time with a line-up of Harry, Stein, Destri, Burke and new members in the form of bassist Leigh Foxx and guitarist Paul Carbonara. Infante and Harrison were not invited and perhaps quite rightly they felt annoyed that history was being revised and their role in the band’s history being limited to a footnote (Infante alleges that Stein had him fired because he was jealous of Infante being a better guitarist than him). So they sued. But Blondie remain intact and have released two albums since their reformation (which have been ever-so-slightly underwhelming, it must be said).

So if you want an introduction to Blondie, a quite under-rated band, it is safe to say that you should definitely give 'The Hunter' a miss. Buy 'Plastic Letters' or 'Parallel Lines' and remember them as they should be remembered.