It begins with a sound that does not belong to a New York punk band at all: a loping, sun-warmed rhythm, horns that seem to arrive from somewhere far offshore, and Debbie Harry’s voice, cool and unhurried, singing about holding on while the tide keeps rising. When Blondie released “The Tide Is High” in the autumn of 1980, it sounded like nothing else on American radio, and like everything the band had ever done at once. It was a cover of a thirteen-year-old Jamaican rocksteady song that most of its new audience had never heard, recorded by a band famous for disco-punk hybrids and streetwise New York attitude. And it went straight to number one on both sides of the Atlantic, becoming one of the most unlikely chart-toppers of the decade. The story of “The Tide Is High” is the story of a song that crossed an ocean, waited thirteen years in the shadows, and then found, in the unlikeliest of singers, the voice that would carry it around the world.
To understand why the record mattered, you have to understand where Blondie stood in 1980. They were not newcomers, and they were not a novelty act. They were, quite simply, one of the biggest bands in the world, and one of the strangest. Formed in New York in 1974 around singer Debbie Harry and guitarist Chris Stein, Blondie had come up through the punk clubs of the Bowery — CBGB, Max’s Kansas City — and then, almost casually, conquered pop. “Heart of Glass” in 1979 had fused disco and new wave into a number one hit in America and Britain. “Call Me,” written for the film American Gigolo, had topped the American charts in 1980. “Atomic” and “Dreaming” had kept them at the top in Britain. They were the band that could do anything: punk, disco, pop, rock, and make it all sound like Blondie. But they were also a band under strain. Success had brought money, fame, and friction, and the members were pulling in different directions. Their fifth album would be a test of whether they could still surprise people, or whether they had become just another hit machine.
The song they chose to lead that album with came from a world about as far from CBGB as it is possible to get. “The Tide Is High” was written by John Holt, the tenor singer of the Paragons, a vocal trio from Kingston, Jamaica. The Paragons — Holt, Howard Barrett, and Leroy Stamp at the time of the recording — worked in the rocksteady style, the smooth, soulful sound that bridged Jamaican ska and reggae in the late 1960s. Their version, backed by Tommy McCook and the Supersonic Band and produced by the legendary Duke Reid, was released in 1967 on Reid’s Treasure Isle label, tucked away as a B-side and later included on the group’s On the Beach collection. It was a gentle, lilting record, a song about a love that will not be washed away, and in Jamaica it was known and loved. Outside Jamaica, it went almost entirely unheard.
It might have stayed that way if Harry and Stein had not gone record shopping in London. On a trip to Britain, the pair picked up a compilation tape — accounts differ on the exact tape, but the story is consistent — and heard the Paragons’ record. Stein, in particular, was taken with it. Here was a melody that was both simple and indestructible, a lyric about stubborn devotion that could belong to anyone, and a rhythm that swung with a warmth Blondie’s music rarely allowed itself. Harry and Stein, who almost never recorded other people’s songs, decided this one was too good to leave alone. They were also, by all accounts, deep in the grip of the British ska revival: the Specials, Madness, and the 2 Tone movement were all over the UK charts, and Harry and Stein reportedly even asked the Specials to sing backing vocals on their version. The Specials declined. Blondie recorded it themselves instead.
The album around the song was itself a deliberate change of scenery. Producer Mike Chapman, who had steered Blondie through their biggest hits, insisted the band record their fifth album in Los Angeles, at United Western Recorders in Hollywood, rather than in New York. The idea, according to later accounts, was partly to ease the tensions that had built up inside the band: a change of city, a change of air. The result was Autoamerican, released in November 1980, and it was the most eclectic record Blondie had ever made. It opened with the orchestral sweep of “Europa,” it included “Rapture,” with Harry rapping over a downtown funk groove — one of the first rap performances ever to top the American charts — and it closed, in spirit if not in track order, with the band’s reggae turn on “The Tide Is High.” The album was a statement of range, and its two biggest stylistic gambles, the rap song and the reggae cover, would both reach number one.
The recording of “The Tide Is High” shows how seriously Blondie took the borrowing. This was not a punk band slumming in another genre, and it was not a novelty. Chapman produced the track with the same polish he brought to the band’s pop hits, but the arrangement honored the original’s spirit: a reggae and rocksteady lilt, a prominent horn section, and strings that gave the record a lush, almost cinematic sweep. Harry changed some of the original lyric’s pronouns, turning the singer’s devotion into her own declaration, and she sang it with a restraint that is easy to miss on first listen. Where the Paragons’ Holt had sung the song with warm, direct soulfulness, Harry sang it like a woman stating a fact: the tide is high, but she is holding on. Her coolness, which some critics had mistaken for detachment, turned out to be exactly what the song needed. It made the devotion sound chosen rather than desperate, a decision rather than a plea.
When Blondie finished Autoamerican and handed it to their record company, Chrysalis, the reaction was reportedly indifferent. The album was bold, scattered, and hard to categorize, and the label did not know what to do with it. The band proved them wrong almost immediately. “The Tide Is High” was released as the album’s lead single on October 31, 1980, with “Susie and Jeffrey” on the B-side, and it behaved like a classic from the first weeks. In Britain it entered the charts and climbed to number one, topping the UK Singles Chart for two weeks in November 1980 and becoming Blondie’s fifth British number one. It sold 145,000 copies in its first week in the UK alone. In America it took longer, entering the Billboard Hot 100 at number 81 on the chart dated November 15, 1980, and climbing steadily for eleven weeks until, on January 31, 1981, it reached number one, where it stayed for one week. It was Blondie’s third American number one, and it stayed on the Hot 100 for 26 weeks in all, finishing 1981 as the year’s 17th biggest single. It also reached number one in Canada and New Zealand, number four in Australia, and the top five in several European countries. It was certified gold in both America and Britain.
There is a pleasing irony in the American chart story. “The Tide Is High” reached number one in the United States on January 31, 1981, succeeding John Lennon’s “(Just Like) Starting Over” at the top — and it was itself succeeded the following week by Kool & the Gang’s “Celebration.” For one week, the top of the American charts belonged to a Jamaican rocksteady song, sung by a New York new wave band, that had begun life as a B-side in Kingston thirteen years earlier. It was, as one later critic put it, the closest thing to a real reggae song that had ever topped the American charts up to that point. Reggae had brushed the American top ten before, with Desmond Dekker’s “Israelites” in 1969, but it had never owned the summit. Blondie’s cover, polished and pop-friendly as it was, carried the rhythm all the way there.
The song also marked a turning point in Blondie’s own story, and not an entirely happy one. “The Tide Is High” was Blondie’s last British number one for eighteen years, until “Maria” in February 1999, after the band’s reunion. The follow-up single from Autoamerican, “Rapture,” reached number one in America but stalled at number five in Britain, and the band’s fortunes began to slide. Only one more album, The Hunter in 1982, followed before Blondie split, not to reunite for seventeen years. In that light, “The Tide Is High” stands as the band’s last great imperial moment: the final single of their first golden run, and the one that showed, more clearly than any other, how wide their curiosity ran. They had taken disco, punk, pop, rap, and reggae, and made each of them sound like Blondie. The reggae turn was the bravest of the lot, because it asked the most of their audience, and the audience followed them anyway.
The song’s afterlife has been longer than Blondie’s first career. In 1988, the electronic duo Coldcut remixed it for the compilation Once More into the Bleach. Blondie re-recorded it for their 2014 compilation Greatest Hits Deluxe Redux. And in 2002, the British girl group Atomic Kitten released their own version, retitled “The Tide Is High (Get the Feeling),” which returned the song to the top of the UK Singles Chart, giving it a second British number one more than two decades after Blondie’s. Canadian rapper Kardinal Offishall had a minor hit with his own interpretation in 2008. Each version found something different in the same melody: teen pop, hip-hop, dance. The song, it turned out, was as sturdy as Harry and Stein had suspected when they first heard it on that London compilation tape. It could survive any arrangement, because the tune and the feeling were built to last.
There is a final pleasure in the story, and it belongs to John Holt. Holt, who wrote the song in Kingston in 1967 and sang it first with the Paragons, lived to see it become a worldwide hit twice over, and to see his name carried on records by bands he could never have imagined singing it. He died in 2014, but the song he wrote as a young man in Jamaica has never left the radio. It is a reminder of how pop music actually travels: not always from the center outward, but sometimes from the margins inward, carried by listeners who hear something true in a record the rest of the world has overlooked. Harry and Stein were those listeners. They heard a B-side from Kingston and recognized a number one, and they had the nerve — and the band — to prove it.
That is why “The Tide Is High” still works, more than forty years later, for people who have never heard of the Paragons and never will. It is a song about holding on, sung by a woman who sounds like she means it, over a rhythm that makes holding on feel like dancing. The tide, in the song, never stops rising. Neither, it turns out, does the song itself.
Watch the video below and listen for the moment the horns come in behind Harry’s voice. It is the sound of a Kingston B-side arriving, thirteen years late, at the top of the world.