Songoftheday 6/19/12 - In Bablyon, on the boulevard of broken dreams...

Blondie - "Island Of Lost Souls"

from the album The Hunter (1982)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #37 (two weeks)

Weeks in the top-40: 3

Today's song of the day in by the new wave group Blondie, who by 1982 were one of the top bands in the US, with three platinum studio albums under their belt and four number-one pop hits, including their last at that point, the rap-introducing "Rapture". It seemed like everything was looking up for the band going into their sixth album, The Hunter.

But a combination of the "death of disco" movement that swept Blondie's dance-centric ties as well as the far right veer in music, with the first single "Island Of Lost Souls" adopting a slow, cartoonish calypso beat that alienated them from both their punk and disco fans.

It was like Kidz Bop redoing "The Tide Is High", and in return the single, pleasant as it is in retrospect, relatively bombed for them, scraping the bottom of the top-40 for a few weeks, and The Hunter also just hitting the top-40 (the single and album did a little better in England, with the LP going top-10 amongst a music scene more conducive to reggae and ska). With the failure of the album and the incompletion of a tour, along with guitarist Chris Stein's serious illness, caused the band to break up by the end of the year.

After a few (good) solo albums by lead singer Deborah Harry, the band reunited in 1999 for the No Exit album, which gave them a top-20 US album and was wildly popular in England, giving them their first #1 in almost 20 years with "Maria". They put out two more records so far since, with one last year, and in 2006 were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Up tomorrow: Heavy Metal goes to Motown.