No longer hanging on the telephone

When Blondie played a storming set on the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury recently, Debbie Harry kicked off with a couple of classic hits all sharing a phone theme – because she quipped that she wanted to get ‘phone songs out of the way’ at the start.

Debbie Harry is 77 now, which is shocking in itself, because she’ll always be the peroxide blonde waif of the seventies to those of an admittedly older generation now as well.

But, as she did in the Big Top at the Galway Arts Festival a few years back, she still knows how to rock the joint.

And at Glastonbury, she was specifically referring to two of the band’s greatest hits – Call Me and Hanging on the Telephone; iconic songs of the eighties and nineties, but ancient history to most of those who were rocking on Worthy Farm.

“We had to get those phone songs out of the way because none of it is relevant today, we all have our phones in our pockets,” said Debbie.

And she’s absolutely right, because Hanging on the Telephone means nothing to a generation who are in constant touch on their mobile – or they might be, if they remembered to turn them off silent.

They would have to ask their parents to explain a line like “I'm in the phone booth, it's the one across the hall; If you don't answer, I'll just ring it off the wall.”

For, in all likelihood, they are blissfully unaware of the part that phone booths or boxes played in our lives – or indeed that phones were once nailed to the wall.

They know nothing of a time when you searched in vain for two tuppences and then stood in line – always in the rain – for the person waffling on in the phone box to finally conclude their call.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.