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Good Terms Create On-the-Spot Screamo Cover of Blondie’s “Call Me”

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Mar 172025
 
Good Terms

Musora is a music education channel based out of the Greater Vancouver Area in Canada with a number of YouTube channels. Some of their channels have featured musicians performing famous songs. Recently, the main channel has started a series where musicians have to cover a song in their own style and they don’t know what it is ahead of time. We here at Cover Me have written up one other Musora spontaneous cover.

The most recent episode features self-described emo/pop-punk/post-hardcore band Good Terms taking on Blondie’s “Call Me.”  “Call Me” was actually written by Giorgio Moroder for American Gigolo, and lead singer Debbie Harry wrote lyrics to it once she was brought in. Blondie then performed the song and it became one of their biggest hits.

From the very opening, it is clear that Good Terms understand the purpose of the Musora challenge. Gone is any hint of Moroder’s electronic disco – from the very beginning it is post-hardcore guitars and drums. Lead singer Brian McShea follows the vocal melody but sings much more in an emo style to begin with.

For the chorus there’s a bit of a break and then a rhythm that is almost 3rd wave ska. There’s another little breakdown before the real show begins: during the second verse Good Terms go full screamo as bassist Geo Botelho briefly takes over the vocals. The chorus is the same as the first but then the bridge is completely transformed into a full post-hardcore/scream breakdown.

It works extremely well and it’s all the more impressive that they just did it on the spot. The full performance starts around 10:58 but it’s fun to watch them working it out too:

Full Albums: Blondie’s ‘Parallel Lines’

 Posted by at 2:00 pm  3 Responses »
Aug 092019
 

Full Albums features covers of every track off a classic album. Got an idea for a future pick? Leave a note in the comments!

blondie parallel lines covers

It’s been a mere 41 years since Parallel Lines was released, a fact that finds this writer flat on his back. How can it possibly be that long? But is is and it was, 1978 being a particularly good year for Blondie, themselves already far from spring chickens.

Debbie Harry, astonishingly already 33, just two years younger than Mick Jagger (and two older than Ronnie Wood), was the mother hen of the band, together with her partner, Chris Stein, half a decade younger. The pair of them and drummer Clem Burke, were the heart of the band, and the only omnipresent members, rounded out at that time by keyboardist Jimmy Destri, guitarist Frank Infante, and bassist Nigel Harrison. Of course they all hated each other and all hated their producer, Mike Chapman, drafted in for this record to widen their appeal.

This would be the band’s third album, the first two having been helmed by Richard Gottehrer, who maximized their punky charm and promise, turning them into the counter-intuitive leaders of the pack at and from Max’s Kansas City and CBGB’s. Chapman, an Australian, had produced UK chart toppers like the Sweet, exiled Music City maven Suzi Quatro, and Mud; he was immensely successful, but looked down upon by any serious musician or fan.

In truth, they didn’t actually all hate each other, Stein was allegedly far too stoned to know much of what was going on, but there was no love lost elsewhere, not least as Chapman felt that Infante was the only one up to it, musically. Burke could not keep time, it seemed; Destri couldn’t play; and whatever Harrison could or couldn’t do, Chapman’s criticism was enough to have Harrison throw a synthesiser at him. But Harry could sing, that much Chapman could sense, carefully restricting her involvement to both protect her voice and prevent costly meltdowns, weeping in the restroom.

Despite all of this, Parallel Lines still came in a full 4 months ahead of schedule, and, amazingly, this line-up and Chapman went on to make four more albums before the band’s 1982 disintegration. It wasn’t until 15 years later they reformed, the original trio with (for a while) Destri, augmented by any number of additional sidemen. They still play on.
Continue reading »

Hear a Young Jack White Cover Blondie’s “One Way or Another”

 Posted by at 12:53 pm  2 Responses »
Oct 102018
 
jack white blondie

In late 1997, a Michigan trio of teenagers calling themselves 400 Pounds of Punk released their only album, a five-song cassette called He Once Ate A Small Child. Calling it obscure puts it mildly; until today, there was no mention of this release anywhere on the internet. “I doubt more than a half-dozen people even knew about it,” writes Third Man Records co-founder Ben Blackwell (that’s him on the left in the photo) on Discogs. Blackwell has changed that, posting a track from it in honor of Cassette Week. That track, a raw and rocking cover of Blondie’s “One Way or Another,” features a young Jack White on vocals. Continue reading »

Erasure covers Blondie’s “Atomic!” on Live Album

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Jul 092018
 
erasure atomic

Long-running British synth-pop duo Erasure completed their “World” trilogy of albums with last month’s release of World Be Live. The 24-track live album was recorded earlier this year in London, where the band was touring in support of the outfit’s seventeenth studio album, 2017’s World Be Gone.

With a deep catalog of originals and hits stretching over three decades, singer Andy Bell and founder/keyboardist Vince Clarke have plenty of crowd-pleasing material from which to choose. So choosing the Blondie song “Atomic” as the sole cover performed on the current tour says a lot about Bell’s admitted affection for the iconic 80s new wave band. Continue reading »

That’s a Cover? “Hanging on the Telephone” (Blondie / The Nerves)

 Posted by at 3:00 pm  5 Responses »
Apr 062018
 

That’s A Cover? explores cover songs that you may have thought were originals.

blondie hanging on the telephone

If you’re a fan of power pop – roughly speaking, the place where early rock n’ roll, ‘60s bubblegum, and the British Invasion converge – then Blondie probably ranks high on your list of faves. Refracting modern rock through multiple lenses – ’50s pop, ’60s girl groups and ’70s punk, to name a few – the band sucked you in with clever, poppy melodies while maintaining a distance sharpened by dark, ironic humor.

If it doesn’t quite represent their commercial peak, the band’s 1978 album Parallel Lines is without much doubt their finest work, crashing out of the gate with “Hanging on the Telephone,” a near-perfect snapshot of illicit romance and sexual frustration, come and gone in 2 minutes 17 seconds. Continue reading »

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