![]() ![]() ![]() Photo: GEMS/Redferns"Over the next two weeks we knocked out four little pop songs, but I quickly discovered that Nicky's musical taste was completely different from mine, and that would cause us a lot of problems as the years went on. After he told me he'd heard I was in a band and that he, too, was a songwriter, I took my guitar to his apartment in Mayfair and we set about trying to write together. At the same time, Nicky was a regular customer at Tramp a rich English kid with nothing better to do than go out every night and dance very badly. I'd been writing pop songs for a couple of years - all of which was second nature to me, having grown up listening to 'Peggy Sue', 'That'll Be The Day', 'Wake Up Little Susie', 'Blue Suede Shoes' and so on - and by 1969 I felt like I was on the right track. I was in a struggling band named Tangerine Peel and needed to do something to pay the rent. "I first met Nicky in late 1969 when I was working as a waiter in the discotheque of a London club called Tramp," recalls Chapman, a native Australian who had relocated to the UK in June 1967, at the height of flower power. Not that the partnership with Chinn had ever really been about songwriting once the hits began rolling in. And when glam's sparkle had faded, Chapman then caught a second wave with his aforementioned solo productions. ![]() Featuring catchy songs often performed by talented musicians, the 'Chinnichap' formula certainly worked during the halcyon period of 1973-74, when it accounted for 19 Top 40 UK singles, including five chart toppers. 'Co-Co', 'Poppa Joe', 'Little Willy', 'Wig-Wam Bam', 'Block Buster' and 'Ballroom Blitz' by the Sweet Suzi Quatro's 'Can The Can' and 'Devil Gate Drive' Mud's 'Dyna-Mite' and 'Tiger Feet' - all are synonymous with the visual excesses of glittery jackets, flared trousers and platform shoes as much as they are with the glam music that melded pop melodies with crunching, fuzzy guitars and heavy drums, bathed in a sound that was a throwback to Sun Records in the mid-'50s. And there, at both the start and end, was composer/producer Chapman, crafting glam rock - with writing partner Nicky Chinn - by way of acts like the Sweet, Suzi Quatro and Mud, and then classic power pop on his own with Blondie, Pat Benatar and the Knack. In popular music terms, the 1970s was a decade that swung wildly from glam, reggae, progressive and AOR to metal, disco, corporate, punk, new wave, neo-mod and pure pop. Photo: GEMS/RedfernsIf Blondie's Parallel Lines album was the New York erstwhile-punk band's finest hour (all 38 minutes of it) and a perfect encapsulation of top-drawer, high-tech 1978 pop-rock, then it also marked the career apex of its producer, Mike Chapman, a man who had already established himself with a form of music that has come to define its era. The partnership between Blondie and producer Mike Chapman created a perfect pop record - and catapulted the group from the underground to mainstream chart success. ![]()
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