American new wave band, formed in New York in 1974
Blondie recorded “The Tide Is High” with producer Mike Chapman at United Western Recorders in Hollywood for their fifth album, Autoamerican. Released as a single on Chrysalis on 31 October 1980, it became their third US No. 1 and a UK No. 1 as well, topping charts in Canada and New Zealand too. The arrangement — horns, strings, an unhurried lilt — is a genuinely loving reading of a Jamaican record rather than a flattening of it. The only error in the popular memory is chronological: the band found the song, they did not write or first record it.