‘We did everything wrong!’ The tragedy of the hit-free band behind Blondie’s Hanging on the Telephone

They gigged wildly, helped other groups to fame and their songwriting brilliance gave Blondie a signature track. Could a deathbed wish now see the Nerves finally making it big?

The Nerves should have had it all. Formed in 1974 and gifted with earworm melodies, good looks and a painstaking work ethic, the trio of Jack Lee (guitar, vocals), Peter Case (bass, vocals) and Paul Collins (drums, vocals) wrote, rehearsed and gigged as if their lives depended on it. Not quite punk and dismissive of the description “power pop”, they aimed to cram epic brilliance into effervescent, two-minute songs.

When the music industry ignored them, the Nerves opted to make their own luck, pressing their own EP and booking a gruelling nationwide tour that saw them share stages with Devo and the Ramones. After they split in 1978, a bittersweet coda to their brief career swiftly followed: Parallel Lines, Blondie’s smash-hit third album, opened with a cover version of their song Hanging on the Telephone. Previously a Nerves calling card, the Blondie take seemed to scrub them from history.

“I figured it would be two weeks, or a month tops, before we were famous,” smiles Paul Collins from his New York home today. A Juilliard student with a bohemian upbringing and an overriding love of rock’n’roll, Collins dropped out and headed for the west coast. “I was barely 18, I had 80 bucks in my pocket and I was scared to death,” he recalls. Within three days of arriving in San Francisco, he found an ad tacked to the wall of a record store which led him to the enigmatic Jack Lee, a transplant from Sitka, Alaska.