Gary Valentine

Gary (Valentine) Lachman (born December 24, 1955 in Bayonne, New Jersey, United States) is a writer and musician.

He was a composer and performer with Blondie, writing the band's first single, "Sex Offender" (later changed to "X Offender") and "(I'm Always Touched By Your) Presence, Dear". Since then has become an authority on various occult and esoteric subjects.

Lachman is a prolific author and has written a number of books about music and the occult, as well as articles for magazines like the Fortean Times and Mojo. He also writes reviews for magazines and papers like The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement and The Independent. Lachman also gives talks on his specialist subject areas and has, for example, appeared a number of times at UnCon.

He was one of the founder members of Blondie in 1975but was replaced in 1977 by Nigel Harrison, just as the band were starting to gain recognition. After Blondie, Gary moved to L.A. and formed The Know with a few members of The Mumps. He claims that The Know were the first band to play the infamous Madame Wong's Chinese restaurant-turned-punk venue. Shortly after that he played guitar with Iggy Pop. Much later, Gary formed Fire Escape with his current girlfriend and performed songs he had written for the Blondie reunion album (they had not been used due to the band ultimately excluding him from the recording process and the reunion tour). They released an EP to little fanfare and went on a permanent hiatus after two years. A compilation of Gary's work in music entitled Tomorrow Belongs to You, was released in 2003 on the UK label Overground Records.

In 2006 he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, because of his time with Blondie, although ex-members weren't allowed to perform with the current line-up at the ceremony.

User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License and may also be available under the GNU FDL....

READ MORE