COVER STORY | Blondie Refuse to Vanish

Debbie Harry and Chris Stein speak with Paste about embracing girl-group pop's crossover into punk rock, navigating Blondie’s brand recognition in its prime, recording their first demos in a sweaty New York basement 50 years ago, the recent death of drummer Clem Burke, and the band’s new, John Congleton-produced album.

By Matt Mitchell | August 15, 2025 | 9:00am

Photos by Gie Knaeps/Graham Morris/Suzan Carson/Michael Ochs Archives/Roberta Bayley/Redferns/Getty Images

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Right now, Debbie Harry, who recently celebrated her 80th birthday, is dressed down, puttering around her home and “searching through a massive pile of stuff from every tour.” Since the ‘70s? Perhaps. During her spring cleaning in July, she pulls out a photograph of a man she believes to be guitarist Dave Edmunds. But after putting her glasses on, she realizes it’s Nick Lowe. A nearby Chris Stein calls her bandmate, old flame, and dear friend “a luddite” before sharing a laugh with her about it.

But before Debbie Harry was Debbie Harry, she was born Angela Trimble in Miami at the dawn of July in 1945. Three years later, gift shop owners Catherine and Richard Harry adopted her, renamed her Deborah Ann, and raised her in Jersey. She was a tomboy before her classmates at Hawthorne High School voted her “best looking” in 1963. Doo-wop music spilled into high school dances at the local firehouse, she remembers. One of the first songs she discovered on her own was Gerry Goffin and Carole King’s “Locomotion”; she bought 45s of Fats Domino and Little Richard; Percy Sledge’s “Thief in the Night” was her first favorite song. The radio taught Harry how to move, how to act. “My parents might have been on the edge of thinking, ‘This is never going to last,’” she chuckles.

After a move across the Hudson, Harry worked a number of odd jobs: BBC Radio office secretary, Union City go-go dancer, Max’s Kansas City hostess, Playboy Bunny. “That was quite an education and a real eyeful for me,” she says, referring to her time waitressing at Max’s before becoming a regular performer there. “There was a very illicit, sort of sexy vibe,” Stein notes. “That wasn’t at CBGB.” Harry adds that it’s what she had “always wanted to know about and be a part of,” that she “glorified in it” being a primary hang for New York’s art cohort. She remembers waiting on Andy Warhol (who would later become one of her greatest friends), Jefferson Airplane, and Mark Rothko. “All the artists went there because Mickey [Ruskin] would give them an open tab. At the end, when he would want to collect, he would settle for artwork, which, over time, became extremely valuable.”

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Once her time at Max’s was over, Harry joined the Wind in the Willows, a band whose only album scored a modest #195 placement on the Billboard 200 57 years ago. Their producer, Artie Kornfeld, who used to sell soda pop at the Charlotte Coliseum so he could watch Elvis play, was hired as Woodstock’s promoter in 1969. By 1973, Harry had joined Elda Gentile and Amanda Jones in the Stilettos. I ask Stein, who went to the band’s first gig and became their permanent guitar player by the second, what he noticed first about Harry. Before he can get a word out, she volunteers to go into another room so he can answer honestly. Stein cracks up, before shrugging off her threat. “Debbie has this super charisma and magnetism,” he reflects. “I was there at an early moment of it, and I was very taken with her.”

Harry and Stein eventually became lovers and left the Stilettos to start their own group, alongside sisters Tish and Snooky Bellomo, called Angel and the Snake. This was 1974, and the name quickly changed to Blondie and the Banzai Babies, and then again to just Blondie—a nod to catcalls Harry got on the streets of New York after she bleached her hair. Even at the beginning, her tongue was stuck firmly in-cheek. The Bellomos were replaced by Gary Valentine, Clem Burke, and Jimmy Destri, but it was Harry’s relationship to Stein that stoked the embers at Blondie’s quarreling center. “Chris didn’t try to push anything on anybody,” Harry remembers. “He wasn’t trying to gain control or approve anything. He was there to play some music.” She turns to him, speaking directly: “It’s this completeness to your understanding of rock and roll, and pop music—and even classical music, or jazz. It was a terrific amount of feeling, and I really liked that. I loved that, actually.”

Stein, a student of the short-lived Mercer Arts Center and, as the New York Times called him, “the abstract mastermind of Blondie,” says he was “totally amused by” Harry and the Stilettos’ image and sound. “I thought they were very viable, for that moment in time.” When he first met Harry, Stein had just returned from England, where he was exposed to reggae music. He loved the deconstruction of it, where guys would break down old songs and make “new versions with new grooves.” Blondie screwed around with the bones of reggae on “Man Overboard” and “Attack of the Giant Ants” in 1976 before fully adopting it on “The Tide Is High” four years later, filling John Holt’s rocksteady original with cavities of calypso and new wave.

25 YEARS AFTER BLONDIE began playing daytime CBGB shows with crowds full of other bands and their entourages, music critics invented a rock revival in New York City to contend with the myths of mid-1970s Manhattan—lionizing the Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the Rapture, and Interpol as the second-coming of a second-coming. But just as a post-9/11 real estate boom in Lower Manhattan and Williamsburg became a salve for a rotten music industry, out of the doldrums of Vietnam came a vibrant underground. No Wave, atonal noise, and art-rock were flavors of the month, germinating in the catalogues of Talking Heads, Patti Smith, Suicide, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, and Lydia Lunch ten years after the arrivals of the Stooges and Velvet Underground. “It was so infectious and small,” Stein admits. “100 bands and that was it, and there were 20 A-list bands, out of all that. Everybody knew each other and went to each other’s gigs, and there was not much of a sense of the outside world or things going on elsewhere.”

I regale to Harry and Stein a story—first told to me by Bobby Baranowski of Werewolves, a short-lived, Dallas-bred, Andrew Loog Oldham-managed group that migrated to Manhattan after touring with the New York Dolls—about Nina Simone ripping up his band’s bar tab after they bowled over a Trude Heller’s crowd on a Wednesday night but drank more than they made at the door. Though most of their “celebrity encounters” came after Mike Chapman strapped a rocket to Blondie’s sound on Parallel Lines (save for Frankie Valli showing up to a gig and leaving his limo parked on the street), Stein recalls one folktale of similar uncertainty that lingered after one of the band’s sets: “There was a rumor that Jackie Onassis was at CBGBs. I can’t speak to the veracity of that, but it’s possible.” And that was the norm, Harry says, until record companies began coming to shows and a competitive bent polluted friendships. “Everybody realized, ‘Oh, my God, this could happen.’”

Maybe you’ve heard the story before, that it was “instant love at first sight” when Harry watched the New York Dolls play at the Mercer Arts Center. Stein says that they influenced “everybody on the scene,” but that David Johansen’s band “failed in America.” I ask him to elaborate. “They were too crazy,” he continues. “They had that album cover in semi-drag, and it was too much for people. It’s too raw and aggressive. Even MC5 and the Stooges—none of those acts really had the same level of success as the fucking Eagles, or whatever was going on.” Harry says that New York City, at the time, was othered by everyone living outside of it, thanks to urban decay, high unemployment rates, slashed social services, and the middle class’ “white flight.” “It was considered ‘dangerland,’” she remembers. “And, in a way, I guess it was.” Stein, Harry’s curt mouthpiece, calls the perception “lethal.”

“[Drag] wasn’t as accepted as it is today,” she argues.

“Yeah, but now there’s fucking Elmo and talking M&Ms in Times Square, so…,” Stein laughs.

Before the Ramones began incorporating chart-minded pop sophistication into records like Leave Home and End of the Century, Blondie took that Philles Records-style of girl-group spunk for a ride of its own. “In the Flesh,” with its 12/8 time-signature and knockout swagger, especially opened the door for the band’s cover of Randy and the Rainbows’ “Denise,” which they retitled “Denis” after hearing it on a K-Tel compilation, on Plastic Letters. Harry and Stein made it clear that having a command on pop songcraft rewarded them with better punk songs. A lot of that came from producer Richard Gottenhrer’s deep connection to the Angels, who sang the #1 hit “My Boyfriend’s Back.” “When I was a kid, I thought the Shangri-Las were too commercial, like Justin Bieber or something like that,” Stein admits. “Then, when I started doing the music, I thought it was genius. It became something else.”

In June 1975, Blondie huddled around a one-inch eight-track recorder in the basement of producer and New York Rocker publisher Alan Betrock’s house in Queens. It was summer—“ridiculously hot and muggy,” Stein clarifies—and there was no air conditioning. “The thing that really sticks in my mind is how the weather and the climate of the room that we were in affected the tonality and the tuning of the instruments,” Harry says. “We kept having to re-tune, and it was pretty harsh. I never really expected anything to come of that.” Demos of “Platinum Blonde,” “Puerto Rico,” “Thin Line,” and “Out in the Streets” were completed. The latter song, a cover of a Shangri-Las joint, caught the attention of one of its co-writers, Ellie Greenwich, and she would accompany the band at Plaza Sound during the recording of Blondie, singing backup vocals on “In the Flesh” and “Man Overboard.”

Plaza Sound, which Stein doesn’t hesitate to call “fucking awesome,” was a wooden, cathedral-like room above Radio City Music Hall. It was Arturo Toscanini’s rehearsal space; the floor was suspended on springs so the Rockettes could do their kicking there (Harry’s parents would take her to Christmas shows in the ‘50s; CBGB owner Hilly Kristal was in the chorus). The walls were designed to bolster the orchestra performances within without letting the vibrations escape into the rest of the building. There was an organ downstairs, Harry remembers, and it “ran on bellows.” You could hit a key and it would be a drum, or a xylophone, or a train whistle, or bird sounds.

Blondie’s first song, “X Offender” (originally titled “Sex Offender,” a name vehemently opposed by the band’s label, Private Stock) remains the best debut single of its era, followed by “Love → Building on Fire,” “Little Johnny Jewel,” “Piss Factory,” and “Blitzkrieg Bop.” Gottenhrer employed a Shangri-Las-style, spoken-word wooziness to the track’s intro (“None of us really wanted that,” Harry reveals) and threw a blown-out Farfisa organ into the mix, while Harry took Valentine’s story about a statutory rape charge (a teenager getting his underage girlfriend pregnant) and turned it into her own beachy caper about a prostitute seducing a cop, singing, “You wanted the love of a sex offender” with a smirk and a wink. “It was enthusiastic and melodic and clicked a lot of the buttons,” Stein says. “People compared it to ‘Born to Run.’ Bruce [Springsteen] was just kicking off at the time, but I was not familiar with that song at all.”

“X Offender” and Blondie were both commercial failures, though the sweeping lullaby “In the Flesh” caught some popularity in Australia after Countdown disc-jockey Molly Meldrum accidentally played it instead of “X Offender,” leading to the B-side reaching #2 on the country’s pop chart. But Stein isn’t so sure Meldrum made a mistake. “He was a very smart guy,” he says. “It’s a great story, but I suspect he knew what he was doing when he played that song.” Harry thinks it might have been a decision based on personal taste. “Olivia Newton-John was the diva of Australia at that time, and her songs were not aggressive. They were pretty,” she reckons. “I think, when we got there, everybody thought that it was going to be nice. And it wasn’t entirely nice.” “Punk” wasnt a by-word in Australia yet—the Saints were still embryonic, as was Black Chrome, Rose Tattoo, and JAB. But “Your picture ain’t enough, I can’t wait to touch you in the flesh” was only PG in sound, not substance. “I think we shocked, perhaps, a bunch of people,” Stein says.

CRITICS WERE SPLIT ON Blondie. Ken Tucker, in his review for Rolling Stone, called the album “a playful exploration of ‘60s pop interlarded with trendy nihilism.” Writing for Sounds, Giovanni Dadomo called the “bland lack of depth and colour” a “pretty dumb affair.” Out of the gate, Blondie was pigeonholed as a “retro” act, likely because the band was fronted by a woman. “There was nothing much to equate it with,” Stein surmises, “except Janis Joplin [in Big Brother and the Holding Company], or Grace Slick [in Jefferson Airplane].” Manhattan, one could argue, was a paradox. Talking Heads—lauded for three generations as an art-rock monolith that gleaned futurism from a music scene that, beyond the marquee names enshrined in our hearts, reveled in a mostly paint-by-number formula—sold far less records than Blondie, a band whose toolbox overflowed with more primitive, tried-and-true concepts (though their later records would explore rap, funk, and disco). “Everything was limiting,” Stein says. “We’re limited by overexposure to fucking everything nowadays. There’s so much fucking stuff. I keep discovering new, weird genres that have titles that I’m like, ‘What the hell is that?’ It’s ‘past Swedish house,’ whatever ‘-core’ is going on at the moment. But everything back then was constrained, and it was a struggle to get the music out in the world, initially.”

And Blondie consumed everything they could. Harry, Stein, and the boys loved the sounds tumbling out of the Brill Building; they chopped and screwed the highlights into aggressive pop hooks, whipsmart keyboard wipeouts, and miniature surf-rock singalongs. Blondie wasn’t just a debut. It was Harry’s persona—not just a part of her art she could control, but a mask she could wear while singing about fucking. She was cartoonishly androgynous, singing from, and about, the male gaze; her remarks on gossip rags in “Rip Her to Shreds” were raunchy but ignored by critics. Blondie’s wit was, and is, exciting if not sorely misplaced in cultural conversations around femininity in 2025. I learned what kind of woman I am in Harry’s provocative, foxy, and appropriated world, where life’s a fantasy and everyone and their leopard print-cloaked mother is invited. Where you can have it all and then obliterate it. On Blondie, nothing else nearby or faraway sounds quite like it. Yet, when labels found something beyond the music to sell, Blondie became a brand. “It became the object,” Harry elaborates. “It took a while for [Talking Heads’] style and message to reach a larger part of the population. I think Blondie was easier for the mass audience to digest, and that was only a short glitch in time.”

In Blondie’s heyday, everyone wanted to ask Debbie Harry about her sex-symbol status. She was the “most photographed woman in music,” thanks to her photogenic pout and a camera attached to Stein’s hip. “What are the cons of being so publicly lusted for?” I ask her, considering that it’s been 43 years since Blondie’s initial hiatus and Harry’s eventual, albeit brief departure from the music business to star in David Cronenberg’s Videodrome before making her Rockbird album in 1986. “In a way, it’s Chris’ fault, because of his photography getting out there before Blondie,” she responds. “His photos of me were often printed in local papers and got world exposure before [Blondie]. That’s what people want to see, what certain magazines want to print, and, definitely, what record labels want to expose. Commercialism, sexism, branding—it’s always going to be part of popular music.”

Harry made second-hand looks as glamorous as Prada. Since the moment she quit waitressing and started singing, camp has been a glue. Her subversions allowed her to become the one thing no one wanted a woman in music to be in 1975: disruptive. And it all came natural to her, because she was stubborn. “I grew up in an era where girls and women were expected to have a limited relationship to life. The relationship to life for women was not as writers or business owners or anything like that. It was as mothers and housewives,” she says. “You can imagine what that was like—it was frustrating and not scary or interesting or challenging for me.” For others, she argues, it’s the perfect place to be. For her, years before sexuality in art had value within the margins, it was “an idea whose time had come.” “And as much as people don’t like to consider it the norm, it’s a norm where, God forbid that would have happened in…” Debbie breaks out into a swell of laughter. “We’d all be dead!”

BECAUSE OF BLONDIE, Debbie Harry has a lineage of children in the music business. Madonna, Lady Gaga, Miley Cyrus, Sky Ferreira—a part of them exists because of her. A part of me exists because of her, and she’s remained close to us by collaborating with everyone from Blood Orange to Future Islands. In the eight years between Blondie and The Hunter, Harry credits her image to “the ones that were there.” “I was fortunate that I was in a male group and felt, honestly, like we all had the same ideas and the same things that we had to express,” Harry recounts. “Guys were more frustrated and held back at that time, as well as girls. One of the things that we always remarked about was, during the really early days, the people that came to see the shows in clubs were mostly guys. Girls started coming around a couple years later. I don’t know how to describe the girls that hung around on the scene in New York. They were a very kind of ornery bunch. They were fringe—stand-up girls. They were tough girls—Anya Phillips, Sylvia Reed.”

Taking inspiration from Marilyn Monroe and Jane Fonda, Harry says, wasn’t a risk in 1975. Monroe had been dead a dozen years by then, but Barbarella was still relatively fresh. Basing her persona off of their personas—becoming this dangerous, captivating middle-point between Bardot and Mansfield—never felt like a leap with consequence. “We had more fodder,” she elaborates. “As time went on, and as telecommunications expanded, we had more and more information and more influences. It became more and more appealing to anybody who felt that they were slightly out of step and were looking for a new step. That was happening, and thank goodness.”

In the liner notes for the Against the Odds: 1974-1982 box set, Harry wrote: “I can make a long list of things I would do differently. But if I were actually thrown back there, I’d probably do it all the same.” She’s not one to give regrets any time of day but, considering the misogynistic writing that hounded her art 40, 50 years ago, it’s fine to wonder whether or not she ever struggled with not having control over how her work was interpreted. She compares her talents to “something in the closet.” “You work with what you’ve got,” she continues. “I always had self-doubts anyway. I would often wonder, ‘Is this good enough?’ I think, for me, I always wanted to move ahead.” She cites a scene from Steven Spielberg’s 2015 film Bridge of Spies, in which, James Donovan (Tom Hanks) is taken aback by Rudolf Abel’s (Mark Rylance) contentment with death by electric chair:

“You don’t seem alarmed,” Donovan observes.

Abel replies, “Would it help?”

“Maybe I had that kind of attitude,” Harry admits. “Would it help?”

Stein chimes in, “We’re not terribly narcissistic. I think we’re both as egomaniacal as the next guy. We’re both kind of withdrawn people. We both, Debbie and I, really had to push ourselves to get out there.”

Art, is so often conducive to the moment it’s made in. But knowing what we do now, that Harry and Stein put themselves out there, “Heart of Glass” and “Call Me” have endured as rock precendents, and thousands still file in to watch Blondie perform them nightly, and that records like Eat to the Beat and Autoamerican haven’t yet been served expiration dates, I wonder to Harry and Stein about whether or not the relevance of something can be measured before anyone else hears it—about whether or not “timelessness” was in the band’s vocabulary. “We are very much in the moment all the time,” Stein says. “A lot of the stuff we were just doing for ourselves. I always wanted people to like it, and I thought of it going out into the world, but I also had to really enjoy what I was doing.”

But the moment is frozen now, suspended in rapturous grief. Five months ago, Clem Burke passed away at age 70 from cancer. He was, undoubtedly, the anchor of Blondie’s sound (see: his drumming on “Atomic,” specifically). His background was strange; he was in his high school’s marching band, which is where he discovered his gift for 4/4, and became a longtime Deadhead. His personality, coupled with the band’s long-held belief that “each musical influence that we shared contributed to the sound of Blondie,” set them all free. “It wasn’t like one of us was saying, ‘No, it has to be like this.’ We worked it out, somehow,” Harry says. “And I think, in a way, because we did so many types of songs, we weren’t locked into one format. When you scramble it all together, we weren’t afraid of that. It gave us a way to expand.” Stein, who has been silent for a few minutes, finally speaks up: “We lost so much knowledge with him, because he knew fucking every goddamn thing. I always was urging him to go on Jeopardy! and pick the music category, because he would have known every single question.”

Blondie isn’t saying goodbye to its drummer yet, though. Not yet. There’s a new, John Congleton-produced album coming sometime in the next year, and Burke is on every minute of it. I pry, of course, hoping to get a taste of what’s to come on the first Blondie LP release since 2017. “There’s a song I’ve been wanting to record for 40 years on it,” Stein reveals. I turn to Harry and ask her what she thinks of it. “It’s good, but it’s out of my hands now,” she laughs, before looking around her room, throwing her hands up, and admitting that she doesn’t have a copy anymore. “My things have vanished. They melt away.” But not that picture of Nick Lowe.

Debbie Harry’s own pictures have been everywhere for decades, even selling for millions. She was a hellcat in a yellow T-shirt with “VULTURES” in script across the chest. Unmistakable and unforgettable. I once knew her only by the look in her eyes—two gun barrels that twinkled like the Sunset Strip. Her bleached, shoulder-length ‘do was the most important peroxide job since Norma Jean Mortenson dyed herself into Marilyn Monroe. In Harry’s context, I found an itch to go blond from a bottle myself. But I settled for bronzy tips I could spike up with hair gel that came in a deodorant stick. I heard her before I saw her, thanks to the Mean Girls tape jammed into the VCR port of my boxy silver Sylvania, and I have remembered every impossible part of her ever since.

And for a long time, I could only think about Harry singing, “We could have made it cruising, yeah,” in a white slip falling past the knee, surrounded by well-dressed men in pencil-thin black ties. Now, I lose myself in her stare—especially the one adorning the cover of Blondie, which protects the rush of sugary punk noise waiting within. She didn’t graduate from the school of serving cunt; she built the plate by hand, after spawning from the chasms of Manhattan in a thrifted wardrobe. In Debbie Harry’s name, someone will build an American institution just as ever-present in both the familiar and the outrageous. Because how potent, to be a vampish woman cloaked in razor blades, disinterested in what housewife debutante destiny was once predicted for you.

And just like that, Harry is now here, sitting before me, the idiom of her soul spanning generations. Our time is up, but on our way out, I ask her about the tour she and the band went on with David Bowie and Iggy Pop in ’77, after Blondie failed to chart in the States. Quick as ever and without skipping a beat, she whispers, with a slippery grin: “Let’s do it again.”

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Los Angeles.