This month, Blondie kicks off a 17-year silence with a comeback tour and album at New York’s Madison Square Garden.

“No Exit” has been quoted as seventeen songs about nothing. Seinfeld on speed perhaps? Jimmy Destri, the keyboardist chuckles. “It feels like a coming round to the same space with the same people forever,” as he turns wistfully to singer/writer Debbie Harry.

Debbie hasn’t changed much from her downtown CBGB days. She admits, “Unlike a lot of bands in the New York scene, we evolve very publicly with our audiences”. Blondie was your proto-80’s style collage. Often, channeling a visceral post-punk image with a vague Kraftwerk and T. Rex redux. But they got to work with some of the decade’s best craft producers like Giorgio Moroder and Mike Chapman. Along the way, the band re-defined once fringe rap and reggae for a broader audience. Read, suburban mall kids. By the end of the decade, Blondie’s nonchalant pop made Debbie Harry the pop vamp model. See Patsy Kensit’s Eighth Wonder, and a spillover effect on Madonna’s early sacred and profane new wave.

But the band was short-lived. By 1983, they all went onto solo acts. “Almost like rubber bands, we were flung off to different directions,” says Debbie. Jimmy went off to help produce U2’s War album with Steve Lillywhite. Debbie went on to myriad side projects. Her roll call list: Iggy Pop, a part in John Water’s film Hairspray, and jamming with Argentine ska band Los Fabulosos Cadillacs. Meanwhile, the 90’s saw a quiet renewal when P Diddy remix-ed Atomic, the classic 1980 Blondie song, that got re-released and rocked the London clubs.

All that snapped back last year. The reformed Blondie was easing itself back into the circuit. According to Debbie, “It’s funny, the Blondie experience is this sort of elastic stretchable vision. We try to embody different styles of music and incorporate them into our sounds”. Arguably, “Maria,” their latest single is pure Blondie pop irreverence. Others like “Screaming Skin” takes on a punk twist. The rock ballads written between Debbie and Chris nicely rounds up the comeback. In the fast closing decade of techno trip hop’s downbeats, Blondie’s optimistic popcraft shines. Quite brightly in fact. 

M3/Singapore, May 1999