(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Wed 14 January 2026 13:00, UK
From the moment that the first jazz artists moved into 1920s Harlem, New York City has been America’s premier breeding ground for musical revolution.
Even during the slimy Taxi Driver days of the mid-1970s, the concrete jungle managed to produce a group as utterly enchanting as Blondie, and Debbie Harry has certainly kept her ear to the ground in the decades that have passed since their heyday.
In addition to an endless onslaught of subway cars, that ear has also been able to pick up a wealth of the city’s greatest musical exports. Punk rock might have been where Harry got her musical beginnings, dodging the rats and junkies of the CBGB club, but that safety-pinned revolution barely scratched the surface of New York’s musical landscape back in the 1970s. For starters, the city’s ever-expansive funk and soul scene had morphed into the dance euphoria of disco, which Harry was a natural appreciator of.
Her early adoption of disco, in fact, attracted accusations of selling out – the worst crime in the punk realm – when Blondie released ‘Heart of Glass’, but that genre-spanning classic only served to exemplify the breadth of the band’s listening habits.
As the years went on, they became the first rock band to embrace hip-hop, and even had a number-one hit with their own version of the rocksteady masterpiece ‘Tide Is High’. It is fair to say, therefore, that neither Harry nor Blondie have ever been troubled by genre barriers.
Even more impressive, though, is the fact that Harry has been able to keep her finger on the pulse of the city’s musical output for the best part of 50 years. From that Studio 54 disco explosion to her far more recent outspoken support of Geese’s Cameron Winter, the Blondie singer has been there to witness it all.
More than that, though, Debbie Harry has been a key influence on many of the movements to emerge from New York in the wake of punk, with the 2000s indie rock revival being perhaps the most obvious example. There was scarcely a band in the so-called ‘meet me in the bathroom’ movement that did not owe a core part of their existence to the pioneering sounds of Blondie, so it is no surprise that Harry found herself cited by everybody from The Strokes to The Rapture.
Inevitably, though, Harry had her favourites within that indie scene, even if those favourite groups hailed from Arkansas rather than Manhattan, as in the case of Gossip. A true stand-out of that era, with a wildly curated sound spanning raw garage rock to old-school soul and dance, the Beth Ditto-fronted outfit certainly made their mark, and it did not go unnoticed by Debbie Harry.
The songwriter was such a supporter of Gossip, in fact, that Blondie took the band on tour with them, leading Harry to select their defining track ‘Heavy Cross’ during her 2011 appearance on Desert Island Discs. “I love Beth’s voice,” she declared. “In a record it’s different because they’ve done overdubs and more tracks but, live – they opened for us at a festival – just the two musicians and Beth, it was fantastic.”
Much like Blondie had done within the punk scene decades prior, Gossip broke the mould when it came to the indie rock realm of the early 2000s, and perhaps that is why their work seems to have aged so much better than many of their early peers. ‘Heavy Cross’, in particular, still stands among the most powerful indie anthems of the 21st century, and Debbie Harry’s adoration of it is merely another accolade in its ever-growing trophy cabinet.
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