The story of Blondie

Downtown beginnings

The story begins in Miami on the first of July 1945, with a baby girl named Angela Trimble. At three months old she was adopted by Richard and Catherine Harry of Hawthorne, New Jersey, who renamed her Deborah Ann Harry. She learned she was adopted at four. In high school she was voted best looking, but her mother later laughed that Debbie claimed her only talent was twirling a baton. After a two year college degree she moved to New York in the late sixties. She worked for a year as a secretary in the BBC's New York office, then as a waitress at the rock hangout Max's Kansas City, a go go dancer in Union City, New Jersey, and a Playboy Bunny.[1] [2] [3]

Her first taste of the music business came in the late sixties with a folk rock group called the Wind in the Willows, named after the children's book. They made one album for Capitol in 1968, with Debbie mostly singing backing vocals, and it barely scraped into the Billboard chart at number 195. A second album was recorded but never released, and the band broke up. Their producer, Artie Kornfeld, went on to help run the Woodstock festival. For a while Debbie drifted. She moved back to New Jersey, where she later described escaping a possessive boyfriend who broke into her flat and held a gun to her head. She also said a former boyfriend stalked her so persistently that she had to leave the state.[1] [2] [3]

Chris Stein was born in Brooklyn on the fifth of January 1950, to parents who had met at a Communist Party gathering in New York. His father died when Chris was a teenager, and in his late teens Chris went through hallucinations and psychotic episodes that put him in hospital for some weeks before medication helped. He was expelled from high school for his long hair, later studied at the School of Visual Arts, and played guitar in whichever band would have him. In 1973 he went to see a trio of women singers called the Stillettoes. One of them was a brunette named Debbie Harry. He thought she was wildly charismatic, joined the band on guitar, and the two became a couple.[1] [2]

In the summer of 1974 Debbie and Chris left the Stillettoes, taking the bassist Fred Smith and drummer Billy O'Connor with them. They played two shows in August as Angel and the Snake, then became Blondie and the Banzai Babies, and by October simply Blondie. Debbie had bleached her hair, and the name came from men in passing trucks who shouted, hey Blondie, at her. Chris said she came home one day, announced it, and it suddenly felt like the band's identity. The early lineup was unstable. Ivan Kral played guitar for a while, and the sisters Tish and Snooky Bellomo sang backup. By spring 1975 O'Connor had quit music and Smith had gone to join the band Television.[1] [2] [3]

Help came from Bayonne, New Jersey. Clem Burke, born Clement Bozewski, was the son of a drummer and had played in a local drum and bugle corps. In 1975 he answered an advert looking for a freak energy drummer. He was the one who persuaded a frustrated Debbie and Chris not to give up, and he brought in his old schoolmate Gary Valentine on bass. Gary auditioned on piano and could not actually play bass yet, so he taught himself. In November 1975 the band added Jimmy Destri from Brooklyn on a Farfisa organ. Debbie, Chris, Clem, Gary and Jimmy were the classic first Blondie, and they soon became regulars at CBGB and Max's Kansas City.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

From CBGB to the other side of the world

The New York of the mid seventies was cheap, creative and dangerous. Debbie and Chris lived in a loft on the Bowery, rehearsing in rooms so cold they wore gloves. Chris photographed the scene and later cohosted a public access TV show called TV Party. It was also a violent time. Debbie later wrote that a man followed them home after a gig, forced them into their apartment at knifepoint, tied them both up and raped her while he stole their guitars. She said she chose not to live as a victim. Decades later Chris wrote that he still wanted to kill the man. Both of them would also fall into heroin in the years ahead.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In June 1975 the band cut its first demo with the writer Alan Betrock. The first song Debbie ever wrote, Platinum Blonde, was among the tracks. In 1976 they signed to Private Stock Records, and their first single came out that June. Gary had written the music to a song called Sex Offender, but radio would not touch that title, so it became X Offender. The debut album, simply called Blondie, followed in December 1976. It was produced by Richard Gottehrer, who had written the sixties hit My Boyfriend's Back, and it was steeped in the girl group sound of that era. Rolling Stone liked it, but it sold poorly in America.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Early in 1977 Blondie got a remarkable break. Iggy Pop and David Bowie had heard the debut and invited them to open Iggy's American tour for The Idiot, with Bowie playing keyboards in Iggy's band. Debbie later said watching the two of them taught her about controlled madness on stage. In Chris Stein's memoir, he recalls Bowie asking Debbie a crude question about sleeping with her, and Debbie coolly answering with a joke about grammar. That July, Gary Valentine left to start his own band, and Frank Infante came in. In September 1977 Blondie bought themselves out of their Private Stock contract and signed with the British label Chrysalis, which reissued the first album.[1] [2] [3]

Blondie's first real hit happened far from New York. In 1977 the Australian music show Countdown played the video for In the Flesh, a slow, dreamy B side, instead of the punchier X Offender. Australian viewers loved it. The single climbed to number two there and the album reached the top twenty. Jimmy Destri later said the band still thanked the show's Molly Meldrum for playing the wrong song. In December 1977 they toured Australia, but it was marred in Brisbane, where fans almost rioted after Debbie cancelled a show because she was ill. Still, a pattern was set. Blondie would be stars abroad well before America caught on.[1] [2]

Plastic Letters and the British breakthrough

The second album, Plastic Letters, was recorded in the summer of 1977 at Plaza Sound in New York, again with Richard Gottehrer. It was a tense, rushed session. Chris said there was always a lot of tension in the band, with egos flying about, and that he was not the least of it. Gary Valentine had gone, so Frank Infante played bass and rhythm guitar as a hired hand. Gary's parting gift was a song called Presence, Dear, which Clem liked so much that the band recorded it anyway. On the cover, Debbie wore a pink dress designed by Anya Phillips, and Joan Jett of the Runaways was thanked on the back.[1] [2]

Plastic Letters came out in February 1978, and Britain fell for it. The first single, Denis, was a reworking of Denise, a 1963 doo wop hit by Randy and the Rainbows, with the name flipped to a boy's. After a Top of the Pops appearance it reached number two in the UK. Presence, Dear made the top ten too, and the album peaked at number ten. A British tour followed, including a show at London's Roundhouse, and Blondie became one of the first American new wave bands to break into the British mainstream. In America the album only just scraped into the chart.[1] [2] [3] [4]

After the album's release, Frank Infante became a full member and moved to guitar. To fill the bass spot they hired Nigel Harrison, an Englishman from Princes Risborough who had played with Michael Des Barres in Silverhead and with Ray Manzarek of the Doors in Nite City. Blondie were now a six piece, and the lineup that would make their most famous records was in place. On a West Coast tour they met the Australian producer Mike Chapman, famous for a string of British glam hits with Sweet and Suzi Quatro. Their manager Peter Leeds and Chrysalis quietly pushed for Chapman to produce the next album.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Parallel Lines and Heart of Glass

Debbie was wary of Mike Chapman at first. He later said the problem was that they were New York and he was Los Angeles. She relaxed when he heard early versions of Heart of Glass and Sunday Girl and loved them. In June 1978 they went into the Record Plant in New York. Chapman was a perfectionist and a hard taskmaster. He later called them the worst band he had ever worked with in musical terms, though he praised Frank Infante as an amazing guitarist. He spent hours redoing Chris's parts. Nigel got so frustrated that he threw a synthesizer at the producer. Even so, Chrysalis had given them six months, and they finished in about six weeks.[1] [2]

Many songs were still unfinished when Debbie stepped up to the microphone. Chapman remembered asking if she was ready, and hearing, just a minute, as she scribbled lyrics. One Way or Another began as a surf style riff by Nigel Harrison, and Debbie drew the words from her experience of being stalked, adding humour to take the edge off. Chris wrote Sunday Girl about Debbie's cat, Sunday Man, which had run away. Hanging on the Telephone was a cover of a song by a little known band called the Nerves. Robert Fripp of King Crimson added guitar to Fade Away and Radiate. Parallel Lines came out on the eighth of September 1978.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Heart of Glass was one of the first songs Debbie and Chris ever wrote, back around 1974 and 1975. They had tried it as a ballad and as reggae, and the band just called it the disco song. Chapman asked if they had anything else, and they sheepishly played it. Chris and Jimmy had bought a little Roland drum machine on 47th Street, and Jimmy pushed for a cool, electronic, Kraftwerk flavour. Clem said he was also chasing the groove of the Bee Gees' Stayin' Alive, and he spent about three hours pounding a bass drum pedal to get a take. The original lyric called love a pain in the ass. They changed it, but kept one line, and the BBC bleeped it.[1] [2] [3]

Chrysalis first put out a Buddy Holly cover, I'm Gonna Love You Too, as the American single, and it flopped. Heart of Glass, released in January 1979, changed everything. It reached number one in Britain in February and topped the Billboard Hot 100 in April. The band heard the American news in Milan, where Chapman dragged them down to the hotel bar to celebrate. Parallel Lines reached number one in Britain, became the country's biggest selling album of 1979, and went on to sell around twenty million copies worldwide. Sunday Girl then gave them another British number one. At an Our Price record signing in London, thousands of fans mobbed the band.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Not everyone was happy. At the height of the disco sucks backlash, some of their punk peers accused Blondie of selling out. Debbie said they became pariahs to parts of the New York scene, and Clem refused to play the song live at first. When it became a hit, he said he supposed he would have to. Chris shrugged that disco was just part of the rhythm and blues he had always loved. Debbie was now a star in her own right, and so many people assumed Blondie was her name that the band printed badges reading Blondie is a group. In June 1979 Annie Leibovitz shot them for the cover of Rolling Stone.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Atomic, Call Me and Rapture

Blondie went straight back into the studio with Chapman, and Eat to the Beat came out in September 1979. Chapman later wrote that drugs had found their way into the sessions, and that the more drugs there were, the more fights there were. The music held up. Dreaming reached number two in Britain, powered by a wild drum part Clem thought was only a run through. Union City Blue drew on a film Debbie had just made and on her New Jersey roots. Atomic, written by Debbie and Jimmy, went to number one in Britain in early 1980. Every song got its own video, making Eat to the Beat one of the first video albums ever, and it was nominated for a Grammy.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Then came a call from the Italian producer Giorgio Moroder, the man behind Donna Summer's biggest hits. He needed a theme for the Richard Gere film American Gigolo. He had first asked Stevie Nicks, but she was tied up by a new contract, so he gave Debbie an instrumental called Man Machine. She wrote the lyrics in a few hours, picturing the film's opening drive along the California coast. The band insisted on playing, but the session ran into sync problems, and Moroder finished the track in Los Angeles with his own musicians. Released in February 1980, Call Me spent six weeks at number one in America and was Billboard's biggest single of the year.[1] [2]

Chapman insisted the next album be made in Los Angeles. Chris grumbled about the blinding sun, while Clem was happy to enjoy two months in California. The band wanted to call it Coca Cola, because it sounded so American, but the Coca Cola company said no. It became Autoamerican, released in November 1980. It was their most adventurous record yet, opening with an orchestral instrumental and closing with a song from the musical Camelot. Chrysalis told them they could not hear a single. It turned out to contain two American number ones. The first was a reggae cover of The Tide Is High, a 1967 song by John Holt and the Paragons, which also topped the British chart.[1] [2] [3]

The second was Rapture. In 1978 the graffiti artist Fab 5 Freddy had taken Debbie and Chris to a hip hop party in the Bronx, and they were thrilled by MCs rhyming over records. They decided to write their own, mixing that energy with Chic style disco. Chris added a strange verse about a man from Mars, and the title was a pun on rap. Debbie's rap namechecked Freddy and Grandmaster Flash. Flash failed to turn up for the video shoot, so the young painter Jean-Michel Basquiat stood in at the turntables. In early 1981 Rapture became the first song featuring rap to reach number one in America, and its video was the first rap video shown on MTV.[1] [2] [3]

Debbie was now one of the most photographed women in the world. In August 1980 Andy Warhol photographed her at the Factory and made a series of portraits of her. She sang Call Me with the Muppets, hosted Saturday Night Live in February 1981 with Chris and Clem backing her, and starred in the film Union City. She also resented how she was sold. She was furious when the label put out a poster of her in a see through blouse, and later wrote that sex sells, but on her terms, not some executive's. Critics, she felt, often overlooked her singing and writing and treated her as a bit of fluff.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Hunter and the fall

Blondie took most of 1981 off. Debbie made her first solo album, KooKoo, produced by Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards of Chic, with Chris involved throughout. Its cover, by the Alien designer H. R. Giger, showed metal skewers through her face, and London Underground officials refused to display the posters. Jimmy made a solo album too, and Clem drummed on the first Eurythmics record. In October 1981 The Best of Blondie came out. Meanwhile the band was coming apart. Frank Infante felt shut out and sued his bandmates over his minimal role on Autoamerican. The case was settled out of court, and he was reinstated.[1] [2] [3]

The sixth album, The Hunter, was recorded from December 1981 to February 1982 and released in May. It was loosely built around the idea of chasing your own Mount Everest. English Boys was a melancholy tribute to the Beatles, written the year after John Lennon was murdered. The album also held For Your Eyes Only, a song Debbie and Chris had written for the James Bond film, which the producers passed over in favour of Sheena Easton's song of the same name. Chapman later said he knew it would be the last Blondie album. Critics were brutal, and it stalled at number 33 in America.[1] [2] [3]

For the summer 1982 tour, Tracks Across America, Infante was replaced by the session guitarist Eddie Martinez, and a horn section was added. Tickets sold slowly, and the British and European dates were cancelled. In November 1982 Blondie announced they had split. Chris later blamed the pace demanded by the record company, the pressure of constant touring, their own weaknesses and heavy drug use. He said that by the early eighties everybody had imploded. Clem remembered that when it stopped, nobody really seemed to care. It felt almost like a relief.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The worst was still to come. Chris developed blisters all over his body and feared he had AIDS. The diagnosis was pemphigus, a rare autoimmune skin disease, eventually controlled with steroids. Debbie put her career on hold to nurse him. At the same time the tax authorities hit them with a huge bill for unpaid taxes and seized their New York townhouse, even taking some of Debbie's clothes. Both were using heroin, and Debbie later wrote that she brought the drug to Chris in hospital. She called heroin a necessary evil at the time, a way of self medicating through a grim period, until it outlived its usefulness.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Debbie also found another career on screen. In 1983 she starred in David Cronenberg's body horror film Videodrome opposite James Woods, and won rave reviews. In 1986 she released the solo album Rockbird, with Chris taking part, and French Kissin' in the USA gave her a British top ten hit. In 1988 she played the villainous mother Velma Von Tussle in John Waters's Hairspray. Her relationship with Chris ended in February 1987 after thirteen years. They had drifted apart, and Chris said part of it was that she came off methadone while he stayed on it. They remained close friends, and Debbie became godmother to his daughters.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Years apart and a comeback

While Blondie were silent, the members kept busy. Clem became one of the most sought after drummers in rock, working with Eurythmics, Pete Townshend, Bob Dylan, Iggy Pop and Joan Jett. In 1987 he even filled in with the Ramones for two gigs under the name Elvis Ramone. With Nigel Harrison and the Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones he formed Chequered Past. Jimmy produced and remixed records and ran a business renovating old buildings. Gary Valentine went back to school, studied philosophy, and reinvented himself as the writer Gary Lachman, publishing books on mysticism and the occult.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Debbie kept recording, now as Deborah Harry. Def, Dumb and Blonde in 1989 gave her a European hit with I Want That Man, and in 1990 she toured with Chris and Clem on a package called Escape from New York, alongside the Ramones. Remix albums and greatest hits sets kept the old songs alive, and a new generation of bands, including Garbage and No Doubt, named Blondie as an influence. In 1996 Debbie and Chris began calling the old members. Clem, Jimmy and Gary said yes. Nigel Harrison worked on some early demos but was then dropped, and Frank Infante was not asked.[1] [2] [3]

The reunited Blondie played their first show on the thirty first of May 1997 at the HFStival at RFK Stadium in Washington. Infante and Harrison sued to stop the band touring under the Blondie name without them, and lost. Gary Valentine soon drifted away, leaving a core of Debbie, Chris, Clem and Jimmy, with Leigh Foxx on bass and Paul Carbonara on guitar. The comeback album, No Exit, came out in February 1999, with Clem suggesting the title. Its lead single was Maria, Jimmy's song about teenage longing at Catholic school. It went straight to number one in Britain, exactly twenty years after Heart of Glass, and also topped the charts in Spain and Greece.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Maria made Blondie one of only two American acts, alongside Michael Jackson, to top the British singles chart in the seventies, eighties and nineties. No Exit also carried Under the Gun, a tribute to their friend Jeffrey Lee Pierce of the Gun Club, who had died in 1996. The follow up, The Curse of Blondie, arrived in October 2003 after a four year struggle, partly because the only demo tapes vanished from luggage at a British airport. Its single Good Boys reached number twelve in Britain. In 2004 Jimmy Destri stepped away to deal with a cocaine addiction of some twenty five years. He got clean, became an addiction counsellor, and never returned to the band.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Hall of Fame and the long road

In March 2006 Blondie were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, introduced by Shirley Manson of Garbage. Seven members were invited, Debbie, Chris, Clem, Jimmy, Gary, Frank and Nigel. It turned awkward on live television. Frank Infante asked from the stage whether he and Nigel could play with the band. Debbie refused, saying the current lineup had already rehearsed. In 2008 Blondie toured the world for the thirtieth anniversary of Parallel Lines, and a year later Leigh Foxx, Paul Carbonara and keyboard player Matt Katz-Bohen became full members. Tommy Kessler replaced Carbonara on guitar in 2010.[1] [2] [3]

The ninth album, Panic of Girls, was recorded in Woodstock and Hoboken and was delayed by label trouble. In 2011 the band released it themselves in Britain as a fan pack with a 132 page magazine, sold in supermarkets. In 2014, for their fortieth anniversary, came a double set pairing the new album Ghosts of Download with fresh recordings of the old hits. Then in May 2017 came Pollinator, built partly from songs written for them by Sia, Johnny Marr, Charli XCX and Dev Hynes. It reached number four in Britain, their best showing in eighteen years. On tour Debbie wore a bee costume to highlight the plight of pollinating insects.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 2019 Debbie published her memoir, Face It, which described the knifepoint rape, the heroin years and the tax disaster in frank detail. In 2020 she and Chris sold their future royalties from 197 Blondie songs to the Hipgnosis Songs Fund. Chris stopped touring after 2019 because of atrial fibrillation, and he later said he was also dealing with prostate cancer. In May 2023 his daughter Akira died of an accidental fentanyl overdose at nineteen. Chris called it the hardest thing he had ever dealt with, and said he was racked with guilt that his own frank talk about drugs might have been misunderstood.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The band kept going. In 2022 the box set Against the Odds, covering 1974 to 1982 with dozens of unreleased demos, was nominated for a Grammy. On the 2022 tour Andee Blacksugar stood in for Chris, and the former Sex Pistols bassist Glen Matlock covered for an injured Leigh Foxx, then played on sessions for a new album. In 2023 Blondie played Coachella and the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury, where a field of fans sang along to Heart of Glass. Then, on the sixth of April 2025, Clem Burke died of cancer at seventy, fifty years after joining. Debbie and Chris called him the heartbeat of Blondie.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Clem had played on every Blondie studio album, one of only three people to do so, along with Debbie and Chris. A new record has been in the works for years, and as of 2026 it has still not been released. The legacy is secure. Blondie have sold more than forty million records, making them the best selling group of the punk era. Parallel Lines was added to the Library of Congress's National Recording Registry in 2024, and Heart of Glass is in the Grammy Hall of Fame. Chris likes to joke that selling out just means you got paid. Debbie, well into her seventies, is still out there on stage.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The people around Blondie

Debbie Harry and Chris Stein. They met in the Stillettoes in 1973 and founded Blondie together a year later, writing Heart of Glass, Dreaming and Rapture as a team. Their romance lasted thirteen years, through fame, heroin, tax ruin and Chris's illness, which Debbie nursed him through. They split in 1987, but stayed partners in music and close friends. Debbie is godmother to his two daughters.[1] [2] [3]

Blondie and Mike Chapman. The Australian producer turned Blondie into hitmakers on Parallel Lines, Eat to the Beat, Autoamerican and The Hunter. He was demanding, pushing for take after take, and Debbie once called him a dictator. He, in turn, called them the least skilled band he ever produced, yet Jimmy Destri said Chapman became like another member of the band.[1] [2]

Blondie and Richard Gottehrer. A Brill Building songwriter behind My Boyfriend's Back and a cofounder of Sire Records, Gottehrer produced Blondie's first two albums and steeped them in sixties girl group sound. Debbie contrasted him with Chapman, saying Gottehrer was laid back and went for the inspired take rather than the technically perfect one.[1] [2] [3]

Debbie Harry and Giorgio Moroder. Debbie admired Moroder's European disco before they ever worked together, praising it in a 1978 interview. In 1980 he handed her the instrumental that became Call Me, and she wrote the words in a few hours. The single was Billboard's number one song of 1980. Moroder later produced her solo single Rush Rush for the film Scarface.[1] [2] [3]

Debbie Harry and Chris Stein and Fab 5 Freddy and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Fab 5 Freddy introduced Debbie and Chris to Bronx hip hop and appears in the lyrics of Rapture. Through the same downtown scene they befriended Jean-Michel Basquiat, who appeared in the Rapture video. Chris bought what he believed was Basquiat's first painting on canvas for two hundred dollars, and later sold it for ten thousand when money was tight.[1] [2] [3]

Debbie Harry and Andy Warhol. Debbie hung around the edges of the Warhol crowd in her waitressing days. In 1980 he photographed her at the Factory and made a series of portraits, and in 1985 she was the first guest on his MTV show. She said the best thing he taught her was to stay open to new music, new styles and new technology, at any age.[1] [2]

Blondie and Frank Infante and Nigel Harrison. Infante and Harrison were key players in the classic six piece lineup, and Harrison cowrote One Way or Another and Union City Blue. The relationship soured. Infante sued over being sidelined in the early eighties, and both men were left out of the 1997 reunion and sued unsuccessfully over the Blondie name. At the 2006 Hall of Fame induction, Debbie refused their request to perform.[1] [2] [3]

Clem Burke and Gary Valentine. The two knew each other from school days in Bayonne, New Jersey. When Gary moved to Manhattan he lived in a storefront owned by Clem, and Clem suggested him as Blondie's bassist even though he could not yet play bass. Gary later left to form his own band, and returned briefly for the 1997 reunion shows.[1] [2]

Blondie and Jeffrey Lee Pierce. The Gun Club singer was such a fan that he copied Debbie's hair and founded a West Coast Blondie fan club. He sent the band a cassette with the Nerves' Hanging on the Telephone, which they turned into a hit. Chris later produced the Gun Club's album Miami, with Debbie singing backup, and No Exit's Under the Gun mourned his death in 1996.[1] [2] [3]

Blondie and Iggy Pop and David Bowie. In 1977 Iggy Pop and David Bowie invited Blondie to open Iggy's tour after hearing their debut, a huge boost for a band that was barely selling. Debbie said she learned a lot from watching them. The connection lasted. Chris produced Iggy's album Zombie Birdhouse, Clem played on it, and Debbie later duetted with Iggy on a Cole Porter song.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Rare facts about Blondie

• Debbie Harry's birth name was Angela Trimble, and she was adopted at three months old. She was born in Miami in 1945 and raised by Richard and Catherine Harry in New Jersey. In the late eighties she traced her birth mother, a concert pianist, who chose not to have a relationship with her.[1]
• Before fame, Debbie Harry worked for a year as a secretary at the BBC's office in New York. It was one of a string of jobs that also included waitressing at Max's Kansas City, go go dancing and working as a Playboy Bunny.[1] [2]
• The producer of Debbie Harry's first band went on to help create the Woodstock festival. Artie Kornfeld produced the only album by the Wind in the Willows in 1968. The following year he was the music producer of Woodstock.[1]
• Blondie's first single, X Offender, was originally called Sex Offender. Radio stations would not play a song with that title, so the band renamed it. The music was written by bassist Gary Valentine.[1] [2]
• Gary Valentine auditioned for Blondie on piano, because he did not know how to play bass. He got the job anyway and taught himself. He later wrote Presence, Dear, about a telepathic bond he believed he shared with his girlfriend Lisa Jane Persky.[1]
• Before Blondie, Clem Burke auditioned for Patti Smith and named John Bonham as his favourite drummer. Clem later suspected that was the wrong answer. He did not get the gig in the band that went on to record Horses.[1]
• Clem Burke played left handed on a right handed drum kit, just like his hero Ringo Starr. His father was a professional drummer, and Clem learned his craft in a drum and bugle corps in Bayonne, New Jersey.[1] [2]
• The title Heart of Glass matches a Werner Herzog film that nobody in the band had seen. Chris Stein said he came up with the phrase without knowing anything about Herzog's 1976 film of the same name. He later called it a great, weird movie.[1] [2]
• The instrumental breaks in Heart of Glass run in unusual seven beat phrases. Disco normally sticks to steady groups of four beats for dancers. The interludes in Heart of Glass use seven beat phrases before settling back to eight.[1]
• The sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati helped break Heart of Glass, and got a gold record as thanks. The show played the song in an episode. Blondie gave the producers a gold disc, which hangs on the wall of the station office from the second season on.[1] [2]
• The phone ringing at the start of Hanging on the Telephone is a British ring, not an American one. The song was recorded in New York, but Mike Chapman had his engineer call someone in Britain and record the double ring of the outgoing line.[1]
• Jack Lee, who wrote Hanging on the Telephone, was about to have his power cut off when Blondie called. He remembered it was a Friday, and his electricity and phone were due to be disconnected at six o'clock. The band had first fallen for his song while listening to a tape in a Tokyo taxi.[1]
• Sunday Girl was written about Debbie Harry's runaway cat, Sunday Man. Chris Stein wrote it alone but was so nervous about having a song of his own that he asked Debbie to put her name on it. In the end the credit stayed with him.[1]
• Chrysalis gave Blondie six months to make Parallel Lines, and they finished in about six weeks. The sessions were fraught. Bassist Nigel Harrison became so frustrated with Mike Chapman's perfectionism that he threw a synthesizer at him.[1]
• King Crimson's Robert Fripp plays guitar on Parallel Lines. Fripp guests on Fade Away and Radiate. He also played on a live Blondie version of David Bowie's Heroes, recorded at London's Hammersmith Odeon.[1] [2]
• Clem Burke thought his famous drum part on Dreaming was just a warm up take. He deliberately overplayed because it was a run through. Later he joked that Dreaming would have been a bigger hit if he had not played like that.[1]
• Eat to the Beat was one of the first albums to be released as a complete video album. Every track got a video, directed by David Mallet. It was nominated in the first year the Grammys gave an award for music video.[1] [2]
• Giorgio Moroder first offered the American Gigolo theme to Stevie Nicks. A new record contract stopped her from doing it, so he turned to Debbie Harry. The finished Call Me includes her saying call me in Italian and French.[1]
• Debbie Harry sang Call Me with the Muppet band on The Muppet Show. She recorded a shortened version for her guest appearance in August 1980, and the episode aired in January 1981.[1]
• Blondie wanted to call their 1980 album Coca Cola, but the company said no. Chris Stein said the name sounded very American. The album became Autoamerican, and its cover art came from a commissioned painting by Martin Hoffman.[1]
• Jean-Michel Basquiat appears in two Blondie videos. He plays a horse valet at the start of the Atomic video, and stands in as the DJ in Rapture after Grandmaster Flash failed to show up.[1] [2]
• Rapture's title was a pun on rap, and the song has a verse about a man from Mars. Chris Stein loved B movies and science fiction, which inspired the surreal verses. Jimmy Destri found tubular bells in the studio and added them for a haunting touch.[1]
• Posters for Debbie Harry's first solo album were banned from the London Underground. The KooKoo cover by H. R. Giger showed her with metal skewers through her face and neck. Officials found it too disturbing, though a TV ad campaign went ahead.[1]
• Devo's Mark Mothersbaugh and Gerald Casale sang backing vocals on KooKoo, credited as Spud and Pud Devo. The album was produced by Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards of Chic, and blended funk, rock and dance a few years before their work with Bowie and Duran Duran.[1]
• Clem Burke once drummed for the Ramones under the name Elvis Ramone. He filled in for two shows in August 1987 after Richie Ramone left suddenly, and used the name again at a Ramones cancer benefit in 2004.[1]
• A study found rock drummers can have heart rates similar to professional footballers, thanks partly to Clem Burke. The Clem Burke Drumming Project began in 2008 to study the physical effects of drumming. He received an honorary doctorate from the University of Gloucestershire in 2011.[1] [2]
• Clem Burke came up with the title of Blondie's comeback album, No Exit. He also earned his first Blondie songwriting credit on that album, with Boom Boom in the Zoom Zoom Room. Chris Stein linked the title to Sartre's play.[1] [2]
• Maria was sent to American radio on Chris Stein's forty ninth birthday. It went out on the fifth of January 1999. In its video, a sniper fires at Debbie Harry, who calmly plucks the bullet out of the air.[1]
• Queen's Brian May ended up with a writing credit on Blondie's 2003 single Good Boys. Debbie Harry's rap echoed the words of We Will Rock You closely enough that Queen threatened to sue, and May was later credited as a cowriter.[1]
• The Curse of Blondie took four years partly because the demo tapes vanished at a British airport. The only copies disappeared from luggage, so the songs had to be recorded again. The album's working title was Phasm 8.[1]
• Heart of Glass has sold over 1.3 million copies in Britain alone. In 2018 it ranked number 66 on the official list of the UK's biggest selling singles of all time, and ninth among singles of the seventies.[1]
• When Heart of Glass fell from number one in America, Chris Stein grumbled that the new chart topper was not even the real Peaches. The song had been knocked off the top by Peaches and Herb. Debbie was glum that week, pointing out it had been number one for only a week.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.