Debbie Harry is at a Chelsea hotel – not one, one in London – and the dazzling Spring sunshine makes the sleek boats in the harbour outside the window look like comets, which straight away makes it difficult to avoid lines about “the brightest star”. She’s here for a couple of days, with a gruelling promo schedule that would utterly exhaust you or me but, despite a slight cough, Debbie sails through it like a serene and radiant (if occasionally giggly) yacht. As I’m waiting to go in, a broadsheet journalist sniffs my jacket up close and tells me it smells of wine.
I never drink wine, but my honourable colleague has done enough to sow the seeds of unease. Perhaps it is for this reason that upon walking into the room in which Debbie is sitting I throw my jacket onto a faraway chair in a cavalier manner and kiss her hand, although more probably both these gestures are simply the right things to do. We’re here to talk about Blondie’s ninth studio album, , and the band’s sometimes triumphant, sometimes turbulent history.
Given that history, it seems odd that it’s only their ninth, but then they did take 17 years’ time out. Theirs is a story that doesn’t fit the shapes legends are supposed to, and yet still somehow conforms to a happy Hollywood-style redemptive arc. In interview Debbie is always warm, helpful and jovial, though not one to pretend her opinion is anything other than what it is.
She prefers chatting to lecturing (“I learned the skill of liste.
