Debbie Harry and the rest of the Blondie gang are undoubtedly among the twentieth century’s musical titans, having defined entire genres – including new wave and punk – which still influence so many of the sounds we hear today. Over decades, they have reaped the rewards of acclaim and rapture, with a string of top chart hits, international awards, and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductions. But the band’s story was not one of overnight success, and initially, they had to rely on a few famous friends to help them out along the way.

Blondie had already hacked the Australian and British audience markets by the mid-1970s, particularly with their second album Plastic Letters, but had yet to make the leap back to their US homeland successfully. But after Harry had a chance star-crossed meeting with another musical behemoth, Iggy Pop, in her native New York, she and the band were invited to support the godfather of punk on his US tour following the 1977 album The Idiot, written in collaboration with David Bowie.

The pair were instrumental in Blondie’s success, Harry explained in an interview earlier this year: “There was so many wonderful bands, you know. The list is long, of course – David Bowie and Iggy Pop broke us to the American audiences, so they’ll always be in my heart, I’m sure.”

She went on to cite a myriad of other musical influences, including the Talking Heads to the Sex Pistols, Patty Smith, and Chrissy Hind. Still, it’s clear that Bowie and Iggy Pop hold that extra special credit for making Blondie the superstars they were. She admitted that the rush of fame and new clamouring American fans they brought in their wake was more than a little dizzying for Harry and the band, “We managed to keep it together for about seven years, I think. But in most cases, that’s pretty much it, so I was glad we had that.”

However, there’s no doubt that rising to fame as a rockstar in the 1970s with Bowie and Iggy Pop as your counterparts is a very different set of circumstances than how the music industry finds itself now. “We didn’t have the same availabilities with the internet and the way to work your products, so a lot of our work was very physical, and it was hard,” Harry recalls, alluding to the sense that artists of her contemporaries’ calibre cannot be so easily manufactured in the current landscape.

In many ways, Harry is correct – the fame that the likes of Blondie, David Bowie, and Iggy Pop garnered, mainly throughout the same decade, has and will likely never be surpassed – pointing to the fact that talent is one thing, but hard graft and creating the right networks are another. Those types of relationships invariably helped each of them steer through the tribulations of the industry and, above all, cement them in a select group of genre-defining artists for the punk era.

The band never forgot this as their roots. It’s most certainly not lost on Harry, some 50 years later, that her sexualised and energetic prowess spearheaded a punk generation, flying to stratospheric international heights following Iggy Pop’s tour and the release of Blondie’s seminal album, Parallel Lines. It’s a sound and songs which have carried down generations and left an indelible mark on the music industry, but who’s to say what would have happened if David Bowie and the godfather of punk hadn’t taken that chance?

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