Debbie Harry remains coolness personified in a set packed with hits
Pop Blondie O2 Arena, London SE10 ★★★★
Blondie hasn’t been blonde for a very long time. At 76, Debbie Harry wears her hair stark white. With her extraordinarily defined features and sassy dress sense, she may still look like the most glamorous granny in rock ’n’ roll, but the group can no longer rely on their frontwoman’s weaponised sex appeal to stun onlookers into submission. Nor, it turns out, do they need to. With her voice gliding tunefully between ice-cream sweetness and growling ferocity, and her insouciant stage presence still the personification of cool, Harry was the focus of a smashhit-packed set of the sharpest, snappiest, new wave pop an old punk could ever hope to hear, from a supercharged Hanging on the Telephone to a storming Atomic.
On their biggest UK tour since their 1998 comeback, the New York punk band took no prisoners, blitzing the O2 arena with a dozen gleaming Top 20 UK hits (including six number ones) and a fistful of classic album tracks. This has not always been the case. I have seen Blondie blow hot and cold over the years, unwilling to conform to vintage band expectations and just play what the audience wants to hear. Maybe the pandemic has mellowed them.
“It’s so good to be back, you have no idea,” Harry murmured, then stopped as if to reconsider what we have all been through these past two years. “Well maybe you do.”
Part of Harry’s appeal is that she has never been a people pleaser, lending her an oddball integrity. She drifted about the stage, did kooky dance moves and occasionally beamed a winning smile.
Besides her, only one member of the band’s original line-up was still on stage 46 years later – drummer Clem Burke. Founding member Chris Stein, 72, had to pull out of the tour at the last minute, due to heart problems. In a display of vintage punk unity, he was deputized by a Sex Pistol, with Glen Matlock on bass, the band mischievously squeezing a blast of the Pistols’ God Save the Queen into the set-closer Heart of Glass. The other three band members have all been recruited over the past 15 years and bring a flashy energy to proceedings.
But there was no question who the star was. A lot of vintage artists avoid close-ups or use camera effects to disguise the ravages of ageing; Harry appeared in all her wrinkled glory.
Although she hails from a different musical generation, she is only two years younger than Mick Jagger, but she shares with the Rolling Stone a certain on-stage F-you fearlessness: this is who I am, this is what I do, and age is just a number. It’s a reminder that music has never really been about youth: it is about life. And there was plenty of that in these old punks.
Touring until May 7; tour.blondie.net