The roots of Blondie
observer.co.uk
By Vanessa Thorpe – 31st August 2025
Martyn Goddard’s photographs capture the New York new wave band on the cusp of fame in 1978
It’s mainly all about Debbie Harry’s striking looks. But also her provocative attitude and, of course, the pure, plangent voice. Harry had something that defined a moment, if not an age. “The Revolution will be Peroxide” announced the cover of the NME in 1979, in a headline that referenced musician Gil Scott-Heron’s call to arms, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. And once, long ago, a mere poster of Harry’s blissed-out face, pinned up on a boy’s bedroom wall, was enough to make a 12-year-old girl want to go out on a “date”. The boy had become glamorous by association.
Harry remains an emblem of blond defiance – one that seems to me much more assured and interesting than either Monroe or Bardot, and yet has the same direct, deliberately erotic quotient. The Barbican’s new exhibition, Blondie in Camera 1978, depicts the band’s breakthrough year with a collection of suitably chaotic, crime scene-style evidence. One of the random news cuttings on display makes the animal voltage of Harry as a frontwoman clear: “If the men you know are anything like the typical, one person in rock they must be drooling over right now is the lead singer with the American band Blondie… She spells sex with a capital S the minute she steps on stage.”
For many of her fans, British photographer Martyn Goddard’s shots of Harry in a string of angelic yet somehow aggressive poses will already be hardwired into a memory of youthful excitement. Tucked away in the Barbican’s determinedly analogue Music Library, the show confirms the Blondie myth. Even for those just hearing the band’s music today, it offers a glimpse into an anarchic Manhattan art scene: a chance to check into a room at the Gramercy Park or Chelsea hotel with some of those who were shaking up the interior life of a generation of teenagers.
The intense emotions triggered by Goddard’s photographs are evident in the pages of the exhibition’s visitors’ book. Alongside declarations of love for the music – and for Harry herself – are a few unfairly dyspeptic outbursts, such as “Don’t bother. Boring. Depressing venue”. It’s as if the band’s snarky sensibility has prompted some visitors to let rip. Appropriately new wave.
Except Blondie were not that punky. The band were musically innovative but also tuneful and catchy. Harry, for instance, has notably clean hair in all the images. She was half Nancy Spungen, half Doris Day. Another contemporary review on display, written when the band switched labels to Chrysalis, reads: “Blondie is one such band which gets itself called New Wave, although its easy rock’n’roll is closer to the doo-wop of the 1950s than to present-day punk.”
The show is based around a selection of Goddard’s New York images, and what it lacks in contextual detail it makes up for with an authentic fanzine mood. The displayed items have the look of the ephemera that might fall out of an old shoebox. Goddard had been commissioned in 1978 to photograph the band on the cusp of stardom. Six weeks after a week-long shoot, he went back and followed them to gigs and parties. An atmospheric shot of Andy Warhol “hanging out” has been included, proving that he and Harry did not, in fact, share a wig. Her wild shock of hair is shinier and longer than his, and the angle of her head is always confident and challenging, especially in the photograph of her in a red hoodie, taken in Union Square alongside the group’s other musical force, guitarist Chris Stein.
For, as the button badge on display insists, “Blondie is a group”. The band’s music, as much as Harry’s face and voice, rightly made all its members famous. Many of Goddard’s images show only Harry, such as the unforgettable shot of her licking the edge of a vinyl record, used for the cover of the single Picture This. But there are several photos of the group together, gathered around their singer. In these shots, however, it is impossible to look at the men’s grubby clothes and messy Beatles hairdos without asking yourself: how did they get that lucky? They were visited by a divine being.
It wasn’t just her makeup, which was copied by millions of young girls. Goddard’s candid shot of a beautiful, bare-faced Harry makes that plain. Among my favourite pictures is one of her apparently lurking alone in the loos before opening for Alice Cooper at the Spectrum Arena in Philadelphia. Another shows her on the roof of the Gramercy Park with a chiffon scarf draped around her legs. Perhaps the most affecting, though, is the sleeping photograph of Harry leaning on Stein’s shoulder on the bus journey to the Philadelphia gig. The tiny flecks of grey in his hair and the lines emerging on Harry’s hands remind you they were not so young, even then.
Blondie in Camera 1978 is at the Barbican Music Library, London, until 5 January 2026
All photographs by Martyn Goddard
