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unioncityblues · 2 months

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Blondie performing live at the El Mocambo in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. August 2, 1978.

Photographed by Patrick Cummins.

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unioncityblues · 3 months

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Debbie Harry and Johnny Thunders at The Village Gate in New York City, New York. August 1977.

Photographed by Bob Gruen.

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unioncityblues · 3 months

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Debbie Harry backstage at the Golden Bear in Huntington Beach, California. September 28, 1977.

Photographed by Brad Dawber.

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unioncityblues · 3 months

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Debbie Harry on the set of Blondie's music video for "Heart of Glass," 1979.

Photographed by Roberta Bayley.

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unioncityblues · 3 months

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Blondie performing live at CBGB in New York City, New York. 1976.

Photographed by Roberta Bayley.

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unioncityblues · 5 months

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Debbie Harry and Chris Stein photographed for the cover of the 1980 holiday issue of SoHo Weekly News.

Photos taken by Allan Tannenbaum in his New York City studio on December 11, 1980.

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unioncityblues · 5 months

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Debbie Harry on the set of The Foreigner (1978)

Photographed by Fernando Natalici in East Village, New York City, New York. 1977.

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unioncityblues · 5 months

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Debbie Harry of Blondie performing live at the Paradiso in Amsterdam, Netherlands. January 29, 1978.

Photographed by Barry Schultz.

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unioncityblues · 6 months

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Debbie Harry talking about her Blondie character and Marilyn Monroe in her 2019 autobiography, Face It:

“Iggy Pop apparently described me once as "Barbarella on speed." Barbarella was a comic-book character from the future, where people didn't fuck anymore, a sexual innocent who gets sent on a mission to save the planet and along the way learns the joys of sex. The director of Barbarella, Roger Vadim, was a big fan of comic books, as were we. Our band shared its name with a cartoon character, after all. And I was playing at being a cartoon fantasy onstage. But the mother of that character was really Marilyn Monroe. From the first time I set eyes on Marilyn, I thought she was just wonderful. On the silver screen, her lovely skin and platinum hair were luminescent and fantastic. I loved the fantasy of it. In the fifties, when I grew up, Marilyn was an enormous star, but there was such a double standard. The fact that she was such a hot number meant that many middle-class women looked down on her as a slut. And since the publicity machine behind her sold her as a sex idol, she wasn't valued as a comedic actor or given credit for her talent. I never felt that way about her, obviously. I felt that Marilyn was also playing a character, the proverbial dumb blonde with the little-girl voice and big-girl body, and that there was a lot of smarts behind the act. My character in Blondie was partly a visual homage to Marilyn, and partly a statement about the good old double standard.

The "Blondie" character I created was sort of androgynous. More and more lately, I've been thinking that I was probably portraying some kind of transsexual creature. Even when I was singing songs that were written from a man's point of view—"Maria" for example, a Catholic schoolboy lusting after this unattainable virgin girl—I had to be kind of gender-neutral, so it seemed that I wanted Maria. A lot of my drag queen friends have said to me, "Oh, you were definitely a drag queen." They didn't have problems seeing it. It was the same thing with Marilyn really. She was a woman playing a man's idea of a woman.”

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unioncityblues · 6 months

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Debbie Harry backstage at the Whisky a Go Go in Los Angeles, California. 1979.

Photographed by George Rose.

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unioncityblues · 6 months

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Debbie Harry of Blondie performing live at the Fox Theater in Atlanta, Georgia. July 28, 1979.

Photographed by Tom Hill.

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unioncityblues · 6 months

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Debbie Harry of Blondie performing live at the Nakano Sunplaza Hall in Nakano City, Tokyo, Japan. January 11, 1978.

Photographed by Koh Hasebe.

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unioncityblues · 6 months

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Debbie Harry of Blondie performing live at the Swarovski Fashion Rocks for The Prince's Trust event at the Grimaldi Forum in Monte Carlo, Monaco. October 17, 2005.

Photographed by MJ Kim.