Debbie Harry, 75, shows off her punk-inspired taste with a blood-red dress as she joins her Blondie bandmates for a Tribeca Film Festival talk
dailymail.co.uk – 16th June 2021
By BRIAN MARKS
Her band Blondie helped define the look and sound of punk rock and new wave music in the 1970s and ’80s.
And Debbie Harry showed that her confrontational fashion style was as in-your-face as ever on Tuesday when she joined her Blondie bandmates Christopher Stein and Clem Burke for a conversation at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City.
The 75-year-old singer had all eyes on her thanks to an edgy blood-red dress that repurposed a chilling still from Alfred Hitchcock’s iconic 1960 horror film Psycho.
Debbie’s scarlet-tinted outfit was illustrated with a blow up of the late Janet Leigh’s screaming face just before her character was confronted by a shadowy knife-wielding attacker in Psycho’s famous shower scene.
The tunic-style dress featured long sleeves and highlighted the septuagenarian’s age-defying figure.
She added some more color to the saturated ensemble with a pair of hypnotizing black pants decorated with green, yellow and red starbursts.
Debbie wore her platinum blond tresses in messy waves that framed an eye-catching neon-yellow pair of sunglasses.
Fittingly for her film festival appearance, she wore a rare baseball cap from the production of the 1992 Harvey Keitel crime drama Bad Lieutenant, which red ‘Bad LT’ on the front.
The film was helmed by her friend, the punk-adjacent director Abel Ferrara.
The Heart Of Glass singer capped off her unmissable look with a set of comfortable-looking spongy red sandals.
Debbie was joined on the red carpet by Blondie’s cofounder Chris Stein and the proto-punk band’s longtime drummer Clem Burke.
Chris was nearly as playful as Debbie with a black blazer with a white skeleton outline drawn on it, plus a pair of baggy black cargo pants and a plain black T-shirt.
Clem showed off a more reserved look with a black double-breasted blazer with a V-neck shirt, dark jeans and black boots.
Also joining the trio for the outdoor conversation was director Rob Roth, who paid tribute to Blondie’s friends and contemporaries Patrick Cowley, Dan Hartman and Arthur Russell with the late musicians’ names on a black T-shirt.
The conversation appeared to touch on both the band’s history and Debbie’s work as an actress.
The backdrop to the conversation featured a still from David Cronenberg’s cult-classic 1983 horror film Videodrome, in which she stars opposite James Woods as a radio host with a taste for sadomasochism who is sucked into a dark sexual conspiracy.
In her music career, Debbie served as the frontwoman and the co-lead songwriter with Stein for many of Blondie’s best-known songs.
Although the band pre-dated the official birth of punk, it became associated with the genre before the members tried their hand and more audience friendly New Wave and even early hip hop experiments.
In a 2019 interview with The Guardian, the singer admitted she had wanted even juicier acting parts throughout her career, though she doesn’t have much hope of that happening now.
She admitted craving ‘a real serious role in film or in TV, but that’s sort of wishful thinking.’
