The crowd lined up outside the Anthem to see Blondie on a Sunday night in DC is about what you’d expect, which is to say eclectic. Some are there for the opening act, The Damned—for instance, the thoroughly bald but Viking-bearded man wearing his sunglasses inside, or my friend Marcus, a less conspicuous veteran of the punk scene.
The Damned themselves have aged with unexpected grace, despite a few tired jokes about not remembering the Sixties even if you were there. Dave Vanian’s vampiric melodrama and the mad scientist antics of Monty Oxymoron make it strongly reminiscent of The Rocky Horror Picture Show—as camp as it is macabre. Vanian’s voice isn’t what it was, but his performance is thoroughly committed and the set so thoroughly entertaining that it’s impossible to care if “Eloise” is missing a few fermatas.
Except for a nondescript white man memorable only because shitfaced and the woman in the ten-gallon hat who appeared to be his date, a good time was had by all. When the Damned left the stage, a slight shift in audience composition sent the Vikings back to the bar and brought GenX girls’ nights out and Blondie die-hards in old tour T-shirts to the front.
The third most populous group was young women somewhere between teenage and twenty-something, who’ve discovered in Debbie Harry a crush, a role model, or both. I’m one of the odd ones out—too old to get carded but too young for GenX, inkmonkey at large and garden variety vinyl dork, with more than the obvious Blondie records in my collection.
Harry still radiates cool in her trademark minidress and Wayfarers. Her deadpan delivery of asides about how “experienced” she and the audience must be by now keep them from sounding quite as corny as Vanian’s wisecracks about countercultural amnesia.
Indeed, Blondie does an admirable job bridging the decades since they achieved mainstream popularity with Parallel Lines, in 1978. The videography combines retro comic book art with archival outtakes and behind-the-scenes glimpses of a younger, blonder Harry. The band effortlessly embodies neon New Wave weirdness—where else can you watch a guy with a mullet in a flamingo-pink suit do a keytar solo in 2022?
Delightfully, the music holds up to the time warp. Old favorites like “Atomic” and “The Tide Is High” are refurbished with megawatt production value, peacocking guitar solos, and sheer volume—a willing crowd equally delighted to know all the words and be caught by surprise anyway.
Despite the frenetic energy in the room and the spectacle unspooling around her, Harry remains the unruffled and uncontested star of the show. Her voice has aged well, glottal on the bottom end and rough around the edges. Sometimes she channels the head-banging, hair-whipping abandon of yore, and sometimes adopts the calm, mesmeric gesture of semaphore. The overall impression is a woman who does what she wants—and does it damn well.
