Deborah Harry: Atomic kitten

Coming on like a stroppy-looking Marilyn Monroe, a black lumber shirt hanging like a mini-skirt around her red plastic trousers – the same shade of red, in fact, as some unbelievably synthetic ketchup – and wearing black-feathered kitten-heel mules, Blondie's lead singer Deborah Harry caused a split second's hush across the Hammersmith Odeon. You could sense the eyes upon her – punk's answer to Botticelli's Birth of Venus – before a sound like a revving chain saw cued a volley of high-speed surfer guitars, backed on a protracted drum roll, and Deborah's barked greeting to the crowd, "Suffer!" was pursued by the effortlessly soaring range of her low, powerful voice. She sang like a blonde in a film noir, and the roller-coaster of raw Blondie was off down the first death-defying incline.

This was some time back in 1978, and the bulk of the predominantly male audience were there to see Tom Verlaine's band Television – a brittle, poetic-looking bunch of gaunt New York punk rockers who chose to perform beneath vicious white light on a stripped down stage. Blondie were the support, but two songs in – from their self-titled first album – it was clear they were simpatico to punk. It's hard to imagine now, when perky pre-teen dance act Atomic Kitten have just scored a hit with Blondie's 1980 number one "The Tide Is High" (itself a cover of The Paragons' song), that what made Blondie so compelling, back then in the sweaty forge of punk rock, was the way in which the band pioneered a vibrant new strand of the frequently darkling New York avant garde.

Pet Shop Boy Neil Tennant has remarked that one of the most welcome things about punk was the way it opened up a whole range of eclectic new music, from industrial electronica to heavy dubbed reggae to moody social realism. Blondie and their contemporaries were beneficiaries of this creative widening of tastes and promotion of newness. Gathered around the down-town New York clubs of the early to mid 1970s, with the slutty glam rock of the New York Dolls (who gigged regularly at the Mercer Arts Centre, before the building collapsed) to inspire them, this was a collection of groups and performers including Patti Smith, Richard Hell, The Talking Heads and Television, whose artistic vision, low-fi ethos and sense of urban poetry made them direct descendants of the Velvet Underground. In this way all were vicariously linked to the extended project of Andy Warhol.

Watching Blondie at the Hammersmith Odeon, belting out perfectly formed yet ragged-edged numbers such as "Kung-Fu Girls" and "Rip Her To Shreds", you felt as though you were watching a gloriously fluorescent group of comic book delinquents, a band designed by Roy Lichtenstein, perhaps, with Deborah Harry herself – so flawlessly beautiful as to seem somehow unreal – updating the classic poise of Hollywood screen glamour (hand on hip, a feigned moue of discontent, the occasional tongue-in-cheek hand-jive) rather than trying to act tough.

Nearly 25 years later, when I meet Deborah Harry in London as she prepares for the band's UK reunion tour, it swiftly becomes apparent that she too regards her early career – just prior to Blondie's phenomenal mainstream success in the early 1980s – as very much a part of the New York avant garde. She speaks with a low, slightly boyish lilt, with her New Jersey accent maintaining that enviable ability to slide between streetwise realism and a pretty elevated form of camp. Dressed in black, her hair a platinum blonde bob and her eyes a shade of silver blue, she looks like a cross between a film star and a scary art historian. You would never guess she was in her fifties.

"I always felt Blondie's performances were conceptual," she says, "so in the early days, one week I'd be wearing hot pants and the next a wedding dress, the next I'd come on with a goldfish bowl – something surreal. You have to remember we did a lot of shows to maybe just two or three people. My partner Chris Stein and I thought a lot about these things. And Chris had studied, he'd been to art school."

Deborah Harry, like her contemporary Patti Smith, made the journey from the New York suburbs to the city itself; and like Smith, her formative years in the city saw her seeking to realise the simple yet elusive ambition of being an artist. For Harry, coming to the city aged 18 in the late 1960s, and waitressing at the legendary Max's restaurant, her inclinations were already towards the bohemian demi-monde around Warhol.

"I didn't become friendly with the Warhol crowd – I just used to stare at them from afar. I was always very interested in them, and I thought that they looked fantastic. I was just very curious about their lifestyle. Some were approachable. Taylor Mead was always sort of sweet, Eric Emerson was a real lad; Nico was very nice. I met Viva later on and she was okay. I was a neophyte then, and I didn't know what anything was about – I was just a kid from across the river.

"I wanted to get somewhere where I wouldn't be encased in an idea – I wanted a bigger idea. I think that back in those days there wasn't much of a career urge for women. I know that my mother just wanted me to get married and that would have been pretty much it. So I just wanted to be a part of something that was odd – a little dangerous. I wanted to be an artist, and I came from a family who had absolutely no connection with the art world. So coming to New York was like going to school – swimming in vagueness."

Nearly 30 years ago, being a woman trying to attempt something new in rock music could be a fairly isolated business. You had to fit a male ideal. Patti Smith was famously requested by her record company to have the visible hairline above her lip removed from the Robert Mapplethorpe portrait on the cover of her first album, Horses. And if Smith's problem was that she didn't look or act feminine in the right kind of way for record company executives, then Deborah Harry had the reverse problem.

"I was protected in that Chris Stein and I were a couple, and that insulated me to some degree from being personally abused in public – so I was protected physically. But I took abuse in the press most definitely – double standard stuff. So if I appeared to do something sexual on stage it was not acceptable, whereas if a guy had done it, those same things would have been okay. There were criticisms that I was a 'bit of fluff', and I probably was a bit of fluff, but there was a lot of other stuff that came with it."

The music industry in the 1990s co-operated with a broader return to the sexism and sexual commodification of the 1960s – with young women in rock or pop being marketed to the lad mags as "babes". Although Harry maintains an attitude in direct opposition to this manufactured entertainment, she wearily acknowledges its power.

"The things that inspired me were cinematic, and that's probably the element I brought to rock that was most unique at that time. I guess if I was a kid coming up now, and I saw all the stuff that was going on – having to do a men's magazine cover or whatever – it would just seem automatic, not so shocking, just part of it. There are some girls who are portrayed seriously, but for the most part, if you want to have a hit video you have to be racy, explicit.

"I can see how this Atomic Kitten thing is very poppy, and I suppose it's a little interesting how they've mixed it with something else. It's very Spice Girls to me. Right this moment, there's so much material out there that's generic – not really driven from someone's experience, inspiration or angst. I mean, there's an inspiration that goes into writing something original, and I've never really thought that a producer should put together a group or an act."

Blondie found mainstream, chart-topping success almost immediately after their early support billing with Television. There was the sense that as a phenomenon they had emerged with their artistic identity fully formed, and their combination of highly revved cartoon rock music gave the group such smash hits as "Call Me", "Heart of Glass" and "Denis". Recently such hits have been given a techno spin by celebrity DJs, thus acknowledging even further the appeal of pure Pop art.

Today, groups which emerged in the late 1970s or early 1980s are often placed in a dichotomous position: either they are revered as iconic, and hence remain forever contemporary (an example would be Iggy Pop) or they are entered as exhibits into the ever-expanding museum of pop cultural kitsch, where the public's nostalgia for their early hits overwhelms whatever new work they might accomplish (The Human League). Blondie, however, not only managed to blast back a couple of years ago with the effortless cool of "Maria", but they seem to share with their contemporaries Television, Patti Smith or Talking Heads that ability in the best of punk to sound more modern, more new, than most of the manufactured pop or copy-cat grunge which is currently doing the rounds.

"Times have changed," says Harry, "everything becomes more diluted. Part of the thing that made rock'n'roll music so interesting was that it was 'other' – it was not accepted. Which is always what new art is about. So now that it's become so central it cannot possibly embody the elements of naughtiness or danger. It's become sort of synthetic, really – it's now a synthetic embodiment of what it once truly was. So now what?"

Blondie's UK tour starts at Glasgow Braehead Arena (0870 444 6062) on 5 December and continues to 18 December, Wembley Arena (0870 733 1001). For tickets and info call 0870 735 5000. The CD 'Best of Blondie' (EMI) is out now