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. 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. 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.