Free Republic

As they reissue their 1981 festive EP Yuletide Throwdown, we rate the best of the New York band who strutted through punk, disco and pop with absolute cool 5. Hanging on the Telephone (1978) Sometimes, a song takes a while to find its ideal singer. The original of Hanging on the Telephone, a 1976 single by LA powerpop band the Nerves, is pretty good, but Harry’s commanding performance owns the song, while Blondie’s arrangement is louder, brasher, tighter and tougher: the stuff of which classics are made.

"I don’t like the idea of promoting fear to gain popularity. It’s so ugly. He’s (President Trump) an idiot!” (“Feminist” rock star Deborah Harry.) “Che Guevara and Fidel Castro are fascinating, enigmatic political heroes and antiheroes in the United States for the most part. It was always very attractive to me…” (“Feminist” rock star Deborah Harry rhapsodizing over the co-founders of the only regime in the history of the Western Hemisphere to criminalize rock music, herd its practitioners and fans into forced-labor caps at Soviet bayonet point while jailing and torturing the most and longest –suffering female political prisoner in...