New Wave pioneer Blondie looks ahead, not back

Blondie: (L-R) Paul Crabonara , Leigh Foxx, Chris Stein, Deborah Harry, Matt Katz- Bohen, and Clem Burke.

Drummer Clem Burke had helped form the New Wave pioneer group Blondie with singer Deborah Harry and guitarist Chris Stein in New York in 1975. But following its breakup in 1982, Burke embarked on an impressive career in other bands and as a sideman, playing with everybody from Wanda Jackson to Bob Dylan to the Ramones.

“The gig with the Eurythmics at Nelson Mandela’s 70th Birthday Tribute in 1988 was pretty amazing,” says Burke of just one of his many career high points. “Eighty-thousand people in Wembley Arena.”

Blondie: (L-R) Paul Crabonara , Leigh Foxx, Chris Stein, Deborah Harry, Matt Katz- Bohen, and Clem Burke.

Blondie, 1979.

So when Harry and Stein approached him in 1997 about reforming the band, Burke didn’t feel the need to jump on board right away. He was still stinging from the original breakup of the group 15 years earlier, a disintegration he attributes as much to the heady rush of success and members’ desire to do their own thing as to Stein’s famous battle with the auto-immune disease pemphigus.

“I think we should have just taken a break, but instead everyone went on and did their own thing,” says Burke .

He only agreed to the reunion when his bandmates convinced him that the group would be moving forward, not looking back.

“I kind of always thought we would get back together at some point,” says Burke. “Once it became evident that we would try to make a new record, that’s what interested me. I didn’t really want to just get back together and become like an oldies band, a greatest hits band. So we got back together and got into a grungy basement and rehearsed like a band and came up with a bunch of new material.”

Currently on tour with fellow ’80s rock icon Pat Benatar and all-girl punk band the Donnas, Blondie performs at the Mud Island Amphitheater Saturday night in what promoter Barry Leff of Beaver Entertainment describes as “trip through rock-and-roll history.”

“Pioneers on the ’70s New Wave and punk scene, few bands have remained as relevant as Blondie,” says Leff.

Indeed, a dozen years later, the re-energized Blondie — with Harry, Stein, and Burke and “newbies” Paul Carbonara (guitar), Matt Katz-Bohen (keyboards), Leigh Foxx (bass), and Jimmy Destri (keyboards) — are still fighting the urge to rest on their laurels and are creating new music that competes with their genre-bending pop hits of the late ’70s like “Rapture” and “The Tide Is High.”

The band issued its first new album in 17 years, No Exit, in 1999. Though the record was met with a lukewarm reception at home, in England it was a smash, with the single “Maria” reaching the top of the charts, making Blondie the only American act to log number No. 1 hits in three different decades.

Now an official pop music institution (the band was enshrined in the Rock-and-Roll Hall of Fame in 2006), Blondie is revving up to produce the long-awaited follow-up to 2003’s The Curse of Blondie.

“We’re kind of using the rehearsals and the tour as an excuse to work on new material for a record that’s going to come out next year,” says Burke, who still pursues outside projects like his bands Slinky Vagabond and Magic Christian. “(The new material) is as eclectic as ever. Influences are all over the place. That’s kind of like what we do.

“We like to confuse people about what we sound like. … It’s evolved some. We use electronics a little bit more. But whether it be the music of Top 40 radio of the ’50s and ’60s or the R&B influence or even the reggae influence, the roots of Blondie remain the same.”

Pat Benatar and Blondie with the Donnas

7:30 p.m. Saturday at Mud Island Amphitheater. Tickets: $52.50, available at the box office and through Ticketmaster. For more information, visit mudisland.com.

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