(Credits: Alamy)
Tue 31 March 2026 23:00, UK
New York – the city that makes people, breaks people, and welcomes every kind of people. Yet right at the heart of it all, the CBGB stood gleaming amid the concrete jungle.
It seems a boringly obvious statement to make, given the calibre of artist which emerged from its walls, but this was a club, though relatively small in terms of physical size, that represented its own little wondrous universe. The acts that played, the conversations that went down, and the stories to tell about it are endless.
For some, it leaves a warming sense of nostalgia in its memory. For others, however, there’s a melancholy that only arrived with its demise: the feeling that they shouldn’t have taken for granted such a shining beacon when they had it. Debbie Harry can tell you a thing or two about that.
Of course, it’s no secret that Blondie are unquestionably one of the greatest exports to have ever been honed by CBGB. But the story is often told in regards to how the band influenced it, and not the other way around. Even as they last performed there in October 2006 as part of its closing celebrations, there were still a lot of thoughts left to be reconciled.
In a 2011 interview, she said: “Of course, at this stage of the game I remember it with both affection and regret, and I wish… I think,” with this struggle to collect her thoughts, the epitome of both her happiest memories and struggles to let go of the sense of exploration that the time spent in the haunt granted.
“When the World Trade Centre went down, there were a couple of weeks where I went through different stages of feeling, like anger, then fear, then a feeling of being lost, and then mourning,” Harry continued. “And then a couple of weeks further along into this process, I had a surge of, oh God, wishing it was the ‘70s again. Because it was such a great time. Even though it was a complete struggle and we had no money, it was a great energy. We were… climbing. And discovering. And what could be better than that?”
In this sense, it reveals the inner psyche of a woman who, for so long, has stood as the symbol of an impenetrable icon. After all, what do stadium tours, headline festival slots, and being known all over the world really mean when you’ve become jaded to their effects? Ultimately, CBGB was the electricity and spark.
When you consider the fact that it has now been lost to the New York music scene and the wider world for the past 20 years, it makes you truly realise how much poorer we are for it. There’s less sense of ambition, dreaming, exploration, and experimentation, purely because there lacks the physical space for it to happen.
That’s what makes the memory difficult to grapple with for someone like Harry. When she first arrived as a young bombshell in New York, she could never have realised what the rest of her life had in store. But if only she had stopped to take stock of where she was at the time, things could have been a lot different.
