Debbie Harry opened the door for girls in rock bands when Blondie released their debut single, with the sexiest B-side ever.

June 1976: punk is in its infancy. The Clash and The Damned have just formed. It’ll be another month before they play their first gigs.

Over in New York things are moving faster. Every week we scour Sounds and NME for the latest news of the scene at CBGBs and Max’s.

We’ve read about The Ramones and Television and Talking Heads and Blondie but apart from The Ramones and Patti Smith, whose albums have opened the doors of our punk perception, we can only imagine what they sound like.

On 17 June, Blondie release their debut single, sung by a girl with peroxide hair and a curl of the lip that tells you she’s full of attitude.

Girl singers weren’t allowed to have attitude in 1976. We didn’t even have girl singers in rock bands until Debbie Harry. And while X Offender got us dancing, the B-side got us swooning.

It’s a ballad, a kind of cool pastiche of a Sixties pop ballad: the sort of thing Nancy Sinatra or Cher might have sung. It’s slow and sensuous and sexy as hell.

When she sings the word “flesh” she lets it linger just long enough for her Cupid’s bow lips to part, frozen like that for a moment that lived on in the imagination of every teenage boy, including me.

And that’s without even seeing the video, which I don’t think I’ve ever seen until now. When she takes off her beret towards the end to reveal a bird’s nest of bedroom hair… well, it’s all too much.