Blondie’s producer once feared they would "shoot" one another.
The ‘Rapture’ hitmakers relationship had deteriorated and become so hostile by the time they recorded ‘The Hunter’ in 1982 that Mike Chapman found making the album "dangerous".
Mike – who was lodging at Chris Stein and Debbie Harry’s New York apartment – recalled: "The whole album give me the creeps. I had a room at the top and so many nights I’d hear something and look down and I’d see Debbie sat in this chair beneath a black mosquito net, surrounded by candles, just sitting there, doing God knows what.
"By then, the whole band, it was like everybody hated each other. I felt at any point somebody was going to pull out a gun and shoot someone. Really. It was a dangerous vibe in the studio."
And with hindsight, most of the band recognise that drugs were a problem within the group.
Clem Burke said: "Three people in the band were seriously into drugs. But we all used them recreationally, Mike included.
"I just remember stacks and stacks of beer cans in the studio. We would toss them into the corner and by the end of the session it was like the Empire State building of beer cans."
Chris added: "We did way too many drugs. Everyone was doing f***ing tons of cocaine and that was considered OK. But if you were doing heroin that was like, ‘I can’t talk to you anymore.’
"So there was this big line drawn and it all got very weird."
However, singer Debbie insists the main problem was a lack of time off.
She told Q magazine: "I don’t think the drugs were the real problem in Blondie. We’d worked years without a vacation, we were expected to produce a huge amount of material, we didn’t have proper management and we had a bad record deal. I mean, how much can one take?"
Blondie’s producer worried about hositility
