Julia Cumming isn't Debbie Harry, she's Burt Bacharach

Blondie. The Ramones. Talking Heads. The Strokes. Geese. Trawl back through the history of New York bands and you’ll find a potted list of some of the coolest motherf***ers ever to grace a stage. It’s the city that birthed the CBGB club and an entire substrata of 1970s punk; the city that gave us Andy Warhol and the Pop Art movement. And so, when indie-rock trio Sunflower Bean burst on to the scene in the mid-2010s in a flurry of fuzzy riffs, bleached blonde hair and precocious youth (the group’s press-igniting debut EP Show Me Your Seven Secrets was released before its members turned 20), there seemed a natural lineage for the group and their frontwoman Julia Cumming to slide into. Cumming had also recently signed a modelling contract with Yves Saint Laurent; frequently referred to as “Hedi Slimane’s muse”, to the world she seemed like Debbie Harry 2.0. But internally, Cumming was trying to reconcile a new identity that felt like an ill fit.