Music

Debbie Harry: 'I feel I'm capable of having a child'


As she relives a remarkable life in new memoir Face It, Debbie Harry talks Blondie, escaping Ted Bundy, and how Madonna stole her career

Thursday, 3rd October 2019, 22:00 pm

Updated Thursday, 3rd October 2019, 22:02 pm
Debbie Harry has had No 1 singles on both sides of the Atlantic, recorded hit albums and toured with Bowie

As the lead singer of Blondie, Debbie Harry has lived one of the great pop lives. She has had No 1 singles on both sides of the Atlantic, recorded hit albums, toured with Bowie, influenced countless bands, left a photographic legacy of pure New York street cool, and almost branded a hair colour as her own. And now, at 74, she would like to have a child.

We’re in a hotel overlooking the Thames. Harry, in head-to-toe black-and-white, with those era-defining cheekbones, is sipping water in a stately armchair. We’ve met before and I’m expecting her to be laconic and hard-to-reach, but she’s not. There’s a tough edge to Harry, but today she’s warm and voluble, with a dirty, plosive laugh that punctuates her stories.

She has just written an astonishing memoir, Face It, about which a review in The Washington Post ran with the headline: “Debbie Harry proves she’s more than just a pretty blonde in tight pants”. Condescending and sexist doesn’t cover it.

I’ve just asked whether she has any regrets – wondered tentatively if she had ever wanted children. “Not until recently,” she says, “I really didn’t see myself doing it, but now I feel I’m capable and I could actually do it.

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Debbie Harry, at 74, would like to have a child (Photo: Independent archive)

“Honestly, I was so self-centred, it never crossed my mind. I was amazed that anyone would want to have a child,” she laughs, then shifts tone. “I was so traumatised in a way by the things that happened to us, I don’t know if I could have taken a child through it.”

In Face It, she describes the “chemical challenge” of writing the book, having to relive “all the shit of my life”. She documents her rise to fame alongside a personal story that includes being raped at knifepoint, becoming a junkie, surviving an encounter with a man she believes was serial killer Ted Bundy, experiencing financial ruin at the peak of her success and coming to terms with a feeling she could not escape: that being adopted as a baby had left her forever anxious and afraid.

“I think being adopted gave me a core that was always a little bit off balance without ever really understanding why,” she says, adding that her adoptive mother and father were “very good, protective parents”.

Harry grew up in small-town New Jersey but fled to Manhattan in the 60s and lived on the edgy Lower East Side. Her early years in the city, working as a waitress and Playboy bunny, as well as for the BBC, were also when she began performing as one of three female vocalists in The Stilettos. The 70s were a time of innocence for her, “struggling and surviving. I had a great relationship with Chris and we shared so much.”

“Chris” was guitarist Chris Stein, who would join The Stilettoes’ band as a bassist, before becoming Harry’s romantic and musical partner. They quit to form their own band, Angel and the Snakes, then Blondie and the Banzai Babies, then Blondie, in mid-1974, and were soon playing alongside punk progenitors The Ramones at CBGBs. “I was a punk,” she writes in Face It. “I still am.”

It was during this period that she and Stein were held up at knifepoint outside his apartment by a man who, once inside, tied them up, stole Stein’s guitars and raped her. “I didn’t feel fear of death,” she says. “I think afterwards I was pissed off and saddened, just angry, but at the time in New York there was a lot of street violence.”

Debbie Harry, circa 1980 (Photo: Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

In the book, she suggests it was losing the band’s guitars that hurt most. “That’s accurate. I mean, I try to be tough and survive, obviously, but that was hard for us. We weren’t making any money, it was a tough blow.”

For Harry, death came closer on the night she believes she escaped from Ted Bundy (said to have killed at least 30 women between 1974 and 1978). She had been walking to a party at 2am when she accepted a lift from a handsome man driving a small, white car, from which the inner door handle and window winder had been removed.

‘Age prejudice in the pop industry is very, very strong’

She escaped by jamming her hand through a gap in the window and opening the door from outside. Years later, after reading about his modus operandi, Harry maintains she knew that the driver had been Bundy. “He had a very bad odour. [When I read about him], I responded physically the same way I did when I was in that car.”

Blondie’s career began inauspiciously when a poster for their 1976 debut single “X Offender” displayed a now-famous image of Harry in a gauzy top that showed her breasts. She was furious. “Rock’n’roll and pop music are about sexuality, so I didn’t have a problem with that,” she says, “But they told me they were gonna use the picture in a cropped format – that was the violation.”

Debbie Harry performing in 2018 (Photo: Mike Coppola/Getty Images for Woman’s Day)

The single made minor waves, but in 1978, when the band recorded a cover of doo-wop group Randy & the Rainbows’ 1963 hit “Denise” (with a gender shift to “Denis”), it went to No 2 in the UK. Once Harry appeared on Top of the Pops, Britain was won over, but the US wouldn’t catch up until the disco-influenced “Heart of Glass” topped the charts in 1979. Blondie’s flawless run of singles would continue up to 1981, taking in the huge hit “Call Me” and the rap-influenced “Rapture”.

Harry was also expanding into acting, appearing in Videodrome (1983) and later Hairspray (1988). She reveals she was offered the part of Pris in Blade Runner (1982), but her label blocked it.

‘I didn’t do heroin until the very end of Blondie’

She was already 33 when the timeless album Parallel Lines went to No 1 in the UK. Did the ruthless attitude towards ageing in the pop industry affect how executives viewed the band’s shelf life? “Definitely,” she says. “Age prejudice is very, very strong and even more so in the corporate world.”

The band’s next album, The Hunter, was a relative flop, and Blondie broke up. Stein was stricken with a mystery illness that caused alarming weight loss, and Harry fell into addiction.

“I didn’t do heroin until the very end of Blondie,” she says, “and that was a very stressful period. Up until then I didn’t do drugs, I didn’t do cocaine – I didn’t like it – or pot.” Being offered heroin at that time was as normal as being offered a drink, she insists. “You’d go to someone’s apartment and they would go: ‘Would you like to chase the dragon?’”

Debbie Harry on stage earlier this year (Photo: Frazer Harrison/Getty)

In Face It, she tells of Hairspray director John Waters saying: “Debbie blinked for two minutes while she was looking after Chris and Madonna stole her career.” Does she think there’s any truth in that?

“To some degree, yeah, but I think whatever Madonna got, she earned. She worked her ass off. She didn’t do a rock bit, she’s a showgirl… mostly what was at risk for me was the image. She was a brunette and suddenly she was a blonde – that was kind of detrimental to me.”

She and Stein broke up, too, on the day Andy Warhol died, in 1987. “Our lives were very complicated and fragile, and we’d been through a lot,” she says. So who got to keep the Basquiat? (The late graffiti artist, whose works sell for $100m plus, was a friend; they bought Self Portrait with Suzanne from him for $300.)

“The Basquiat was sold long ago, when we were still living uptown,” Harry says, referring to the period in the mid-80s when they had to sell everything to pay off tax debts. They’d bought a townhouse on the Upper East Side but it, too, had to go. I’m shocked that they were left so exposed by their management. “Not only us, it’s happened to so many. I have nobody to blame but myself. Ultimately if you don’t take responsibility for your mistakes, where do you go from there? ‘I was the victim’? No, you say, ‘I fucked up’, although people helped me to do that.

Debbie Harry in 1978 (Photo: Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty)

Does she think things are different for today’s artists? Does Taylor Swift face the same pressures she did? “Oh, I don’t know, didn’t she lose control of her publishing at an early stage?” (Swift does not own the rights to her first six albums.)

“It happens. We’re not businessmen, we’re artists. If you don’t have good representation, who care about you, you’re vulnerable. There are some artists who are particularly astute, but not a whole lot. We’re all basically a bunch of idiots,” she starts to laugh, “we’re fools at large.”

The band reformed and rose again, hitting No 1 with “Maria” in 1999, and were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2006. “I could retire probably at some point, but physically I’m not forced,” Harry says.

Despite the trials in her personal life, she never experienced abuse within the industry. “Chris and I had a great partnership, so that’s how we did business. I was never going into meetings with an executive who might have been a predator in that situation.”

‘I was flattered when David Bowie took out his penis. What can I say? David, I’m all yours…’

Was it harder back then, working out what was OK? (I’m thinking of an incident she recalls in Face It where she is in a room with Iggy Pop and David Bowie, who took out his penis.) “I didn’t think that was disrespect at all,” she says, a smile starting to form. “I was flattered. What can I say? David, I’m all yours… unfortunately nothing happened, but that’s just the way I am. I’m a rascal.”



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