FEATURE:
Sunday Girl
IN THIS PHOTO: Debbie Harry photographed in 2019/PHOTO CREDIT: Celeste Sloman for The New York Times
The Iconic Debbie Harry at Seventy-Five
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WHEN it comes to marking big birthdays…
of music icons, I can be a bit early and quick off of the mark! Debbie Harry turns seventy-five on 1st July, but I wanted to be one of the first to send a nod her way – I am sure I will write something else and publish on the day she turns seventy-five. Although Harry’s age is not important as such, I do think that it is important to salute one of the most inspiring artists of all-time. At the age of seventy-five (almost), she is still inspiring new artists, and has no equals. I encountered Blondie’s music when I was a child, and I think the first song I discovered was Sunday Girl – it is from their 1978 masterpiece, Parallel Lines. Although that song was written by the band’s guitarist, Chris Stein – he and Harry were in a relationship for over a decade -, I think it is Harry’s cool and powerful voice that takes the song to a very special place. I will end this feature with a playlist of the best Blondie and Debbie Harry solo material, but I listen to the music of Blondie and look at images of Harry from the 1970s and 1980s, and there was nobody who had that same magnetism and sense of authority! I can only imagine what it was like female artists in the 1970s in terms of how they were perceived and marketed. Debbie Harry was in various bands before forming Blondie (with Chris Stein), and they played various clubs throughout New York.
IN THIS PHOTO: Debbie Harry with Blondie
Harry soon become an icon and key figure in the Punk movement because of her incredible style, streetwise cool and her obvious musical talent. I know she would have faced a lot of sexism and prejudice, but she, alongside the band, became a global megastar and inspired and gave strength to many other women. It is hard to narrow down to the best Blondie albums, but I think their debut, Blondie (1976), Parallel Lines (1978), and Eat to the Beat (1979) contains some of their best work. I think Debbie Harry gets overlooked as a songwriter, but she co-wrote some of the band’s biggest songs – including Union City Blue, Heart of Glass, X Offender, and Rapture. Rapture was an important song, as it was the first number-one song in the U.S. to feature Rap vocals – which was a huge catalyst and shook the music scene in 1981. The year 1999 was a scary one for me, as it was the last at high school, and I was about to embark on a move to sixth-form college. Though Blondie’s comeback album, No Exit – their first since Hunter in 1982 – is underrated and not ranked alongside their best, I think Debbie Harry (and the band) are amazing throughout. Maria is a phenomenal track and can rank alongside the best Blondie tracks. I feared that album might be a one-off from the band. Luckily, they continue to put out albums and their latest album, 2017’s Pollinator, is a fantastic record and one of their strongest to date.
I felt I knew a lot about Debbie Harry and her career before her memoir, Face It, came out last year. I would urge people to buy it, as it is very honest and well-written. I learnt so much from it, and I got a lot better impression of a fascinating woman who has experienced some real highs and lows. The memoir received a lot of praise and fresh wave of media attention. Here is what The Atlantic wrote when they reviewed Face It:
“It’s hard to put your, um, finger on the Harry that emerges from Face It. While other aging-rocker memoirs have earned press for the gossip they’ve revealed, so far the biggest brouhaha about Harry’s book has been about a clumsy attempt at summing her up. “In her memoir, Debbie Harry proves she’s more than just a pretty blonde in tight pants,” read a Washington Post tweet that went viral for the wrong reasons. Sibbie O’Sullivan’s corresponding book review began with disdain (“Even if Debbie Harry, of the band Blondie, isn’t to your taste—her voice too thin, her sexiness too blatant, her music too smooth—you can’t dismiss certain truths about her”) and ended with the backhanded praise of the tweet. In the scorn storm that brewed on social media in response, the journalist Alicia Lutes asked, “Legitimately who has ever thought so little about Debbie fucking Harry?”
PHOTO CREDIT: David Levene for The Guardian
One revelation of the memoir is that the public hasn’t been given a ton to think, good or bad, about Harry over the years. Absolutely there’s a well of fervent and uncomplicated admiration for Blondie’s music, which includes some of the most crystalline pleasure-rushes of the ’70s and ’80s: “Heart of Glass,” “Hanging on the Telephone,” “One Way or Another,” “Call Me.” Definitely she’s remembered as a fixture of CBGB, the legendary New York City punk club. But when I went to look up her role in Please Kill Me, the canonical dirt download about that era and place, I found an interview in which she told the writer Legs McNeil, “Supposed to be questions about fucking punk, man,” when he asked about her backstory. Now, with Face It, Harry is here to fill in some of the blanks—briskly, humorously, and mixed in with abstract riffs on appendages and animals”.
Before I get to the playlist, I want to source from a few interviews, as it is interesting to hear from Debbie Harry herself and get a personal insight into a music legend. Not only does Face It paint a picture of the music scene in the 1970s and how Harry and Blondie approached things, but she does not hold back when it comes to writing about some of the more painful and harrowing events that have happened to her. One reads various extracts and chapters of Face It and you cannot help but be moved by Harry’s plight and strengthened by her resolve and bravery.
IN THIS PHOTO: Debbie Harry in 1977
When she spoke with The Evening Standard earlier this year, Harry was asked about an occasion where she was raped and how she wrote about it (in her memoir):
“On and off stage, Harry has never been one to conform to expectations, and in Face It, she describes her rape in a breezy tone that some have found uncomfortable. ‘I was more embarrassed than afraid,’ she writes, adding it was the perpetrator’s theft of Stein’s guitars that ‘stung the most’.
What would she say to those who see her response as unusually flippant? ‘It’s an opinion,’ she shrugs brusquely. Can she honestly say the attack had no psychological impact on her? ‘I have a friend who is a great example to me,’ she says, going off at a tangent. ‘I used to be all morbid about things and this friend would say, “Well, I’ve got five minutes for that,” and then she’d move on. For a while I wondered how she did it, but I took a lesson from it and managed to make it work for me. I can’t always make it work. Sometimes I live with this darkness or idea of impossibility, but I was in a great relationship [with Stein] at the time and we supported each other through it.’
As well as the rape, during the 1970s Harry endured a violent ex-boyfriend who became her stalker and constant encounters with institutional sexism in the music industry — she has also written about a kidnap attempt by a man whom she believes was the serial killer Ted Bundy. Although she’s adamant that none of these incidents has had any long-lasting effects on her life, it’s hard not to see her Blondie persona as a riposte to the men who did her wrong. ‘I was saying things in the songs that female singers didn’t really say back then,’ Harry writes of the band’s early years. ‘I wasn’t submissive or begging him to come back. I was kicking his ass, kicking him out, kicking my own ass, too’”.
I do not want to make this feature about the trauma that Harry has encountered; more that there are events and periods of her life where she has encountered setbacks (if that is a fair word?!), but one needs to address them to get a bigger and clearer picture of her – and not just focus on the hits and Blondie albums. Bearing in mind Blondie’s eponymous album made a big impression and turned heads, it is not a surprise that Harry was in demand and all over the media. It must have been crazy for her and the band to receive such attention so soon. When she spoke with GQ last year to promote Face It, she was asked about the sort of attention she received in the early days:
“Did you enjoy that first flush of fame?
It was weird, because so much was happening in London at the time, but when you’re riding a success like we were with Blondie, it’s hard to keep up with everything, hard to be a part of an evolution or revolution or whatever you want to call it. You’re too busy to work out what’s going on. I should have enjoyed the process a bit more, but you just didn’t have the time. You never have the time. You’re just in the middle of all this crazy activity and you just hang on for dear life. What I do know is that it was wonderful and it was especially wonderful being in London. It was exciting and it was a huge learning experience and, of course, we had all been aware of The Beatles and The Stones and all of that period from the Sixties, I guess. As music is such an important part of British culture, it felt great to play such an important part in it”.
IN THIS PHOTO: Debbie Harry in 1978/PHOTO CREDIT: Mick Rock
Debbie Harry is an icon, for sure – whether that is a term she feels comfortable with -, and many wondered why it took a long time to write her memoir. I guess it can be quite revealing writing about your life, and there is that feeling of being naked or the reader having complete access to a lot of information that would have been secret for a long time. In the same interview, Harry addressed the reason why it took a while for the memoir to come about:
I guess I was a coward really. I never really thought of doing it and I never really wanted to do it especially. People came to me and said, “Oh, you’ve got all of these great stories, you really ought to tell them,” but I was kind of reluctant. This is the first interview I’ve done for the book and I’m still quite tentative about it if I’m honest with you. It seems unnatural. To me it just seems like the same old story, but then I guess you’re not me. I mean we all have stories to tell, so in the end I did get it together, but I feel like there’s so much missing from this book actually, because it’s impossible to cram everything in. There are lots of stories in the book that aren’t just me and so-and-so going out and having a night or doing this or doing that, little anecdotal kind of stories about the process of writing songs or that day in the studio or my phone conversation or this or that. I suppose the book is an overall kind of broad brushstroke book, trying to externalise internal events. In the end I just had to stop or else I’d still be writing”.
One cannot forget the wonderful music of Blondie and just what an innovator Debbie Harry is. I do not use the word ‘icon’ lightly: few artists have achieved as much and changed the music world like she has. So many artists owe a debt to her, and I don’t think we will ever see anyone like her ever again! I want to finish by casting back and imagining what it would have been like for an obviously very beautiful woman to be thrust into the limelight, and the sort of attitudes she had to deal with. It still happens today, but Debbie Harry (and her peers) experienced a lot of sexism and objectification. I found an interview Harry conducted with The Guardian last year, and the subject of sexism and being objectified arose:
“Few women have been objectified as much as Harry. Her face – those killer cheekbones and heart-shaped mouth – is immortalised on Blondie album covers and in Warhol’s famous portrait. Was she always aware of men’s reaction to her? “I think we all have issues of self-esteem and I’m not clear of that,” she says, by way of an answer. “I also think that because it’s my occupation – to be a performer and to attract attention and to appeal to sexuality – it’s sort of a given in showbiz.”
Did she feel objectified? “There was a time in the earlier Blondie years when I was trying hard to perform, sing and write, and all of those contributions would be overlooked [by critics]. And that was, well …” She doesn’t finish the sentence. She was furious when Blondie’s record label put out a poster with a picture of her wearing a see-through blouse. In the book, she writes: “Sex sells, that’s what they say, and I’m not stupid, I know that. But on my terms, not some executive’s.”
IN THIS PHOTO: Chris Stein and Debbie Harry in 1980/PHOTO CREDIT: Lynn Goldsmith
Did she feel dismissed because of the way she looked? “Yes. A bit of fluff.” Wasn’t that infuriating? “Yes, but, you know, in a way it was good because I can sneak up on them unawares. I think times have changed in that respect. Women are serious wage-earners, and we create great things, and it seems clear to me that we can be supportive of one another regardless of what sex [we are]”.
I wonder how Debbie Harry is dealing with lockdown, and whether there are any Blondie songs taking shape. The band have not ruled out another album, so it would be wonderful to think they have written songs or are planning stuff for later in the year. I want to track back to that interview from The Evening Standard, as Debbie Harry discussed her life today:
“A conventional life with a husband and kids never appealed, although she admits to pangs of jealousy when Stein married Sicuranza. She lives in Manhattan with her dogs and spends her time writing music, painting and reading. Does she date? ‘Very much so. There are less men around for people my age, though. They’re all married with children. What’s wrong with them?’ She wrinkles her nose. ‘I think what’s going on, there’s more extra-marital relationships and maybe that is the right way. I’m looking for something really chemical’”.
I have thrown a lot of information out – not necessarily in the most cohesive manner! -, but go and get the Face It memoir, and buy as many Blondie albums as you can. Long may we hear music from the wonderful Debbie Harry. As her seventy-fifth birthday is a matter of days away, I want to show some love, and end the feature with a playlist of the finest songs from her Blondie and solo catalogue. On 1st July, I hope all corners of the media and music world will pay their respects…
TO a music legend!