Interview with the legendary Deborah Harry

Growing up in the late 70s and 80s there was a serious lack of female role models – particularly in Utah. Oh sure if you wanted to be a timid, naïve, gullible Mormon housewife my sheltered, religious world was awash with that type of flower-print-dress-wearing woman. But that never felt right to me, it never looked appealing. I hated those women for being so weak, selfish and stupid. On TV were the feminists, severe, angry, intentionally unattractive women who looked like they were no fun at all, nor did they look particularly happy. I certainly didn’t want to be one. Also on TV were women who seemed to me a bizarre mixture of the two, women like Mary Tyler Moore, Rhoda and Charlie’s Angels. Characters who seemed unsure what to do with themselves and uncomfortable in their own skin, or maybe TV didn’t know what to do with women.

There were few examples of the kind of woman I wanted to grow-up to be; strong, beautiful, desirable, intelligent, passionate, sexual and brave — unless you counted Princess Leia, she was the embodiment of most of those things, but she wasn’t real and a bit of a girlie girl, I was more rock chick. Lucky for me there was one woman who fit the bill perfectly, Debbie Harry – or as I knew her then Blondie. When I found out that my idol, this goddess of pop-punk, was, like me, adopted I knew I wanted to grow-up to be Deborah Harry.

This icon of pop-culture and feminine power got her big break as frontwoman for the legendary band Blondie. The band’s name got attached to Harry and many thought it was her name, and with her shocking blonde hair it was inevitable. It was partly due to that hair, those fabulous cheek bones and sleek boyish figure that Blondie got noticed.

You can’t help but think that being a pop-icon must come with a lot of pressure, but Harry seems to have a very healthy attitude. “I do actually feel that the image, the Blondie image… is more iconic than I actually am. That visual has carried on because it was so strong. I don’t know if I feel myself an icon, more that, that image is iconic.”

However there were a lot of tensions surrounding Harry’s status within the band. The Blondie break-up was caused as much by Chris Stein’s — Harry’s romantic partner and band mate – diagnoses with the rare and usually fatal genetic disease, pemphigus, as to acrimonious feelings surrounding the attention she got from the media and public. When Blondie broke-up, Harry put her career on hold to nurse Stein through his illness and although Stein survived their relationship didn’t – Harry and Stein split in the mid 80s. Harry tried to return to singing but, weary of the Blondie persona she died her hair, and took on a rougher tougher image. The record label balked, Harry herself once quipped “they wanted Debbie Harry not Dirty Harry”.

All of the stresses of life led to a depression of sorts in the mid 80s, she won’t talk about that time except to refer to it as “the ice-cream years”. Harry became a recluse, put on weight and gave up, at least temporarily, the notion of pop stardom. However eventually she came through it.

Most recently Harry released the new-wave/pop/semi-experimental album, 14 years after her last release. It seems a long time to wait between albums but Harry is blasé about the gap.

“It was just something I felt like doing. I had the urge to get back into the studio. I had some ideas I wanted to put down and I just had the time. I didn’t have any pressure or a contract or anything. I wanted to do it.”

But surely with that long to consider the project she must have had some grand scheme or ultimate plan for how the album should sound.

“No. I was doing it in bits and pieces, dribs and drabs, spread out over such a long period of time. It’s really just a loose thing. If I had an idea I could just go with it and try something out.”

With this new album, I asked Harry if she thought she had finally separated herself from the Blondie image.

“Well I am that [Blondie]. I mean, it’s a combination of things. I think for a while I was kind of upset by it, thinking that somehow or other the rest of the band was short changed. But I think that we have all learned to live with the reality of it, that it has become the image that people associate with me, but we are really lucky that it stuck.”