Q Magazine

August 1999 – Page 56

The 100 Greatest Stars Of The 20th Century

46 – Debbie Harry
Better when she wasn’t Deborah

Debbie Harry: cheekbones like geometry and eyes like sin.
In the late-’70s Harry emerged as a cool but accessible pop icon who brought streetwise, downtown New York culture into the lives of an unsuspecting adolescent audience. Perhaps it was significant that Harry’s natural dark roots usually showed through her blonde hair, because she always had the look of an ex-waitress and heroin addict who had reinvented herself as a pop mannequin. At the height of Blondie’s fame, Harry’s flair for self-iconisation (the white dress of Parallel Lines; the Atomic bin-liner) was as witty as Bowie’s or Madonna’s, while her underrated, effort-free singing was sensual, knowingly submissive and hip. In the mind’s eye, she remains all lip gloss and soft focus.
Recommended album: Blondie, (Parallel Lines, Chrysalis, 1978). Pop art and garagey ’60s songwriting in a pornographic package.
You said: “Grrrrrrrrr…” Saul Hetherington, Boscastle
*Astonishing Fact*
In 1983, Harry starred in a New York play – Teaneck Tanzi: The Venus Flytrap – as a lady wrestler. It closed after only one night.