The Word

July 2011

Pages 38 & 39

FACETIME

She missed The Rapture. How does DEBBIE HARRY take care of Brand Blondie?

INTERVIEW BY ANDREW HARRISON

IT SEEMS THAT THE NOTORIOUSLY brittle, distant, frosty, monosyllabic interviewer’s nightmare that is Debbie Harry has failed to turn up for our Monday-morning chat in a secluded hotel bar off Regent Street. The figure on the other side of the table – candy floss hair, big smile, a bit of work done but, be fair, it’s showbusiness – is cheerful and talkative if a bit “floaty”. “Red Eye from New York on Saturday night,” she explains. “Spent yesterday just wandering…”
Debbie Harry, a serene and friendly 65 with a complexion still the colour of Gold Top milk, seems to be quite enjoying her re-entry into the exciting and competitive world of pop music. The reason is Panic Of Girls, Blondie’s first album in eight years. It is not just a pretty decent comeback – imagine the snappy pop of Parallel Lines liberally smeared with clubby electronics – but also a full-service Blondie record that sums up every style the band worked in during their 1978-81 heyday.
There are thrilling drum-driven punk-pop tunes, outbursts of dance music, a song in French and even that acquired taste that is the Blondie reggae song, in this case a cover of Sophia George’s 1985 hit Girlie Girlie. The phrase ‘panic of girls” refers to the heightened state of freedom one attains when one has gone beyond fear. But Debbie quite likes its secondary meaning, that a panic of girls can be a collective noun like a murder of crows or a siege of herons. “It seems like a real pop thing. A panic of girls, all screaming.”
We talk on the morning of Monday 23 May, two days after God forgot to teleport the Faithful to Heaven.

So, how many radio plays did you get for Rapture at the weekend? You could have had the new 1999 by Prince.
I know, that was good! Kind of exciting in its craziness.

We were literally waiting for the man from Mars to appear and eat our guitars.
Well, yeah! It was very strange for us. You’re having a quiet Saturday getting ready for your flight to England and then suddenly people are tweeting you. Suddenly you’re trending. Snoop Dogg and Jimmy Kimmel are all these big stars were talking about the approaching Rapture and posting links to our song. You know, what a way for the world to end.
If we’d had a little notice then maybe we could have rewritten the rap. Which, by the way, is always misquoted. It’s not about getting high, it’s about going out clubbing. It’s not “Fab Five Freddy told me everybody’s high”, it’s “everybody’s fly”, which is a very different proposition.

The music business couldn’t be more different now from when Blondie started out. Is it more fun now or is it harder?
It’s… different. We’ve always had to play live, and play a lot, and that’s been to our benefit as a band. It strengthens you as a musician and as a group of people too. And our shows were always at different levels, from 4,000 people one night to 400 people the next to four friends the next. So we’re kind of used to the slog. If there’s a difference now it’s that we’re there, we’re properly experiencing it. When we were starting out we’d always come off stage raving or worrying or arguing. You don’t know if you just played a good show.

You’re releasing the album in a novel format, a CD with a magazine and memorabilia attached. Did you have to discuss the fine points of “Brand Blondie”?
Yes, you kind of have to in today’s world. I don’t think the brand, if you want to call it that, has changed. We’re still about the same things were always were. But the terminology, the way of thinking about it, is all shaped by technology. It makes some things harder but it creates opportunities too.

Part of Brand Blondie is that you’re as much of a walking logo as Betty Boop or Ronald McDonald. In the beginning, did you think, “I must make myself as recognisable as I can be, to be the face of this band”?
I’ve always been like that and it used to drive Chris [Stein, Blondie’s musical director and Debbie’s one-time romantic partner] crazy. We’d be walking around the city and he’d say, “Do you realise how many people are looking at you?” And I would never notice. But when I first moved to New York I came from a small town where everybody did know who you were. New York was intimidating, riding the subway was terrifying for me, but there was something attractive in the fact that nobody knew who you were.
I suppose I was a little shy, and part of dealing with that can be to make an overt decision to be the kind of person that gets attention. A lot of actors say similar things: they begin as very shy people and by taking on multiple identities the shyness fades. In my case it was one identity that I started to inhabit. In time you become more and more the person that you want to be.

Did you ever see giant posters of yourself and think, “God, is that me? Am I that sexy?”
[Laughs] I would see billboards or posters for albums and find myself thinking, “Oh God, how am I going to live up to that?” But ultimately, you know, it is my job. And I like to do a job well.

You were the first of the New York pop mega-blondes – the Manhattan Marilyn, in the same lineage that gave us Madonna and now Lady Gaga. What is it about New York that makes that downtown art-blonde persona work?
New York is a very concentrated place, so you learn quickly to shout, to be heard over the noise. Madonna, Lady Gaga, us… there is a similarity there. You’re surrounded by strong influences. You become used to handling the energy of the place. And nobody’s looking at you unless you really want them to, so you learn how to make them look. To me, that’s what makes a New York artist.

You were also part of the CBGBs generation. A lot of people mourned the venue, but was it really so bad that it closed, and became a legend, instead of degenerating into a tacky tourist spot?
CBGBs had already become one of those places that you had to visit but fortunately the visitors were still music kids, real fans. They knew why they were going to CBGBs, it wasn’t yet an empty tourist thing. It still had bands on. The sadness for me was to know that Hilly [Kristal, owner and promoter] was dying. In a way CBGBs was an organism, it was Hilly opening his brain, and we could all just walk in and experience this amazing manifestation of his weird thought processes. So in a way it was right that it should not carry on after Hilly had gone.

Everybody knows you worked in Max’s Kansas City and as a Playboy bunny but nobody knows you were also a secretary at the BBC New York office in the ’60s.
Yes, and it was very interesting. I saw a lot of very stellar people coming in for transatlantic radio shows, like Alistair Cooke and Malcolm… what’s his name, Muggeridge? It was great to meet these people. I worked on the radio side, or “Sound” as they called it, and I had to take care of the guests. Susannah York came in – beautiful – and Cassius Clay came in before he was Muhammad Ali. He was so pumped up and he was just gorgeous. I really liked it. Alistair Cooke got a little annoyed when I took a call and asked him to spell his name. I didn’t know who he was and he wasn’t happy about that at all (laughs). I wasn’t really doing anything in music at the time. I left in the end – I probably should have been fired – because I had aspirations to live a more artistic life. Nine to five didn’t suit me.

There’s also a story that you lost the master tapes to the follow-up to No Exit in the 9/11 attacks.
That’s actually kind of a myth. We had a lot of problems making that record but we didn’t actually lose recorded work in the attack. I can remember 9/11 pretty clearly – as everyone can – because I was in my bedroom and I saw the plane actually hit the building. The feelings I went through were the same you go through when someone dies: shock, anger, denial. The reaction I had afterwards was a surprising one because I began to miss the ’70s quite strongly, and wish I could relive them. I’m not a person who likes going back. I’m sick and tired of talking about the past. But to have that deep feeling of wishing it was the ’70s again was a moment of clarity. I missed a time when life made more sense.

When you and Chris were a couple you famously gave up music to look after him when he contracted the skin disease pemphigus in 1981. Did you feel that circumstances had robbed you of your career?
To be honest, I wish I could eliminate that from people’s minds. It’s been overstated ad nauseum. Back then Blondie was imploding, exploding, just not happening in so many ways whether Chris got sick or not. A lot of people have something like that happen in their lives and you do what you have to do. Because we were in the music world it was very much overstated. It wasn’t that big a deal.

What do people most get wrong about Blondie?
(Lengthy pause) It’s hard for m to say because I think people do get what we’re about. They get the music, and that’s great. (Thinks some more) There are little discrepancies, like maybe overstating the drug-taking. I mean, we can’t have been that bad. Nobody’s dead, are they? My measure is, your drug-taking is bad if you’re dead from it. I think we’re pretty OK on that score.

PANIC OF GIRLS is available now in newsagents and record shops as a special pack with a magazine and memorabilia. The conventional CD is out on 4 July