Where are all the Blondie bombshells? Frontwoman Debbie Harry’s memoir, Face It, may be entertaining but it’s also exasperatingly unreflective
dailymail.co.uk – 5th October 2019
By GRAEME THOMSON FOR EVENT MAGAZINE
Face It
Debbie Harry HarperCollins £20
Rating: 3/5
Debbie Harry was always smart enough to give people what they wanted without revealing too much of herself. In Blondie, she was a ‘woman playing a man’s idea of a woman… you could say I was selling an illusion of myself’. It worked wonders for her career as a pop star. It’s a less successful approach for a memoirist.
An inimitable singer, feminist trailblazer, street-smart songwriter, global pin-up and – we learn – wrestling fanatic, Harry is a woman truly deserving of that overused honorific ‘iconic’.
If only she’d dug a little deeper in Face It, which has been culled from a series of interviews with music writer Sylvie Simmons. The direct style makes for a lively, candid but often exasperatingly unreflective read.
Harry emerges as a survivor with an acute instinct for self-preservation. Her adoption, at three months, ‘put a real inexplicable core of fear in me’, creating a tough outer shell.
The lasting impact of several horrific events – in the early Seventies she is raped at knifepoint in her apartment in the Lower East Side – are swept aside with almost shocking detachment.
When fame comes, Harry is in her early 30s, but still unprepared. ‘The first seven years of Blondie felt insane. Total madness.’ Sure enough, the band’s heyday spins off the page in a blur, all that DIY creativity and musical brilliance rushing past with little sense of what it all meant.
Harry lived fast during that period and is candid about her appetites. ‘For those times when I wanted to blank out parts of my life or when I was dealing with some depression, there was nothing better than heroin. Nothing.’ We do not learn, however, how and when she beat her addiction.
There are several good, gossipy cameos. On tour with Blondie in 1977, David Bowie and Iggy Pop invite Harry to their dressing room, where they ‘suck up’ a gram of cocaine. ‘After they did the blow,’ Harry recalls, ‘Bowie pulled out his ****.’ There are dalliances with actor Harry Dean Stanton and magician Penn Jillette, but her soulmate is Blondie guitarist Chris Stein, her lover for 13 years and still her closest confidant today.
In the Eighties Stein almost dies from a rare autoimmune disorder, and Harry writes movingly about his agonising recovery and the toll it took. They break up on the day Andy Warhol dies, though again she doesn’t disclose the reasons.
She is similarly opaque on the disintegration of Blondie in the Eighties, and her bankruptcy. Blondie sold 40 million records and yet here she is, having her house, car and coats repossessed, chasing jobs that pay cash. ‘We got taken,’ she says, apportioning blame to predatory industry types.
Happily, Blondie reform in the Nineties and Harry continues to lead the line today, at 74 as magnificently unabashed as ever. ‘I’ve had one hell of an interesting life,’ she concludes, something that Face It makes abundantly and entertainingly clear. It’s just frustrating that it also conforms to the old showbiz tradition of leaving the audience wanting more.
