Debbie Harry reflects on NYC, punk — and playing Glastonbury at 77
nypost.com – 17th June 2023
By Nikki Mascali Roarty
One way, or another, Debbie Harry is unstoppable.
The 77-year-old platinum-haired chanteuse is slated to play next week’s Glastonbury Festival in Somerset, England, with her longtime band, Blondie, and she wouldn’t have it any other way.
“We’re still playing music and being creative and that’s the essence of it all, isn’t it?” she told The Times of London Friday.
Harry, who has been fronting Blondie since 1974 save for a 15-year hiatus between 1982 and 1997, will play Glastonbury for the third time on Sunday, between Yusuf/Cat Stevens and Lil Nas X.
The band performed in 1999 and 2014, and the fashion icon fondly remembers what she wore for her inaugural show.
“The first time I was wearing an Elsa Schiaparelli hat, so I think I was very happy about that. It was red flowers on a straw bucket, and I thought I was really chic.”
Harry also recalled a very punk-rock moment on one of the Glastonbury trips — when her bandmates broke into Stonehenge.
“The boys were all very excited, and they climbed over the fence, ran over and touched the stone,” the “Heart of Glass” singer said. “I wasn’t about to climb that fence.”
Harry became an integral part of New York City’s gritty 1970s music scene, frequenting the stages of legendary clubs like Max’s Kansas City and CBGB, which she described as having an alley “full of rubbish, rats, pissed-on garbage and shards of broken glass” in her 2019 memoir “Face It.”
“Inside, the club had its own special reek — a pungent compound of stale beer, cigarette smoke, dog shit and body odor,” she wrote.
But the “Rapture” vocalist wouldn’t trade all those nights enveloped in the infamous club’s particular miasma for today’s always-on, social media-savvy world.
“I remember performing on stage at CBGB and thinking to myself, ‘I’m really having a great time and no one’s ever gonna see this except these 25 people that are here,’” she told the Times. “It was a great way to learn to perform — I wasn’t being microscopically observed.”
She wasn’t making a dig at today’s ever-present technology, she said.
“I just happen to have known something different. Technology is great, but I sort of wonder about everybody having an opinion. Everybody is entitled to an opinion, but some of them aren’t worth shit, you know?”
Today, the longtime New Yorker and mom to two Japanese Chin dogs splits her time between the Big Apple and New Jersey.
“My feelings about living in New York changed a little bit,” she told the Times. “I lived in the city for I don’t know how many years — 40? I like it here in New Jersey because it’s private.”
But she was quick to point out she still spends a lot of time in the city, and just visited her longtime guitarist and Blondie co-founder Chris Stein, who is also her former partner. She’s even godmother to his daughters with his wife, actress Barbara Sicuranza.
Harry and Stein survived her addiction to heroin and his nearly dying from autoimmune disease, a battle that led to mounting medical bills, millions owed in taxes and the then-couple losing their home.
“It sucked, basically,” she said of those hard years. “I sort of feel like I was swept along in some cases. But then in some ways it was very educational, and thank God that we both survived all of that bullshit. That’s life, isn’t it? Does anybody get through unscathed?”
After Blondie’s Glastonbury show, the band will open for her old friend — and fellow punk legend —Iggy Pop at Dog Day Afternoon in London on July 1.
“I think Iggy’s a much better punk than I’ve ever been,” she mused.
