Call me! Debbie Harry on fashion, fame and flirting

The Sunday Times – STYLE Magazine – Sunday 5th January 2025

Pages 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21

From selling 40 million records to dealing with drug addiction and financial wipeout, Debbie Harry has seen it all. The pop legend talks to Julia Llewellyn Smith about fame, fashion — and dating at 79

Photographs Louie Banks
Styling Bojana Kozarevic

Debbie Harry is telling me about her recent trip to the very glamorous-sounding Home Depot — think the US answer to B&Q. “I found somebody there I thought was really sexy,” the 79-year-old Blondie lead singer recounts in her quintessential Noo Yawk drawl. “He was working in the garden department. But he was busy.”

So did Harry communicate her interest to this lucky guy? “No. We just sort of looked at each other and did that …” She gives a look that could spark forest fires. “Home Depot is where I do all my flirting. There are some big, strong men there.” She cackles exultantly.

This is not the kind of conversation I was expecting to have with the punk/pop icon that the photographer David LaChapelle once proclaimed as “the definition of cool”. As with every Gen Xer, female or male, my teenage bedroom walls were covered with posters of Harry, who incarnated feminine beauty (with an ethereal voice to match), while simultaneously being the personification of the terrifying Lower East Side neighbourhood of New York. Decades later I’m fearful she’ll be as snarling and aloof as she came across in those Top of the Pops appearances of the 1970s and 1980s.

But instead, talking from the kitchen of her Chelsea apartment in Manhattan (I spot huge windows and an antique dresser in the background), Harry is sharp, funny, unaffected and generous. I start the conversation a grovelling mess after 15 minutes of Zoom glitches, but she couldn’t be more relaxed. “Don’t apologise at all! It’s all their fault.” She chuckles huskily. “Zoom’s a satanic invention to confound, baffle and torture us.”

Satanic, possibly, but now Zoom is allowing me to gawp at Harry, who — with tortoiseshell cat-eye specs on her nose, flawless, porcelain skin and those eponymous, still peroxide (if slightly more silvery in tinge) locks framing her heart-shaped face — looks just as glorious as she did back in the day. “I know how to put make-up on. I have a good foundation, good bone structure and, fortunately, good skin,” she says with a shrug.

That she looks so fabulous certainly belies much of what has happened since her bombshell heyday. With classics such as Hanging on the Telephone, Call Me and Rapture, Blondie sold millions of records before they split up in 1982. Harry partied at Studio 54 with Andy Warhol, Truman Capote and Paloma Picasso. But by the mid-1980s things were bleak. She and her bandmate, long-term boyfriend and co-songwriter, Chris Stein, had been dealing with heroin addiction and his serious illness caused by an autoimmune condition that Harry nursed him through. After being hit with a huge tax bill (their accountant hadn’t paid their taxes for two years), the couple had their possessions seized by the Internal Revenue Service, including their Manhattan townhouse. In 1987 they split. Stein subsequently married and had children, Harry didn’t, but they’re still best friends. “Those were tough times,” she says, characteristically deadpan. “But they were also very creative. Creativity and chaos often go hand in hand.”

During the 1990s, Harry, by now long since cleaned up, found herself virtually back where she started, fronting an obscure jazz outfit. But posterity has rewarded her. In 1997 Blondie re-formed and had another No 1 with Maria. Charli XCX and Sia wrote songs for their 2017 album Pollinator. One Direction and Miley Cyrus introduced the band to a new generation with their respective One Way or Another and Heart of Glass covers. There was a storming 2023 UK tour, which included playing Glastonbury.

What does Harry think her teenage self — growing up in suburban New Jersey — would have thought of a septuagenarian rocking a festival? She hoots. “She woulda thought, ‘Send the old bitch back!’ I was a snotty little ageist thing.”

In fact, her star just continues rising. Her latest role is as a face of Gucci’s Cruise 2025 collection, shot for its We Will Always Have London campaign in the back of a black cab by the renowned photographer Nan Goldin. “I just love Nan, she’s a sweetheart and a talent …” she says before being interrupted by her phone, which she squints at and then chuckles. “That was a butt dial.”

This career twist happened after Gucci’s creative director, Sabato De Sarno, relaunched the Blondie handbag — a 1970s archive piece — at the Cruise 2025 show, held at the Tate Modern, London, last May, with Harry in attendance. “There was a long, rampy staircase. They said, ‘Sabato is up there,’ so I was huffing and puffing up them and almost ran into him. We had an explosive moment and then … ” She was handed the campaign? “Yes, I don’t know what their thinking was but I was surprised and excited to be looked at.”

Having such an archetypal New Yorker front a London-based campaign may sound counterintuitive but, as Harry points out: “Blondie was part of the culture over there for such a long time.” It’s true the band broke the UK before the US, with their first tour here starting in Bournemouth in 1977. “Bournemouth may not seem punk now but it was then. I went back recently and thought, ‘Oh! It’s gentrified.’” Hasn’t everywhere? “Yes, everywhere’s changed.”

Yet Harry is resolutely unsentimental about the past, refusing to be drawn into any old-fogeyish praising of the good old days. “I don’t think anything can go backwards,” she says. Of today’s female pop stars, she likes Doja Cat and SZA. She loves making new young friends. “Doing this Gucci thing I’ve met a whole bunch of different people. [Her fellow Gucci campaign star, the musician] Kelsey Lu is one of them, she’s absolutely adorable.”

She’s equally unemotional about the many obstacles she has overcome. Her 2019 memoir, Face It, briskly — often humorously — lists events most people would categorise as traumatising, from having a stalker (the inspiration for One Way or Another), to being raped at knifepoint, to escaping from a car that she’s convinced was being driven by the serial killer Ted Bundy.

“Well, I had to make the book exciting,” she says. “But I’ve never been prone to hysterics. I have bad moments when I’m tired but most of the time I take things philosophically. So much the better for me — why would I want to rock my boat? I was on stage once when a bunch of Hell’s Angels took it over. I kept singing away but all of a sudden Chris yanked me off. Everyone was worried but I wasn’t. The bikers were absolutely charming, they were just so into the music.”

Returning to the Gucci Blondie bag, she reflects that it reminds her of a suede one she bought in the West Village in the 1970s, “when I was a hippy. Two kids tried to mug me when it was on my shoulder and dragged me down the street with it, but I hung on to it for dear life and it was so well made they couldn’t break the straps,” she says, chuckling. “I still have it.” Does she still use it? “Only when I want to hit people on the head.”

Harry’s image is still important to her; she tells me how much she hates people taking photos of her on stage. “Looking up is the worst angle to take a picture — I cringe, I crumble! I still have my days when I feel like, oh God, don’t go out, don’t let anybody see you looking like this.” She once said the focus on her beauty became so overwhelming she took down all the mirrors in the house. “Did I say that? Maybe I turned them round for a bit. You need a mirror by the door to check your teeth. I saved Jodie Foster once. I don’t know if it was spinach but something was stuck and they wanted to take her picture. I went …” She taps warningly on her shiny teeth.

Harry was born in Florida, the result of an extramarital fling. She was given up for adoption at three months. Decades later she had a private detective trace her concert pianist mother, but she didn’t want to know Harry. “As an adult I had to respect that. If I’d found that out when I was a child it would have been crushing.”

Her strait-laced adoptive parents ran a gift shop. Harry knew early on she wouldn’t be able to fulfil their dreams of her marrying and having a family. “I wanted to get out in the world. Maybe if I’d have been madly in love I would have settled down, but it wasn’t like that for me. I had ambition.” What did her parents make of her stardom? “They were proud I achieved something because they just thought I was a drug addict. It turns out that I was a drug addict, but I also made music so it was OK. I think they’d be happy with the way my life turned out.”

Harry’s happy too. I tell her I saw her at Glastonbury in 1999 (aged 53) and 2023 — and she was way better the second time round. “Yup. I have no more nerves now. Experience is the key. It hasn’t all been lucky, but I feel I’ve been treated very generously by the fickle finger of fate and I’m just more content than I used to be. I tried very hard to do something and succeeded, and having some success is a terrific elixir.”

She has been a doting godmother to Stein’s children (Valentina, 19, and Akira, who died from an overdose aged 19 in 2023), but does she regret not having her own? “No, I think I would have been a terrible parent. Although, who knows? I salute anyone who raises a family, but it doesn’t bother me for some reason. I guess there’s some missing element in my chromosomes.”

How does she feel about turning 80 this year? “I don’t walk around thinking every minute, oh my God, I’m going be 80 — but that’s sort of how I feel. My mother used to say in her head she was 25 and I’m the same. But thinking about it all the time could be your downfall. And I don’t really want the same kind of life I did when I was younger. I’ve done that! That’s the beauty of ageing — you know what it’s about. You have it in your heart and soul and your memory bank … or does that sound like an excuse? Should I go out and party every night?”

Maybe not every night, but she should at least have a birthday party. “Oh yeah, I’m going to have a whopping great party with everyone there. Though one of the bad things about ageing is everyone’s gone already. In the 1980s, or maybe 1990s, there was a show at [the downtown nightclub] CBGB’s gallery. I went around the room and 50 per cent of the musicians in the photos were gone and that was years ago. It’s what they call diminishing returns.”

She stays in shape, although she has given up her personal training sessions (“I sorta miss it but I know my limits”) in favour of walking her two beloved Japanese chins (“Or they walk me”). She only drinks — she claims — “water”. So she has no vices? “No, I’m pretty clean. But I have a dirty mind.”

Back to the Home Depot man. From this we infer Harry is not in a relationship. “No! God forbid! I’m terrified. No, I’m kidding, but I don’t think [being in a relationship] is possible. Do you?”

She’s not clear if she’s too old to date or the opportunities don’t arise. How about online dating? “I haven’t tried. I like chemistry between people.” She starts laughing again. “Are you encouraging me to online date? This is outrageous!” Then she muses. “I had a friend who was an avid practitioner of online dating and she met a terrific guy. But I don’t know if I’m in the right position to be dating online.”

If the issue’s that she’s too famous to put herself out there, there are celebrity dating apps such as Raya. “OK, OK, I’ll do it!” Harry cries, clearly tickled. “And I’m going to get back in touch and let you know how it went.” As established, Harry is still up for excitement. “I’m definitely not so adventurous as I was, but I’m still curious. I like the way the world spins.”