Debbie Harry: How did the post-punk princess make it to 77?

Ahead of the release of a new Blondie box set, we revisit the rise of its iconic leader Debbie Harry

Debbie Harry pictured in 1979. Photo: Maureen Donaldson

Blondie's Parallel Lines was released in late 1978

Debbie Harry pictured in 1979. Photo: Maureen Donaldson

Blondie's Parallel Lines was released in late 1978

Debbie Harry onstage in Blondie

Debbie Harry pictured in 1979. Photo: Maureen Donaldson

Barry Egan Twitter Email

June 19 2022 02:30 AM

Debbie Harry was more than a voice in New York new-wave band Blondie. She was one of the most remarkable front persons of all time, as charismatic onstage as Jagger or Elvis, and as iconic too.

Later this summer, Blondie release a deep dive into their early years’ archive, Blondie: Against the Odds 1974-1982. A box set of 124 songs (36 previously unreleased), it features demos, alternate versions, and out-takes.

Ahead of the release, Harry said: “When I listen to these old tracks, it puts me there like I’m a time traveller. As bad as it was sometimes, it was also equally as good. No regrets.”

Regrets or not, she didn’t have the happiest start to life. Born Angela Trimble in 1945 in Miami, aged three months she was adopted by Richard and Cathy Harry in New Jersey and given a new name. At four she discovered she was adopted.

“I guess somewhere in my subconscious, a scene was playing on a loop, of a parent leaving me somewhere and never coming back,” she later wrote.

In her early teens she used to imagine she was the lost daughter of Marilyn Monroe. She removed herself from the boredom of suburbia by listening to The Shangri-Las, the 1960s girl group from Queens.

Then in 1965, she moved to New York to join a folk band. In 1967 she saw the Velvet Underground play the Ballroom Farm on the Lower East Side (“it was like a former Ukrainian nursing home” was her description of the venue) and that was that.

“I remember Nico was wearing a chartreuse outfit and it was stunning. Andy Warhol was running the lights. The projections behind them were just so lovely and impressionistic, but also dark and scary at the same time. I guess I was drawn to the darkness.”

The pull of the darkness continued when she worked at Max’s Kansas City on Park Avenue South. Trans punk-glam singer Jayne County remembered Harry as a waitress: she was “always stoned and regularly dropped cheeseburgers in people’s laps”. It was there in 1971 that she met the likes of Warhol, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs.

After work, she and her new boyfriend Chris Stein – when they weren’t having sex in the alley behind the club – would go back to Burroughs’ windlowless apartment in the Bowery and discuss the world with the author of Junkie and The Naked Lunch.

Debbie Harry onstage in Blondie

Around this time, she had a close call. One evening, a man offered her a lift downtown in his car. She got in, but saw the inside of the car had no door handles. She scrambled to open it from the outside and leapt out of the moving vehicle. A few years later she saw a photo in a newspaper and recognised the driver as serial-killer Ted Bundy.

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In 1972, she formed The Stilettos. They often performed at Club 82 on the Lower East Side (where Errol Flynn had once apparently played the club piano with his penis). A year later, Stein joined The Stilettos as guitarist, and in October 1974 they become Blondie.

In the early days they would play at gay clubs in Lower Manhattan. Onstage, Harry’s sexual aesthetic was about subverting convention. She was influenced by the drag queens she would hang out with.

“Blondie, as a character, was kind of bisexual or transsexual, and would change perspectives,” she said. “Or sometimes she would observe things from a third-person point of view. Blondie was always morphing and taking on a new identity from song to song.”

In 1975, she played the role of Juicy Lucy in an off-Broadway revival of Jackie Curtis’s Vain Victory: The Vicissitudes of the Damned, while Blondie performed as the backing band in blue sharkskin suits. A review of the show in the SoHo Weekly News was Blondie’s first mention in media.

A bizarre rumour started that their name was a reference to Hitler’s favourite Alsatian, Blondi. The band even pondered changing their name as a bad situationist joke to Adolf Hitler’s Dog, before common sense prevailed.

In June 1976, their first single ‘X Offender’ came out. Two months later they released their self-titled debut album. They seemed to be going nowhere. Then in 1977, David Bowie and Iggy Pop asked Blondie for open for them on ‘The Idiot’ tour. Their single ‘Denis’ gave them their first UK top ten hit, and cleared the way for the third album, Parallel Lines, to break them into the mainstream.

Released in late 1978, it sold 20m copies worldwide – and made them stars. A year later ‘Heart of Glass’ went to number one in America. The hits continued, with ‘Sunday Girl’, ‘Call Me’, and ‘The Tide is High’. In 1980 Warhol made a famous screenprint of Harry (in 2011, it sold for $5.9m at a Sotheby’s auction).

Blondie's Parallel Lines was released in late 1978

In 1981 Blondie had another US number one with ‘Rapture’. It featured Harry rapping and a young Jean-Michel Basquiat DJ-ing in the video. She was ahead of her time. Wu-Tang Clan member once said ‘Rapture’ was the first rap song they ever heard as kids.

Two years later she starred in David Cronenberg’s 1983 cult movie Videodrome.

By then Blonde had split up. Despite selling millions of records, Harry was broke – and bankrupt – because of a succession of bad deals signed over the years. She also owed the IRS a fortune in back taxes.

Unable to pay, the house she and Stein owned in New York was taken off them. The timing couldn’t have been worse: Stein was recovering from a rare autoimmune disease. Harry looked after him, and brought him heroin in hospital. At this stage she too had a drug habit.

In the late 1990s, the band reformed and toured to continued acclaim by besotted fans.

Debbie Harry never found her biological parents. But she found the love of the world – as a musical legend who opened the way for so many other artists. And against all the odds, Harry – who turns 77 on July 1 – and her band are still playing.