Sunday Mirror

POP ICON WHO SAYS

- BY HELEN WHITEHOUSE

WITH her tousled blonde hair, gorgeous green eyes and perfect cheekbones, Debbie Harry was the ultimate punk pin-up girl.

But, incredible as it may seem to those now middle-aged Blondie fans who worshipped her back in the day, she believes she actually looked like a transsexua­l in her early career.

Looking back, at the age of 74, she says: “The Blondie character I created was sort of androgynou­s. More and more lately I’ve been thinking that I was probably portraying some kind of transsexua­l creature.”

Emerging from the New York punk scene as the face and voice of the band, she scored six No 1 UK hits and sold more than 40million records globally. And it’s 40 years this month since Blondie’s song Call Me topped the charts.

Debbie admits that back in the 70s she viewed her look as more of a “visual homage” to tragic film star Marilyn Monroe.

Her signature style has been recreated many times, and she revealed years later that one famous zebra-print dress from a 1978 poster was actually made from a pillow case.

But it wasn’t easy to be the face of a rock band with four, sometimes five, other members who rarely featured in media coverage. Debbie says: “People would review the way I looked instead of how our music sounded.

“I didn’t do Blondie to become famous for my looks. When I started out, rock music didn’t want girls to be anything but window-dressing.”

Her looks are still very much talked about today. In the picture, left, showing Debbie on stage last year, she looks astonishin­gly youthful for a woman in her mid-70s and she doesn’t hide the fact that she’s had cosmetic surgery.

“Getting older is hard on your looks,” she says in her bestsellin­g autobiogra­phy, Face It.

“Like everybody else I have good days and bad days, and those ‘s***, I hope nobody sees me today’ days, where you look exactly the same from the outside, but you see yourself through different eyes.

“I’ve never hidden the fact I’ve had plastic surgery. I think it’s the same as having a flu shot – just another way of looking after yourself.”

Born Angela Trimble in Miami, Florida, in 1945, Debbie was adopted into the Harry family at three months old. She began bleaching her hair at 14 and in her 20s she was hanging out with early punk band the New York Dolls while experiment­ing with her own music.

In 1974, she formed a female trio called the Stilettos, and when guitarist Chris Stein joined they became a couple for the next 13 years, later forming Blondie together.

In their early days, she caused a stir by posing for a publicity photograph crawling out of an upside-down wrecked car that she and photograph­er Bob Gruen came across on the streets of New York. “It seemed really funny and glamorous to get a shot of me crawling from the wreckage,” she explains.

When their first hit single Denis propelled

To me, plastic surgery is like having a flu shot – a way of looking after yourself DEBBIE ON PRESERVING HER LOOKS UNDER THE KNIFE

 ??  ?? Aged 74 in December
Aged 74 in December

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