SHE’S STILL JUST A NEW YORK PUNK
1978’s Parallel Lines album
With her (very) big pal Bowie in 1977
Blondie in Hollywood, 1977 Blondie into the celebrity stratosphere, Debbie was soon rubbing shoulders with stars like Iggy Pop and the late David Bowie. She quickly discovered Bowie’s habit of showing off his manhood.
Debbie says: “David’s size was notorious of course and he loved to pull it out with both men and women. It was so funny, adorable and sexy. One time, Chris walked into the room but the show was already over. Nothing to see. Which was kind of a relief.”
Debbie delved deep into the New York music scene and became an early champion of rap music, then just emerging from the streets, and tried it herself on the band’s hit single Rapture.
With a lifestyle that often burned the candle at both ends, she began looking for other ways to stay healthy, which led her to a bizarre alternative treatment. Finding an article in Vogue on
(fresh cell therapy) she checked herself in to a Swiss clinic for injections of cells from a sheep embryo.
She says: “There were doctors and nurses and a battery of blood tests and X-rays. Then came a series of injections with embryonic cells from a black sheep – why it had to be a black sheep I’ll never know.”
For a time, both she and Chris were serious heroin addicts. And even when he was seriously ill in hospital with an autoimmune disorder that threatened his life, Debbie would still head out to score the drug for them.
“I think that doctors and nurses knew that he was high all the time but cast a blind eye because it kept him relatively pain-free and mentally less tortured,” she says. “The heroin was a great consolation. Desperate times call for desperate measures. I was most certainly indulging too, staying as numb as possible.”
In the 1970s, the couple were attacked by a burglar who broke into their flat and raped Debbie at knifepoint. But she has always insisted she was more traumatised by their instruments being stolen. She says in her book: “I can’t say that I felt a lot of fear. In the end, the stolen guitars hurt me more than the rape.”
She also says she escaped an abduction attempt by notorious serial killer Ted Bundy.
Despite the band’s worldwide sales, she lost most of her fortune thanks to bad management deals and tax bills. Debbie says: “Musicians are often notoriously shambolic at taking care of business, which leaves the window wide open for the wolves to come loping in. I guarantee, anything we could have done wrong business and management-wise, we did it.”
But she says she still feels lucky. With her memoir released at the end of last year and a series of In Conversation concerts lined up for April, she is still writing and creating.
She never married or had children but is godmother to Chris Stein’s daughters. And she still lives in New York.
“New York is my pulse,” she says. “New York is my heart. I’m still a New York punk.”
I think now I was probably portraying some kind of transsexual back then
DEBBIE REFLECTS ON HER ICONIC EARLY IMAGE