enticing glimpse through a heart of glass

By Debbie Harry In her memoir, Debbie Harry proves she’s more than just a pretty blonde in tight pants, writes Sibbie O’Sullivan

EVEN if Debbie Harry, of the band Blondie, isn’t to your taste – her voice too thin, her sexiness too blatant, her music too smooth – you can’t dismiss certain truths about her. She paid her dues; her ambition never waned; and she was there – there being New York in the late ’60s’ and ’70s – a city full of garbage, rent-controlled apartments, and men and women discovering new ways of making art and music.

Harry’s story is an illuminating one, considering how much New York has changed and how stars are made and marketed today.

In her new memoir, Face It, Harry describes a life formed by the desire that, one way or another, she’d leave suburbia and become a performer; a desire she shared with Patti Smith, Stevie Nicks and Chrissie Hynde, three other women who influenced post-’60s music. That Harry succeeded is a tribute to her ambition, perseverance, talent and good looks.

The book opens with her heart-rending origin story. Harry’s mother gave her up for adoption, reluctantly, in 1945, when Harry – given name Angela Tremble – was 3 months old. Harry was raised by Richard and Cathy Harry in a migrant worker’s house near a park, where Harry spent most of her free time on her own, daydreaming – a tomboy who loved to play in the woods with her dog, Pal. Seeing a show at Radio City Music Hall piqued her interest in becoming a stage performer.

She knew there was more to life than being a high school majorette and later, in junior college, a sorority sister. By age 20 Harry was living in the East Village, on St Marks Place, where, listening to the sounds of the city, she felt she was “in the place where my next life would begin”.

And so it did.

Harry quickly took to the artistically combustible downtown scene, watching acts like the Velvet Underground and Janis Joplin, and playing “anti-music music” with a fellow who called himself Charlie Nothing. She befriended street people and later the drag queen Divine.

Ditching her secretarial job at the BBC to work in a head shop, Harry navigated the edges of new sensibilities. She had a hookup with an Andy Warhol protégé in a phone booth in Max’s Kansas City and began what she blithely calls “chipping and dipping” in heroin. (Harry is quite explicit in her descriptions of her drug use and sex life.)

The chapters about the New York scene and Harry’s early adventures making music are the most compelling parts of the book. We’re in her environment – smelling the garbage piled up on the street, trolling the sidewalks for discarded clothing, stepping over drunks on the Bowery.

About her experience playing at the notorious club CBGB, birthplace of punk, Harry writes: “It was a time of felt experience – no special effects, just raw, visceral, uncut living.” Nothing seemed to faze her. There were loft fires and relocations, and she once was raped at knife point: “I can’t say that I felt a lot of fear,” she writes. “I’m very glad this happened before Aids or I might have freaked.”

In 1974, she and her lover, guitarist Chris Stein, founded Blondie. After playing in New York’s punk scene, the group gradually rose to stardom and soon toured with Iggy Pop, David Bowie and Television. By 1979, Blondie’s song Heart of Glass was No 1 on the American charts, and the band’s popularity blossomed.

Unfortunately, fame can make for a rather dull narrative. Once Harry digs into Blondie’s heyday, the book suffers in ways other rock memoirs often do – rehashing the next album, the next tour and so on.

Despite rapid and worldwide fame, Blondie disbanded in 1982. Harry’s soul mate, Stein, broke up with her, and she went on to make solo albums. The strange final chapters of Face It include a rambling poem Harry wrote about 9/11 and a plea to save honeybees.