The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Sex, drugs – and a bit of rock’n’roll
Debbie Harry’s life story is so gripping that you don’t mind how little she says about the music, finds Helen Brown
‘Fame”, says Debbie Harry, “felt like having sex, a wash of electricity coursing through your fingers and up your legs, sometimes a flushed feeling at the base of your throat”. On stage with Blondie, she felt the heat of “5,000 people pulsing their desire at me” and worked hard to “turn them on even more” in a “frenzied feedback cycle”. I’ve never read a rock memoir so unsqueamishly frank and celebratory about the role sex plays in the whole star/fan transaction. But the frontwoman of Blondie – a band that scored six No 1 UK hits, including Heart of
Glass, and sold 40 million records from 1976 on – is as curious as the rest of us.
Born Angela Tremble in Florida, in 1945, she traces her need for electric connection back to a childhood that saw her spend only three months with her birth mother (a musician) before she was adopted by a kindly, strait-laced couple from the New Jersey suburbs. A doctor, examining the newly renamed baby “Deborah”, told her parents to “watch out for that one, she has bedroom eyes.” Harry has a lifelong craving for a taste (almost peanut butter, a little coconut) that she suspects was her birth mother’s breast milk.
She describes a relatively friendless childhood, creeping out to the woods to play alone:
“dig a hole, poke an anthill, make something, or roller-skate”. Deliberately spooking herself with thoughts of the “scary folk skulking in the bushes”, she let her creepy imagination run wild. Then she would sneak into the coal store, blackening her preppy clothes, marvelling at the furnace. “Over time”, she writes, “I learnt to create compression in my body as a singer, I could see myself as a combustion engine […]
Singing is hot and wet, and you can take that any way you want.”
The young Harry loved movies, loud music, fashion and boys. She writes about the first flasher she encountered, when she was eight (“he made me feel like a fly on the edge of a spiderweb”), and the first boy who followed her home (she will never forget the pain on his face when he overheard her describing him as the class freak). She was drawn to danger, but
“not dangerous myself – yet”. She soon found that she loved sex. “I think I might have been oversexed, but I didn’t have a problem with that; I felt it was totally natural.”
After two years of college, she hightailed it to New York, where she met (and dishes up great anecdotes about) almost everyone on the late Sixties, early Seventies underground scene. She describes the thrill and squalor of sex, drugs and violence with a punk deadpan. Despite – or perhaps because of – her underlying anxiety, Harry appears relatively untraumatised by having been stalked, raped and filmed naked without her consent. She was more bothered when a man who she believes was Ted Bundy attempted to abduct her.
These horrific assaults are relayed as part of life in a feral, rat-infested city where the bins were on fire.
While other female rockers
– like her hero Janis Joplin, or Patti Smith – channelled a macho swagger, Harry created a hyperfeminine (she increasingly suspects transsexual) persona for Blondie. She channelled Marilyn Monroe (who she liked to fantasise was her mother): a dumb blonde act with serious smarts behind it.
“To be an artistic, assertive woman in girl drag, not boy drag, was then an act of transgression,” she writes. “I was saying things in