Debbie Harry, the Heart of Glass dress

“Heart of Glass” is a dreamy pop hit that at the very least is pleasing to anyone sane and addictive to those who love to dance. And the video delivered so much more: a beautiful blonde front woman whose delivery matched her persona: Detached, willful, feminine, feminist, bored and flirtatious. And the style! Was she disco, New Wave, rock or punk? Was she an uptown princess or downtown cokehead? Her outfit—a scrap of a dress paired with clear plastic heels—hints at posh but also feels like a one-off. The duality made Blondie lead singer Debbie Harry endlessly alluring and enigmatic. Through “Heart of Glass,” Harry was introducing the world to fashion designer Stephen Sprouse, who styled her rock goddess image from the tips of her bleached roots to the transparent toes of her Cinderella slippers, East Village style.

Life Lessons from Debbie Harry

By Interview

July 14, 2021

Welcome to Life Lessons. This week, in honor of the release of Blondie’s new Cuban-inspired EP Blondie: Vivir En La Habana—which accompanies a new film about their highly-anticipated 2019 performance in Havana—we revisit a number of memorable quotes from our conversations with Blondie front-woman Debbie Harry. Over the course of her career, Harry has appeared in Interview countless times: as a cover star, an interviewee, and a contributor. So sit back and prepare to absorb some punk wisdom—you just might learn a thing or two.

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“The blonde thing is really very much about the old silver screen platinum blonde, and I certainly was interested in capturing that as the frontwoman for a band.”

Blondie’s Debbie Harry Finishes Long-Awaited Memoir ‘Face It’

Debbie Harry

Blondie’s Debbie Harry Finishes

 Long-Awaited Memoir ‘Face It’

The book will tell the band’s story “from my sort of warped little perspective,” she says

By

KORY GROW 

FEBRUARY 6,2019

Debbie Harry has finally finished her long-in-the-works memoir, Face It, which she expects will come out in the second half of 2020. “I talk a bit about my internal functions — not biological but mental,” the Blondie frontwoman, 73, tells Rolling Stone. “It’s more personal.”

Debbie Harry

The book will “weave through” her life story, she says, and will trace the ups and downs of her band, including her relationship with guitarist Chris Stein and his struggle with the disease pemphigus, as well as how they carried on. “It’s such a long period of time, and there’s so much to tell, that I couldn’t really isolate a lot of little stories and events,” she says. “It’s an overview of the way we got through and maintained and continued and carried on through all that time from my sort of warped little perspective.”

Reflecting on her history before the band through its 1997 reunion, Harry says writing the book helped her realize that she was born with an innate drive to push forward. “I was always obsessed to do music,” she says. “That seemed like the only thing that I could do or wanted to do. It just seemed like a part of me. And then meeting Chris, and Chris being this creative force, the optimistic fool that he is; I didn’t see any real reason to stop. We were forced to stop for a while for a lot of reasons. And then the opportunity came back that we could do it again. We could weather another storm of contractual obligations and fuck-ups and get past all that shit and get creative again and be a band. We’re lucky that that happened.”

Debbie Harry

Harry says things are easier now in the band, and there are outside forces that have made it so the group could continue. “I think the industry has improved and our management was more professional the second time around, ” she says. They knew what the game was, and it became very natural in a way.”

Looking back on the band’s earliest days, Harry says she remembers that the band seemed to be “reaching” in its ambition. “I think that may be part of what carried us through,” she says, reflecting on the band’s self-titled first album from 1976. “We weren’t sitting in a safe place musically. We were always reaching and trying to do something that was maybe beyond our skills. But it forced us to be better and to work harder.”

Debbie Harry

That said, she has mixed feelings about Blondie. “Sometimes I think, ‘Oh, my God. It’s so … oh, Jesus, that’s embarrassing,'” she says. “But then I think, ‘Wow, we were so driven. We were really just inspired.’ We were just full of it — however you want to say ‘full of it’ means.”

Beyond working on the book and planning for their trip to Cuba, Blondie are getting ready to record a follow-up to 2017’s Pollinator. Stein tells Rolling Stone that they’ll again be working with producer John Congleton.

ROLLING STONE

Debbie Harry
by Hans Ruedi Giger

Debbie Harry reveals she was once raped at knifepoint

BY Eileen Reslen

August 7, 2019 | 10:07am

Debbie Harry has revealed she was raped at knifepoint in her new memoir, “Face It.”

In the book, which comes out Oct. 1, the Blondie singer recalled an incident in which she returned to her then-boyfriend and guitarist Chris Stein’s New York apartment after a shopping trip to the “bodega for milk,” according to People. The couple was met at the front door by a man who “came up from behind us with a knife.”

Debbie Harry

Harry wrote that the man followed them inside and “piled up the guitars and Chris’ camera and then untied my hands and told me to take off my pants.”

“He f—d me,” she added. “And then he said, ‘Go clean yourself.'”

The now-74-year-old said she was “very happy” the sexual assault occurred prior to the AIDS epidemic or she “might have freaked out.”

“In the end, the stolen guitars hurt me more than the rape,” Harry wrote. “I mean we had no equipment.”

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