Blondie in 1976: (from left) Gary Valentine, Clem Burke, Harry, Chris Stein and Jimmy Destri. Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images But by the second full day of audio, her tone seemed flat and impersonal with little or no emotion or inflection. I really struggled to stay focused on it at times.

Debbie Harry: ‘It wasn’t a great idea to be as Blondie’s Debbie Harry: ‘It wasn’t a great idea to be as

I always liked Blondie. The music was catchy with a crossover appeal and I thought Debbie Harry was the perfect front person for the group. I can’t say I was a super fan and up until now I knew very little about Debbie from a personal standpoint. I had heard she had a drug addiction, but other than that I couldn’t have told one other thing about her.Excepting that one intensely personal and brave revelation, Debbie remained aloof for the most part. While I realize she plays up her sex appeal, and that is a big part of her stage persona, I was a bit surprised by her strong reliance on her outer appearance, and how, despite believing her music was cutting edge, and that she was standing up to men, and for herself, through her music, she placed a very heavy emphasis on her looks and sex kitten persona rather than on her talent. I was disappointed by that and wish she had relayed a stronger stance against the misogyny in the male dominated and controlled music business. In fact, she went out of her way to avoid that subject, explaining that she just put up with it and got on with what she needed to do- which is a cycle we are desperately trying to break. James was constantly making funny remarks, which was a great relief. He was always making suggestions about scenes and was very helpful to me. David just seemed like a dedicated film-maker who found his niche, where his imagination took fire. A History of Violence and Eastern Promises are wonderful pictures. He also takes little cameo roles and he’s actually a really great actor. A chance encounter at Max’s with singer Elda Gentile, sometime partner of the Dolls’ Sylvain Sylvain, led to her joining Gentile in the Stilettos, a trio “enamored of the Dolls,” which meant Harry was now in a campy girl group inspired by a group of guys who camped it up in makeup and glitter. It was after one of the Stiletttos’ shows that Harry met Chris Stein, a shadowy figure in the audience there with his girlfriend, who’d previously been involved with Dolls’ drummer Billy Murcia. (Here as in other accounts of 1970s NYC punk, all roads eventually lead to the Dolls.) Getting older is hard on your looks. Like everybody else, I have good days and bad days and those, ‘S***, I hope nobody sees me today’ days,” she quipped.

Debbie Harry on heroin, rape, robbery – and why she still Debbie Harry on heroin, rape, robbery – and why she still

And of course when I saw this in the bookstore, I couldn't resist - is there any person on this planet cooler than Debbie Harry? Did "cool" as a concept exist before Debbie Harry? The answer is no, friends. No it did not. (Did anyone else watch the Zoe Kravitz-led reboot of High Fidelity? There's an unexpected Debbie Harry cameo in one of the early episodes and that one brief scene is worth the entire price of admission alone.) People, me included, have found it hard to fathom her reaction. For this reason, she says: “I’m sort of wondering if I should have left it out [of the book], but it’s part of the story.” It feels wrong to push her on it too much. “I can’t explain it,” she says, as she talks about whether it had any lasting impact. “I didn’t want it to. I just said: ‘I’m not hurt, I’m alive, I’m doing what I want to do, I have a wonderful boyfriend’ – and that was it. I had to consider what was important to me, and being a victim was really not who I wanted to be.” Perhaps, I suggest, minimising it has helped protect her from it? She smiles. “Yeah. Absolutely.” As to the format and organization, Debbie gets off to a good start, talking about her childhood, her road to success, and the atmosphere in New York during the seventies, which was bursting with creativity and artistry, but was also a dark, dangerous, terrifying city that was going broke. She recalls, “I really loved sex. I think I might have been oversexed, but I didn’t have a problem with that; I felt it was totally natural. But in my town in those days, sexual energy was very repressed, or at least clandestine. The expectation for a girl was that you would date, get engaged, remain a virgin, marry, and have children. The idea of being tied to that kind of traditional suburban life terrified me.” At the time, however, I think us girls did get it. No one else could be Harry. Now ordinary girls look at beautiful celebrities and feel inadequate or try to emulate them. With Harry we just bathed in her light.Was it painful to revisit that in her book? “Not at this point in my life because I’m an adult. I think we all have a little area of clutter that’s nagging sometimes and it’s often hard to get rid of. Maybe this is my purge.” Did it feel cathartic? “Well, you know,” she says with a sigh, “I think I’ve solved a lot of those problems that were hanging on and I’m glad it’s sort of done.” She is still working, writing and touring. She would quite like to do “a real serious role in film or in TV, but that’s sort of wishful thinking”. There may be another solo album at some point, and another book. It is only recently, she says, that she has thought she might have liked to have had children (she is godmother to Stein’s two daughters.) “I sort of thought: ‘Gee, maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad to have kids.’ But I don’t know if I could have done it while I was working so much.” Because she would have had to give up some of her freedoms? “My natural inclination is to really throw myself into things. It wouldn’t be like I could hand over the baby. I would really want to be involved.” Because I’m so ancient [laughs], I don’t think posters came in until much later. My parents were into big bands, so I started listening to pop music on the radio and paying attention to DJs, because I was too young to go to concerts – and my parents were definitely not going to go because they did not appreciate it! I wasn’t there for that last night. I hope I saw them there but I can’t honestly say I did. It’s a blur. There was so much going on, and a lot of great artists hung out at Max’s. I distinctly remember meeting Stevie Winwood, and how adorable he was. Not to say that he’s not adorable now. I did get to see the Velvets when they reunited and played only two shows, and that was wonderful.

Face It by Debbie Harry review — the face that launched a

Although I have fond memories of listening to the music of Blondie and watching the videos of the winsome Debbie Harry prancing in front of the camera, I wasn’t a mega-fan and never followed her career after the break-up of the band. However, that didn’t stop me from anxiously awaiting my early reading copy that promised to be revealing and compelling and I was not disappointed. What drives her is not clear as she is a reluctant memoirist. Her honesty about sex and drugs is a relief. Unusually for a sex symbol, she actually likes sex. Her observations on heroin are acute: some people, she writes, take drugs not to feel more but to feel less. I got a job working at a health club and I started dating a guy who was a painting contractor. The normal life.”

First, I feel like there was no Debbie Harry in this book about Debbie Harry. Meaning, there was literally NO emotion. I feel like I never really got to know Debbie Harry at all, having just read an entire book about Debbie Harry, supposedly written by Debbie Harry. Deborah Harry starts in recounting her early years in New Jersey and how her adoption shaped her view of her world as evidenced by one of her more poignant reflections, '...everybody was trying to do the best they could for me. But I don't think I was ever truly comfortable. I felt different; I was always trying to fit in.' And while reading this book, I couldn't believe that it's already been 20+ years since Blondie regrouped in the late 1990s and recorded the album No Exit (an album that now appears to be out of print). Time flies when you're sleepwalking through life in pointless meetings and unsatisfying relationships. (Thankfully, one of those scenarios has changed over the years. Hint: It's not the pointless meetings.) Recent years have brought a wealth of memoirs from women who served pivotal roles in the creation of punk and its descendants: Patti Smith, Carrie Brownstein, Kim Gordon, Viv Albertine, Linda Yablonsky, Chrissie Hynde, Alice Bag, as well as associated works like Sarah Marcus’s Girls to the Front and Vivien Goldman’s Revenge of the She-Punks. When talking about harassment she encountered (David Bowie exposing himself in dressing rooms, a band member staring at her chest while speaking to her, producers making a semi-nude picture of her into an ad without her consent, etc.), she refers to these incidents as "flattering", "sexy", and "adorable".