Debbie Harry

• 1. Introduction

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  Debbie Harry spent 1979 handing out a reminder that she was not her own band. That year Blondie ran a button campaign with a blunt slogan: "Blondie is a group." The pins existed because the public kept confusing the woman at the microphone with the name on the records. She was a singer who had to explain, on a piece of metal pinned to a jacket, that she was not a brand.

  Her story starts somewhere far from that confusion. A baby was adopted in Florida and raised in New Jersey. She later waited tables, danced in a discotheque and worked in an office. How does someone with that résumé end up on the charts on both sides of the Atlantic? What did she learn from the artists who found her interesting? And what happens to a performer when an invented persona grows larger than the person who wears it? The answers run through punk clubs, the Bronx, a silkscreen studio, a body horror film and a memoir written decades later.

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• 2. Adopted in Miami

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  Angela Trimble was born at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, Florida, on the 1st of July 1945. At three months old she was adopted and renamed Deborah Ann Harry by Catherine and Richard Harry of Hawthorne, New Jersey. The couple later ran gift shops in Cooperstown, New York. Her biological parents carried the surnames Trimble and Mackenzie, and she is of Scottish ancestry.

  She learned about the adoption at the age of four. For years she chose not to look for her birth parents. In the late 1980s she did locate her birth mother, a concert pianist. The woman declined to build a relationship with her. In her memoir, Harry recalls a tomboy childhood spent playing in the woods beside her home.

  At Hawthorne High School her classmates voted her "Best Looking," and she graduated in 1963. In 1965 she earned an Associate of Arts degree from Centenary College in Hackettstown, New Jersey. Then came the odd jobs of the late 1960s in New York City. She spent one year as a secretary at the BBC Radio office there. She also waited tables at Max's Kansas City, danced in a discotheque in Union City, New Jersey, and worked as a Playboy Bunny.

  Music arrived through the side door. The folk rock group The Wind in the Willows hired her as a backing singer, and the group released an eponymous album on Capitol Records in 1968.

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• 3. Bleached Hair, New Name

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  In 1973 Harry joined a band called The Stillettoes, alongside Elda Gentile, Billy O'Connor, Fred Smith and Rosie Ross. Amanda Jones came aboard later. Soon the group added a guitarist named Chris Stein, who also became her boyfriend. That partnership would outlast the romance and shape nearly everything that followed.

  By 1974 Harry and Stein had walked away from The Stillettoes, taking the bassist and drummer with them. They teamed up with Tish Bellomo and Snooky Bellomo and called the new group Angel and the Snake. The name did not last long. Harry had bleached her hair blonde, and men on the street had started shouting "Blondie" at her. The band took the catcall as its name.

  The new name found a home quickly. Blondie became regulars at two New York City clubs, Max's Kansas City and CBGB. Harry had once carried plates at the first of those rooms. Now she was singing from its stage.

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• 4. Number One Years

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  Blondie's self-titled debut arrived in 1976 and peaked at No.14 in Australia. It only reached No.75 in the United Kingdom, and not until 1979. The second album, Plastic Letters, found some success outside the United States. The third, Parallel Lines in 1978, turned the group into an international act.

  The key track was "Heart of Glass," released while disco dominated the airwaves. It reached No.1 in the United States and sold nearly two million copies. It also topped the British chart, and it ended up the second highest-selling single of 1979. With her two-tone bleached hair and daring clothing, Harry was quickly treated as a punk icon.

  The momentum held. In September 1979 the platinum-selling Eat to the Beat reached No.1 in the UK and No.17 in the US. Autoamerican followed in 1980, landing at No.3 in the UK and No.7 in the US. Hits piled up. "Call Me," from the American Gigolo soundtrack, topped both the American and British charts. "Atomic" went to No.1 in the UK. "The Tide Is High" reached No.1 in both countries. Four of the band's songs hit No.1 on the Billboard Hot 100 between 1979 and 1981, and the fourth was a song unlike anything else on that list.

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• 5. Rapture and the Factory

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  Fab Five Freddy, a graffiti artist, became a friend to both Harry and Stein around 1980. He took them to the emerging hip-hop scene in the Bronx. Through him they met Grandmaster Flash, who is played by Jean-Michel Basquiat in the video for "Rapture." Freddy gets a mention in the lyrics. The song became the first rap-oriented record to reach No.1 on the Billboard charts. Grandmaster Flash later said that Harry "opened up so many doors for hip hop" by naming him in it.

  Basquiat reappears in her filmography. In 1981 she appeared in the movie Downtown 81, where he played the lead. She played a bag lady who turns into a princess when he kisses her.

  Andy Warhol turned his attention to her in 1980. From a single photoshoot at the Factory, he made a small series of four acrylic and silkscreen ink portraits on canvas, each in different colors. He also made Polaroids and a handful of rare silver gelatin prints. Stein was in the room and photographed Warhol photographing her. Those pictures were exhibited in London in 2013.

  The friendship continued onto television. Harry was the first guest on the MTV show Andy Warhol's Fifteen Minutes, and she opened the premiere by announcing its theme: "Sex, Vegetables, Brothers and Sisters." She said the best lesson he gave her was a simple one. She said it was "always to be open to new things, new music, new style, new bands, new technology and just go with it."

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• 6. Blondie Versus Deborah

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  In June 1979 Blondie appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone. By then Harry's mix of cool sexuality and streetwise style had fused with the band's name so tightly that many people assumed Blondie was her name alone. That is the confusion the pins from 1979 were fighting.

  Two years later she tried a more formal fix. In 1981 Harry issued a press release stating that she was neither "Debbie Blondie" nor "Debbie Harry." She was Deborah Harry. Yet she also admitted the character was real to her. In a message printed in the tour book for No Exit, she wrote, "I was always Blondie. People always called me Blondie, ever since I was a little kid." Then she added a twist. At some point, she said, she became Dirty Harry, because she could no longer be Blondie.

  The naming kept shifting. With the release of Def, Dumb and Blonde in 1989, she switched from "Debbie" back to "Deborah" as her professional name.

  In 2007 she drew the lines out loud. Asked why she played only solo material on the True Colors World Tour with Cyndi Lauper, she described a new trio with no Blondie members. She said, "I really want to make a clear definition between Debbie's solo projects and Blondie."

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• 7. Skewers, Splits and Screens

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  Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards of Chic produced Harry's first solo album, KooKoo, in 1981. It peaked at No.25 in the US and No.6 in the UK, and it later went gold in the US and silver in the UK. The cover was the problem. Designed by H.R. Giger, it showed her face apparently pierced with skewers, and many stores refused to stock it. Giger also directed the video for the first single, "Backfired," which reached No.43 on the Hot 100.

  Blondie, meanwhile, was coming apart. The Hunter, released in 1982, was less successful than the earlier albums, and a world tour ended early because of slow ticket sales. Stein fell seriously ill with pemphigus, a rare autoimmune disease. Combined with falling sales and internal struggles, his illness broke up the band. In June 1982 she sang backing vocals on the Gun Club album Miami under the credit 'D.H. Lawrence Jr.' The Gun Club's singer, Jeffrey Lee Pierce, was an ardent fan who had founded the West Coast Blondie Fan Club.

  Caring for Stein slowed her recording, but film work filled the gap. In David Cronenberg's Videodrome in 1983, she played the sadomasochistic lover of a television producer. Critic Howard Hampton later singled out her work. Harry, he wrote, "carries herself with the wry, burned-out, but still titillated instincts of a voyager buying a one-way ticket for the outer limits."

  The screen roles kept coming. In 1988 she played Velma Von Tussle in John Waters's Hairspray. Heavy in 1995 cast her as a misanthropic waitress in an upstate New York restaurant. Cop Land in 1997 made her a bartender.

  The music continued in odd corners. Rockbird in 1986 produced "French Kissin' in the USA," her only UK solo top 10 hit at No.8. Def, Dumb and Blonde reached No.12 in the UK in 1989. In July 1991 she played Wembley Stadium, supporting INXS. Debravation followed in 1993, and the video for its single "Strike Me Pink," which showed a man drowning in a water tank, was banned. She also joined the avant-garde jazz ensemble the Jazz Passengers in 1994.

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• 8. Reunion and Memoir

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  In 1997 the four original members, Harry, Stein, Clem Burke and Jimmy Destri, began working together again for the first time in 15 years. The sessions produced No Exit in 1999. Its lead single, "Maria," debuted at No.1 in the UK, the band's sixth British chart-topper, and it reached No.1 in 14 countries. The album itself entered at No.3 in the UK and No.17 in the US.

  The band went on. The Curse of Blondie arrived in 2003, Panic of Girls in 2011 and Ghosts of Download in 2014. Pollinator, the eleventh studio album, debuted at No.4 in the UK in May 2017. In between, Harry released her fifth solo album, Necessary Evil, in 2007. She also sang on Fall Out Boy's 2008 album Folie à Deux and joined Arcade Fire on stage at Coachella in 2014. She appeared there again with Blondie in 2023. That same year Rolling Stone placed her at number 168 on its list of the 200 Greatest Singers of All Time.

  In October 2019 she published a memoir, Face It, through Dey Street Books. In it she describes being raped at knifepoint during a burglary of the home she shared with Stein in the 1970s. She also writes that the serial killer Ted Bundy lured her into his car in New York City in the early 1970s, and that she escaped. Her description of the vehicle matched the 1968 VW Bundy was driving. But authorities believed him to be in Florida at the time. Bundy biographer Ann Rule said erroneous claims of Bundy abductions are fairly common.

  Her relationship with Stein ended in 1987, but they remained friends, and she is godmother to his two daughters. In 2011 she said both of them had used drugs during their relationship and no longer did. In 2014 she revealed that she had relationships with women in her youth. Inspired by Elton John's work against HIV/AIDS, she said in a 2011 interview that philanthropy had become her top priority. She supports charities devoted to fighting cancer and endometriosis.

  Her next screen project was announced on the 8th of May 2026. She is set to star alongside Pamela Anderson in a comedy called Maitreya.

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