Debbie Harry dissects “the worst” period of her career
Debbie Harry never seemed like a single thing phased her throughout Blondie’s career.
As much as people like to paint her as the glamorous version of punk rock, she never took shit from anyone in the industry and was willing to play off of any artist she collaborated with and look like the coolest person on the planet every single time she sang. But even the biggest names in the world tend to have those moments where they struggle behind the scenes.
Then again, Harry was always one to take things in stride whenever faced with backlash. Although the band were far from the same kind of hardcore bands that populated the CBGBs scene when they first began, it took a lot of guts for them to get over the polarising sound of ‘Heart of Glass’. It was nice to see them flirting with other genres, but since everyone was still living in the same world where disco was the enemy, having that kind of hi-hat groove wasn’t going to earn them any friends.
But that’s part of what made Blondie even more punk rock in many respects. They realised that there was room for them to work with sounds that they hadn’t heard before, and as long as Harry and Chris Stein were writing the tunes, there was no doubt that things were going to sound great when the rest of the band brought them to life. While it was great for the times, it would become a lot harder to ignore the realities going on in the background.
Although the band were set to take over the world once the 1980s kicked in, Stein’s rare struggles with an autoimmune disease put a pause on everything they were doing. The band had already broken up after The Hunter in 1982, but even if Harry had the potential to blossom out into a solo star, she wasn’t exactly in the best emotional place, seeing her musical soulmate struggling from one day to the next.
Harry never claimed to have a rock bottom in her career, but she did admit that the transition between Blondie’s end and her becoming a solo star was among the worst eras of her career, saying, “There’s been worse times… I guess there was a time in the second half of the ’80s that was pretty awful. It mostly had to do with when the band broke up, when Chris [Stein, bandmate and then romantic partner] was sick, when the IRS took the house. I mean, everything just went ‘Braah!’ That was pretty awful. But I guess I just wiggled through.”
But everyone loves a good comeback story, and listening back through Harry’s solo career, it’s not like she didn’t know how to pick herself back up, either. She may have had to turn down opportunities of a lifetime, like potentially being among the cast of Bladerunner, but even if not every one of her albums reached the same audience as Blondie’s did, hearing her work with Nile Rodgers was the natural evolution of the band working in dance music.
And when Blondie eventually reformed, everyone got the chance to remember the icon that had been left behind back in the day. With time having since passed, albums like Parallel Lines had become classics, and no matter how much pushback they used to have on their records, Harry had managed to spawn some of the greatest female-led rock bands of the time and could have been considered one of the forebearers of women in punk music.
It took a long time for her to get back to her old band, but if she managed to get through Stein’s sickness, watching her band fall apart and still find a way to keep everything moving, there was nothing that could stop her at that point. She was going to do whatever she wanted, and she would make sure that she was still one of the coolest-headed people in the room whenever she took the stage.
