OK so I'll let you all into a little secret - Debbie Harry was my very first childhood crush. Parallel Lines was the first album that I ever purchased with my pocket money and I still have a vivid memory of Blondie's front woman parading around a stage on Top of the Pops wearing a ripped plastic bin liner and not a lot else. Oh those were the days of my twisted, adolescent fantasies…..
When I recently stumbled across a biography on the pop icon that is Debbie Harry in a charity shop it was inevitable that I was going to part with my 50p, if only to try and recapture some of my childhood dreams and besides I had four plane journeys in a week ahead of me so I needed plenty of reading material.
Platinum Blonde is the title of a portrait of Debbie Harry written by Cathay Che. It was written with Harry's full co-operation and when published in 1999 it was actually the first official book that had been published on the woman, which I quite find incredible considering today's current climate where flash in the pan celebrities from reality game shows have their own biographies and autobiographies and some footballers that are yet to reach 30 are "writing" their second or third books. The only book that had come close to giving an insight into the band previously was a Blondie biography published in 1981 called "Making Tracks - The rise of Blondie". This was written by Victor Bockris, who had
published a similar biography on Andy Warhol, as with Warhol's book it was written largely without consent.
The story begins with Debbie Harry and former Blondie founder/Harry's ex lover, Chris Stein attending a gig in New York where a Blondie tribute band is playing. This is 1998, almost two decades after the bands heyday but the crowd are still ecstatic over the tracks that are being belted out. Meanwhile Harry and Stein stand at the back of the room, they are heavily disguised and go unnoticed. Harry explains that they she still likes to go to see as many live bands as possible to keep her finger on the pulse. The couple are impressed by the quality of the act and presumably feel quite smug with themselves at the legacy they have left a new generation of performers.
Platinum Blonde is the frank story of Debbie's rise to fame and draws heavily on the only Blondie biography that was ever written in 1981, "Making Tracks - The rise of Blondie. There are plenty of quotes from this book but this time around these quotes are analysed and elaborated upon by Harry in a reflective way that wasn't possible at the peak of the band's fame. It is quickly evident that even when this book was published the demise of Blondie had already begun. The pressures from the management and internal squabbling fuelled from the wild life of drugs and the stereotypical rock n roll lifestyle had begun to take its toll.
Within this book there are two whole chapters devoted to the author's interview with Debbie Harry. Entitled "The Debbie Harry Interview - Part One" and "The Debbie Harry Interview - Part Two". Both of these follow a question and answer type format. The first of these interview chapters appears towards the front of the book, the second towards the end. There is also an entire chapter devoted to a similar interview with Harry's long time boyfriend and Blondie member, Chris Stein. The rest of the book is also divided into short chapters, each of which is given a brief descriptive title.
As a fan of Debbie Harry I found this book fascinating although I certainly felt that I benefited from having quite a bit of knowledge about Blondie and little about Debbie Harry herself. One criticism that I have however is that I found that it was not in a very chronological order and in places this really irritated me.
One example of this is during the first Harry interview where she talks about the fact they were always skint, something I found impossible to believe, until this was explained much later in the book. She says that the more records they sold, the less money they had and remembers that the week after Atomic went to number one in America she had to borrow a hundred bucks from her parents.
Shortly after this section we are then told about how despite selling millions of records in Europe they were unable to sell anything in the US, yet we had already learned that Atomic had topped the US charts. The band's inability to sell records in their homeland is blamed as the reason for the band members' lack of personal gain but this simply does not add it.
It is only towards the latter half of the book when the band finally crack America and the money starts to roll in that things are started to be explained. It seems that in their naivety Blondie signed a dodgy record deal and attracted a manager that did not have their best interests at heart. When they found a new manager and signed a European record deal with Chrysalis their new record company had to pay $500,000 to free them from this contract. It was because of this debt that had to be repaid that the band did not receive any money initially and in fact it had very little to do with their inability to crack the US market. This puts an interesting twist on Harry's revelations about being skint and having to shop at charity shops for clothes to wear on stage, despite being at the top of the charts in multiple countries. Personally however I think that the reader would have benefited better having had this former record company debt explained to them at the point where a new deal with Chrysalis was signed.
Overall I found this book to be written in an easy to read format. Its chapters are short enough to please those curious enough to pick up a copy of the book and read it but not obsessed enough to fly through it at break neck pace as I did, often reluctant to put it down. It should be noted however that this is quite a frank account of Debbie Harry's life and it comes with a fair few four-letter expletives along with stories of sex and drugs and rock n roll.
In the centre of the book there are 15 pages of photographs, mainly in full colour and some previously unpublished. The book ends with the author telling us about Harry's life today, although this is now quite dated. As the book ends Harry tells us that she has become an icon because she is more famous than she ever was successful. This might be true as between 1981 and 1982 she was the second most photographed woman in World after Princes Diana (some people claim she was actually photographed more than Diana). However with over 50 million albums sold worldwide and over 20 million copies of Parallel Lines sold alone I doubt that anyone could ever claim that Debbie Harry was not successful.
As a final note the copy of Platinum Blonde that I obtained features a picture of Debbie Harry taken by David LaChapelle, leaning against a car and scantily dressed, quite unlike the cover that Ciao have uploaded with this category.
ISBN 0-233-99496-3 250 pages First published 1999 RRP £14.99 (Hardback)
Pictures of Platinum Blonde - Deborah Harry
The cover of my copy which differs from that on Ciao.
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As the lady once said herself, Deborah Harry is far more famous than she is successful. ... more
The two or three years of Blondie's pop supremacy as the 70s turned into the 80s can hardly account for her enduring stardom, so effortlessly revived when Maria, their comeback single, barnstormed to the top of the charts in early 1999. It seems a good moment then to take a second look at Deborah Harry, and to peel away that multitalented peroxide persona--in Cathay Che's words, "a 50s bad girl, a 60s hippy, a 70s punk, an 80s pop star and a 90s post-modern artist." Harry has already told her own story in Making Tracks, written with Victor Bockris, so Che presents only a rather pre-emptory account of her career, useful as a corrective for some of Harry's more sweeping claims, interspersed with some good-natured interviews with Harry and her ex-partner Chris Stein. Her portrait comes into its own in the thoughtful essays (based on interviews with the likes of RuPaul, John Waters et al) on Harry as icon and wannabe, in which Che places her heroine back in the bohemian, often gay, artistic and intellectual circles which spawned her, and which make far more sense of the "Blondie" creation than a purely pop/rock genealogy. With a filmography and exhaustive discography, this may look like a book for fans, but it's also an honest attempt to understand the making of a real and lasting icon. -- Alan Stewart
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