Blondie, Parallel Lives

by Dick Porter

  “We learned a lot from that,” adds Nile. “It was a very good experience. When we did that album everyone was expecting a combination of Blondie and Chic. They thought it would be the ultimate commercial venture, with the best elements of both. But we didn’t do that. I know it’s not gonna sell, but I had to play it like that.

  “There’s a lot of good stuff on that record. ‘Surrender’ – that’s one of the hippest guitar solos I ever played! The trouble is there’s nothing traditional you could put your finger on. Everyone expected it to be the ultimate commercial seller, but instead of that we tried to make it more of an artistic endeavour communication thing. Once you get to a certain point in your career it’s important to make that kind of album, where you want to say something else.”

  Although it reached number six in the UK and bruised the US Top 30, the album’s blend of inner city funk, angular post-punk and Islamic disco confused both groups’ fans. “I really like that record.” Debbie declared in 1987. “I still think it stands up today. Except for probably a little bit of remixing, it’s really good material. I was really surprised that it never did anything … it was mostly the record company. They didn’t want me to go solo. They didn’t want to lose Blondie. Just my opinion, of course, but I have pretty good grounds for my opinion.”

  In keeping with the spirit of confounding expectations, Debbie subverted her public image by returning her hair to something close to its natural brown colour. “I just had to do something different. That’s all. I got tired of it; I’d had blonde hair from – what – 1973, all the way up to 1980. That’s a long time to keep bleaching your hair one colour. And how can you stay one way for such a long time? It got so that people were telling me what I should look like,” she explained. “I couldn’t fairly to the rest of the guys in the band take Blondie’s identity and then go and do a solo project. I thought that would have been really rude.”

  For the album sleeve, Debbie and Chris brought in acclaimed Swiss artist H. R. Giger to impart his uniquely visceral style to the visuals. “We knew his stuff before Alien [the classic 1979 movie for which Giger acted as production designer],” says Chris. “We knew he could do something which had a lot of impact and was memorable … It’s always so difficult with Blondie because everybody has to look good!”

  “Ever since we met Giger at the Hansen Gallery in New York nearly two years ago, we’ve thought of working together,” recalled Stein in 1981. “Similar loves for science fiction, skulls, and pagan archetypes forged an automatic union. We remembered his posters in the late sixties when he was the first European psychedelic-poster artist. Then we knew of him as the artist of Alien. And we found out that Giger began listening to us while working on Alien in England. Our ascendance paralleled his as we simultaneously became aware of each other.”

  “I asked [Deborah] to make a portrait of herself to give to me,” Giger explained. “At the time, a friend of mine was a doctor who made acupuncture where they went into your ears with little needles. I was very impressed by this, so I took very big needles and I used them for her portrait – I stuck them through her picture. Then I airbrushed it so that it looked like the needles went through her head to suggest stimulation, to turn on the four elements – Earth, Air, Fire, Water … She was very pleased but I think some people thought it was like voodoo, when you stick needles into a doll and make magic, but that’s not what I meant by it.”

  The multiple facial piercings of Debbie represented a shedding of her Blondie persona, a progression away from the band’s established image and the way she had been marketed. “We did want to cut down a little on the exploitation end of it,” stated Chris. “Maybe it means Debbie’s just sick of her face. It’s hard to say, but I’ve never liked the merchandising of Blondie and all that crap. We’re just trying to cut it down a bit.”

  “There were some problems with the fans,” conceded Debbie – although their concerns were more mundane. “A lot of them felt I was killing off or deserting Blondie by going brown-haired.”

  Any concern felt by Chrysalis about Debbie’s makeover was undoubtedly heightened when promotional materials featuring Giger’s Koo Koo cover image were banned by London Transport, the BBC and a number of record shops. “It didn’t bother me that it was banned, but I was surprised,” recalled Deborah. “I guess it was ahead of its time, as were a lot of things we did. H. R. Giger had just won the Academy Award for his work on Alien, he was a huge name and his images were known the world over – and more importantly, it was such an incredible image. It was his idea, his design, and he had a whole philosophy around it. There was a Frankenstein element to it, with him being such a sci-fi freak. I guess the piercings were just a little bit too realistic.”

  “We knew the cover would cause a reaction, but maybe were overconfident, even naive, to believe it would simply be taken as art,” mused Chris. “It was a risk we were willing to take.”

  Debbie also worked with Giger and his team of assistants for videos of ‘Backfired’ and ‘Now You Know I Know”. “Working with Debbie was very good, she was very professional,” Giger recounted. “I had worked with the human form before and made costumes for the theatre, but I thought Debbie looked really beautiful, really strong.”

  The media’s focus on Debbie’s change of hair colour served to highlight just how recognisable she had become over the last two years. Aside from the pressures of fame that accompany fronting a globally successful band, the strength of her image had also encouraged labels such as ‘The Face of the Seventies’ or ‘The Face of 1980’. The history of 20th-century popular culture is littered with salutary tales of those unable to cope with the very specific pressures of celebrity. From Marilyn Monroe to Amy Winehouse, there are dozens of public figures who have imploded beneath the gravitational force of stardom. “I fully intended to be famous, ever since I was a little girl,” Deborah explained. “I focused on it mentally and spiritually – on the idea of fame and the fantasy idea of Marilyn. I loved it. Then I hated it. I am truly not the person who wants to have all that exposure. In the eighties, I found that there was no place I could go, and I found that very uncomfortable. I lost all my access to street life. So then I didn’t want to have a public life any more. It took away from the love that I had of the artistic thing I was doing.”

  Although Debbie and Blondie became well-known after the release of Plastic Letters, it had not been until Parallel Lines broke the group as a major international act that a sense of separation from the intimate scene that spawned them truly set in. In the two years that followed, Deborah was catapulted across the media at an accelerated rate, making the whole experience far more intense than if Blondie had risen to prominence more gradually.

  “It really was just a lot of work always being propelled at a faster rate – an unnatural rate – trying to keep up. It was like being marched straight into the sea, always facing deadlines and so on,” she admitted in 2003. “It wasn’t how I imagined it to be. I think now I’d deal with it in a different way, as a game. I took it all very personally. I didn’t consider myself to be ‘in showbiz’ – I wanted to be an artist – but I started to like it and got to being good at it. I’m good at it now and I wish I’d handled it better, that I’d been more astute as a business person. If I have a regret, it’s that I didn’t have that information.”

  Unlike many of those who found celebrity impossible to cope with, Debbie had a stable relationship that provided a bubble of comfort into which she could retreat. Hers and Chris’ relationship had lasted for eight years and seen them share things that most couples never experience. Although it served to strengthen the bond between them that would endure even after they ceased to be an item, it was hardly conducive to domestic harmony.

  “It was difficult for Chris and me when I became so famous,” Debbie later recalled. “Because Chris is very protective, and it was beyond his ability to be the man in that situation. Witness Sean Penn and Madonna – it’s not possible for any couple. And we’d worked for seven yea
rs non-stop, and it was just chaos. There was a lot of pressure.”

  “We have a normal relationship,” Chris asserted to the contrary, at the time. “Our roles are hard to nail down because we flip-flop and take opposite sides as well. We have a very fluid relationship that can adapt to just about anything.”

  “I think I have a better understanding of the business world than he does,” Deborah added. “Chris has a better sense of time and logic. How things will actually happen. Sometimes I can’t bear to answer the phone, so Chris will do all the business that day. And then, the next day, I will do it. We support each other.”

  Only six years before, Chris and Debbie had lived in a rundown Bowery loft where it was possible to find a dead bum on their doorstep and not be profoundly freaked out by it. Now the couple’s experiences of invasive journalism and obsessive fan interest fostered feelings of isolation and suspicion.

  “One night my garbage disappeared from in front of my house and I thought, ‘Oh God, what if it’s that guy who goes around picking people’s secrets out of their trash?’ So there I was – tearing up and down the road, looking for my garbage, and … I found this bum, just rooting through it for something to eat,” recounted Debbie. “It was like, ‘Oh shit!’ And I had to say to him, ‘Listen, you picked a good night here ‘cos I just happen to have thrown out some food today.’”

  Not all of her concerns were unfounded, as her fame had served to mark her parents out for unwanted attention. “There was one particularly horrifying letter all about money – he was in prison, waiting to get out,” she recalled. “I thought, ‘Oh my God, it’s like In Cold Blood.’ I told them never to talk to anyone.”

  Although Debbie had always wanted to be a star, the bohemian outlook she shared with Chris ensured she would never become the kind of celebrity motivated only by fame. As much as Blondie’s management, their record label and the media had sought to shape her into a consumable product, Debbie’s artistic sensibility led her away from becoming a commodity.

  “What I really wanted to be was a beatnik, I really wanted to be an underground artist,” she asserts. “That was really where my thrust was, being a pop star – I thought it was such bullshit, you know? I knew it was bullshit, I didn’t really give a rat’s ass about any of it, I wanted to be famous, but I didn’t really care about carrying it on.”

  Both Autoamerican and Koo Koo are indicative of how Debbie and Chris prioritised creativity above commerce and celebrity. “You do have a choice,” Deborah declared. “You can get away. You can say, ‘Either I’ll stay here in a predictable world with everything controlled for me or I can close myself off from it.’”

  In June 1981, the week before Debbie and Chris flew to Zurich to hook up with H. R. Giger, another link with their New York roots was severed when Anya Phillips succumbed to cancer. Anya had been one of Deborah’s closest friends since they had both worked as waitresses at White’s Bar during the earliest days of Blondie. While Debbie had concentrated on her group, the notoriously strong-minded Anya worked as anything from stripper or dominatrix to clothes designer to make ends meet. When conservatory-trained saxophonist James Siegfried (aka James Chance) arrived from Wisconsin, first appearing with Lydia Lunch in Teenage Jesus And The Jerks, Anya had become the manager of his group, The Contortions, and the couple later became an item. After Teenage Jesus, their wired maelstrom of clipped funk, barbed-wire vocals and manic sax caterwauling made them the most infamous group to emerge from the ‘No Wave’ movement.

  Along with Steve Mass and Diego Cortez, Anya was co-founder of No Wave epicentre The Mudd Club on White Street, which opened in October 1978. Blondie were regulars at the venue, along with Johnny Thunders, Lou Reed, David Byrne (who name-checked it in Talking Heads’ ‘Life During Wartime’), The B-52’s, Walter Steding and most of the TV Party regulars. This drug-charged den of unfettered hedonism, which featured gender-neutral bathrooms and pop artist Keith Haring’s rotating gallery on the fourth floor, presented underground bands of the day along with literary titans such as Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. Initially intended as a downtown riposte to Studio 54, it later developed a similarly exclusive door policy, gradually losing its initial sense of danger and excitement, before closing in 1983. For a maniacal few years, New York’s underground, its veterans and new bloods had been able to boast their own clubs, a regular TV show and a healthy representation on vinyl.

  Anya had been at the centre of a scene that originated at CBGB’s and took off into wildly experimental, often confrontational new directions. Fiercely independent, she initially refused to even recognise the disease that would cut short her life. “Anya never really came out and said, ‘I have cancer,’” explained designer Sylvia Morales, a friend of hers who had recently embarked on a decade-long marriage to Lou Reed. “She said that they had found this lump behind her ear, and that they were looking for other lumps … I don’t think she accepted it for a long, long time.”

  When it became impossible, even for someone as self-possessed as Anya, to ignore the effects of the disease, Debbie helped her receive care at the Westchester County hospital, where she died on June 19. “Anya’s death seemed to mark something, perhaps the coming of the real world,” reflected Debbie. “The period 1975-1980 was a time in which people insisted on being allowed to do what they weren’t supposed to do. Anya symbolised that period. She was a powerful energy source that’s now missing from the scene, an example of how intense willpower is charisma. As a Chinese woman she was a symbol of intensity, but she was also very romantic even though she would say hard things and act cold sometimes. I think Anya meant many things to everybody, because she was so ferociously strong. Most of the people who started at the same level as she did never got anywhere. Apart from being a photographer and actress, Anya succeeded in the things she tried. She helped shape the concept of The Contortions. I guess certain sections of a scene always get marked off by death. Anya’s was a particularly personal loss for us. I wish she hadn’t died.”

  “She was unique,” observed Chris in 1999. “I have Anya’s ashes downstairs. James [Chance] was always afraid he’d leave them somewhere. He keeps saying he wants them, but he never comes to get them, maybe because they’d make him sad. Anya was a really strong girl who did really powerful things. I’m honoured to have them here.”

  Issued at the end of July 1981, Koo Koo was trailed by the single release of ‘Backfired’, which suffered from a lack of airplay and failed to make the Top 30 in America or Britain. Three months later it was followed by a seven-inch of ‘The Jam Was Moving’ that came with little publicity, stalling at number 82 in the Billboard chart.

  Chris admitted to being disappointed with the way the album had been received. “More so in the States where we had this blatant racist reaction. Some of the stations were saying we can’t play it because it’s too R&B. But in the States you have a white chart and a black chart, so that’s appalling.”

  Equally disappointing but perhaps understandably so, Debbie’s nascent solo career drew little support from within Blondie. Nigel Harrison admitted her and Chris’ link-up with Edwards and Rodgers had generated “a little paranoia”, while Clem observed, “I don’t think that album was very good. I don’t think that Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards were the best producers for her.”

  Perhaps these reactions stemmed from a sense of disappointment at Blondie’s recent inactivity. A year after the band had travelled to Los Angeles to record Autoamerican, there was still no concrete date to commence on a sixth studio album. “I don’t feel under pressure to do it,” Deborah asserted. “I think it’s much better to do something that’s good and right and that everybody wants to do than to do it because the record company thinks it’s time. I will definitely not do that.”

  Instead, Chrysalis released The Best Of Blondie in October 1981. The 12-track retrospective was freshened up by four ‘Special Mix’ tracks that saw Mike Chapman remix ‘Heart Of Glass’, ‘Sunday Girl’, ‘In The Flesh’ and ‘Rapture’, la
rgely by incorporating elements of alternate takes into the single version. Although the compilation reached number four in the UK, it would merely brush the Billboard Top 30. As the autumn drew to a close, the news that Blondie would reconvene to record before the end of the year drew sighs of relief from a record label desperate for new product.

  An enduring item – Chris and Debbie in 1982. JANETTE BEGKMAN/GETTY IMAGES

  Chic’s Nile Rodgers hangs with jade goddess Debbie in New York, 1982. MIGHAEL PUTLAND/GETTY IMAGES

  Designer Stephen Sprouse and Debbie give it the mean eye, out on the town in 1982. RON GALELLA, LTD/WIREIMAGE

  Blondie approach the end of the road in Toronto 1982 as Chris’ gaunt appearance indicates just how unwell the guitarist had become. MIGHAEL PUTLAND/GETTY IMAGES

  Debbie enters the squared circle for Teaneck Tanzi with actors Caitlin Clarke and Andy Kaufman. TIME & LIFE PIGTURES/GETTY IMAGES

  James Woods gets physical with Debbie in David Lynch’s groundbreaking 1983 film Videodrome. REX FEATURES

  Deborah in solo action. IAN DIGKSON/REX FEATURES

  Deborah with the Jazz Passengers – ensemble mainstay Roy Nathanson is pictured far left. ACTION PRESS/REX FEATURES

  Post reformation – Jimmy, Debbie, Chris and Clem line up for the second act. MIGK HUTSON/REDFERNS

  Tagged – Debbie is reunited with Fab 5 Freddie at the 2004 VH1 Hip Hop Honours event. STEPHEN LOVEKIN/FILMMAGIG

  Delight and disharmony at the 2006 Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony. MIKE SEGAR/REUTERS/GORBIS

  Clem and Frank renew their acquaintance at photographer Allan Tannenbaum’s New York In The 70’s book signing on April 2, 2009 in Los Angeles. MIKE GUASTELLA/WIREIMAGE