by Dick Porter
“He was still on the road,” added Debbie. “He didn’t know who people were.”
Initially he downplayed his condition, preferring to talk up the band’s future: “Ironically the shows were the best received of any we’ve ever done and the reviews were also the best – although the previews were universally moaning and groaning on about ‘art’. Being associated with art is really a negative thing. But ticket sales abroad were down and everybody was tired so we figured we’ll end it now and see what happens. Go on to the next thing, which is Debbie’s solo project.”
It became apparent that Chris’ condition precluded any quick return to performing or recording. “Chris and I had talked about taking a year off,” Debbie revealed. “He was working very hard with his label Animal Records, and he’d produced Zombie Birdhouse and the first record of The Gun Club, plus with the Blondie pile-up and responsibilities, it all got to be too much.”
In the late summer of 1982, without any fanfare, public acrimony or even a press release, Blondie simply dissolved.
Looking back from a perspective widened by nearly 30 years, Chris reflects on the way in which Blondie broke up. “As far as why the band split, there were so many causes and a lot of negativity … getting older gives one a different view of just about everything … I’m sure I said some really stupid shit – it was a period of stupid statements. Looking back from the 21st century, I often wonder about some of the things people said back then about Blondie, about how some of the crazy criticism and mud slung at us would hold up in today’s context, in light of all that has come after … For example, how would Lester Bangs’ severe comments about Debbie and my selling out and exploiting her sexuality – for one, ‘selling out’ implies that you get paid but that’s a whole other story – hold up in the cold light of Britney and all of her ilk? Deb got so whacked for doing what in retrospect was absurdly innocent compared to what’s become the norm now, not only the norm but embraced by the masses and the media.”
“It was a gradual thing to end Blondie. It wasn’t totally my decision,” Deborah explained. “We had all outgrown it and wanted to do different things. So we stopped. I wanted people to know there was more to me, as a person, than the sort of cartoon character we had created. It wasn’t enough for me to be treated any more like I was Blondie. I had to let people know there was something else happening there. I wanted to be an actress, and that’s what I want more than anything now – to be recognised as an actress. It’s important to let people know I’m not Blondie, I’m Debbie Harry.”
“The drugs were a tremendous downfall for us, because we were with management that was really OK with cocaine use – that was fine, but once you graduated to heroin use, you were fucked,” stated Chris.
“I think that probably the main contributor to the band disbanding is our drug problems,” agreed Jimmy.
“Everything fell apart and I don’t think that anyone could hold Blondie, as individuals or the band, responsible for all of that,” Debbie summarised. “It just was this kind of eruption or disintegration of the whole fucking machine simultaneously. It’s just a very rare kind of occurrence and very sad. It was mind numbing, actually. We had worked practically non-stop for seven years, so we were probably over-worked and over-tired and the whole thing was just badly handled. I think we were mismanaged from the get-go. If it hadn’t been for the fact that Chris and I were a sort of grounding force in the band, almost parental in a sense, that we represented some kind of solidity to the other guys, we probably wouldn’t have lasted as long as we did.”
Disappointed by the end of a key phase of his rock’n’roll dream, Clem noted, “It’s frightening to see how successful the band could have been. It was a great success, and a great experience, but a lot of things could have been done a lot better.”
Chapter 13
The Ice Cream Years
“Stories of my sainthood have been much exaggerated.”
Debbie Harry
In the aftermath of Blondie’s dissolution, the band’s constituent parts scattered in search of new outlets for their talents. Disappointed by the way in which Heart On A Wall had been received, Jimmy set his sights on production, travelling to Europe with a view to working on the other side of the mixing desk. Although he met with U2 manager Paul McGuinness, nothing transpired and Destri returned to Brooklyn, where he went into the building industry. “I bought a company that bought and sold old buildings and renovated them,” he explained. “It’s a little more complicated than construction and I made a lot of money, which was good because when we left Blondie I had no money.”
Nigel hooked up with his old Silverhead frontman Michael des Barres’ latest project, Chequered Past, a dissolute supergroup that also included former Sex Pistol Steve Jones. Harrison was joined by Clem and Frankie, the latter not sticking around long before he was lured away to tour Australia and Japan with Iggy Pop. “I didn’t call him, he called me,” Infante declared. “He just let you do what you wanted, everything was real cool. He’d encourage you to get wild.”
Frankie’s guitar berth in Chequered Past was taken by another Iggy sideman, Tony Sales, and the group toured in support of Duran Duran, INXS and Little Steven before recording an eponymous album for EMI. After they split in 1985, Harrison became involved with soundtrack production and band management, while Burke travelled to Britain, appearing on Pete Townshend’s White City album before joining The Eurythmics.
Chris had been forced to curtail his work with Animal Records when he fell ill, which meant the cancellation of projected albums by Fab Five Freddy, rapper J Walter Negro and several soundtracks. Any thoughts of a second solo album by Debbie were also abandoned. “I’ve put my life on hold till he’s well again,” she said. “I just can’t think about anything until Chris has recovered. My life, my career, my home – they mean nothing to me while he’s like this.”
Although Chris’ illness had been diagnosed, he remained in a serious condition. “He’s so weak he can’t stand on his feet,” Deborah explained. “He lies in bed all the time.”
Debbie was a constant presence at his bedside during his confinement at Lenox Hill Hospital, an acute care facility on the Upper East Side. What she subsequently described as “the worst time of my life” was made more trying when sections of the press – who had been at the hospital, covering the birth of Jerry Hall and Mick Jagger’s daughter Elizabeth – caught wind of Chris’ alarming physical state and Debbie’s regular visits. Seemingly scandalised that she had not even bothered to visit a stylist before arriving to watch over her partner, New York’s tabloids ran photographs of Debbie looking far from her best – alongside sensationalist copy that insisted Chris was dying and she was falling apart.
In some respects, being cast into the role of carer can present more difficulties than for those requiring care. While Chris was under heavy medication, drifting in and out of consciousness, Debbie was left to cope with the complete abandonment of her previous lifestyle. “When Chris got ill everything changed,” she observed. “I was suddenly holding everything together. It was the hardest time, it got unequal. He was never mentally incapable, always astute, but it forced me into different areas. I didn’t fit that role of keeper very easily. He had always been the mentor. He had always been the funny one and suddenly it was not light-hearted. Before then I’d always felt perhaps too serious.”
As Chris’ health slowly stabilised, Deborah found that her summary removal from the music business and all its concomitant pressures afforded the opportunity to reflect and reconsider. “I think that, up until that time, I had a lot of what you would call ‘childish ways’ and then the idea of taking complete responsibility for my life and not seeing it as just sheer fate or luck really hit home,” she recalled. “Everything had been so intense. Just thinking about it I’m getting dizzy. There was no escape, no respite. What really brought me down to earth was Chris being sick. When that happened, I just said, ‘I don’t have time for this bullshit.’ And I just washed it out o
f my character.”
The regime of steroids employed to counteract pemphigus vulgaris began to reap benefits, as the disease eventually went into remission. Despite being allowed home under observation by a doctor from New York Hospital, who regularly monitored his blood, Chris still suffered from the effects of both the disease and its treatment. “Steroids change your whole metabolism. They’re weird,” he observed. “The proteins that bind your skin together break down, and you just sort of dissolve. You get a lot of sores – I still have the scars.”
“This disease was incurable before steroids,” added Deborah. “Before that you would die from associated infection because your skin would be all open and your immune system goes completely ferkakte, right? So then you catch everything. If he hadn’t been fairly young when he got it, it could still have killed him.”
With the critical phase of Chris’ illness behind them, the couple immediately found that they were facing another crisis – they were broke. “Overall we just got completely fucked over,” explained Stein. “It was a period when musicians still lived in a state of serfdom. We trusted people who weren’t trustworthy … and they cleaned us out.”
“Things were really bad in 1982 and 1983 – when Blondie first broke up,” Deborah recounted. “I didn’t know what direction to go in; it was a very scary period all round. The IRS had closed in on me and Chris for various reasons, and at the same time Chris was sick. It was pretty damn heavy and it all started in 1982. It was awful – they took our house, everything.”
As unpaid tax bills were brought alarmingly to light, this was an issue that affected the band collectively. “We had a letter from our accountant basically saying, ‘Don’t expect any more money, it’s all over – basically there’s $25,000 left in the Blondie account. Make arrangements to pay your bills, don’t count on another penny from Blondie,’” said Nigel.
“We were all in a tax hole,” added Jimmy. “I think Chris owed nearly a million dollars, I owed half a million dollars. After all of that work we wound up in the red.”
It seemed unbelievable that a group who had sold well over 20 million records worldwide could find themselves so far in debt, within months of disbanding. Although the band had enjoyed the material and chemical trappings of success, running up the usual expenses which are then deducted from royalties, the extent of their debt was staggering.
“It’s just that we were being fleeced so badly,” stated Chris. “The first two years we made a lot of money, and this accountant that we had just didn’t pay our tax bills. Everyone went on these horrendous back taxes for years and years …”
“We were very bad at the business side and we lost a lot of money,” Deborah later admitted. “At the height of our fame the thing that caused us the most stress was the business – we knew we didn’t have a handle on it and we knew a lot of cash was flying away. When you get into a band you think it’s all about music. It’s all you know about and it’s all you want to know about. The reality is that most young musicians could do with a crash course in accounting. It’s a weird situation to be really famous, really busy and yet to have this feeling all the time that you’re not being properly looked after. If I could give my younger self any advice it would be to keep an eye on the business side of things.”
“I had a horrendous tax debt for about 20 years,” revealed Chris. “I try not to feel bitter. Debbie keeps reminding me that it’s our own fault and we should have paid better attention, which is the case. But I have no head for figures.”
In February 1983, Debbie returned to the public eye when David Cronenberg’s Videodrome was released in the US. Filmed in the previous summer, the movie tells the tale of Max Renn (played by James Woods, shortly before his co-starring role with Robert De Niro in Once Upon A Time In America), a small-time cable TV channel owner who stumbles across a coded broadcast containing extreme violence and using high-frequency signals to reconfigure viewers’ perceptions of reality. Cast in the role of Renn’s girlfriend, Nicki Brand, Debbie is drawn into a sleazy web of deception and body horror. “I played the seductress, the temptress. I was sort of like the embodiment of the video creature,” she explained. “Don’t ask me whether she was really a real person or an electronic being, because I didn’t write the fucker! Ask Cronenberg. He said, ‘I wrote this part for Blondie,’ and then I showed up with red hair and he said, ‘Oh, I guess that will be OK.’”
“There was something in my music that David used as a reference for writing the part of Nicki Brand,” elaborated Deborah. “He told the producer this, who then asked him why he didn’t cast me? And David said, ‘No, I’m sure she can’t act. I want to get somebody I know can handle the role.’ Finally the producer convinced him to try me out. So I got a screen test and got the part.”
Following cult success with such visceral fare as Shivers (1974) and Rabid (1976), Cronenberg’s directorial career was shifting into high gear in the wake of 1981’s psychic thriller, Scanners. With a budget in the region of $6 million, Videodrome represented a step up from Union City. “I need a lot of explicit direction,” explained Debbie. “I need to be told more than an experienced actress would need to be told. Cronenberg said to me that he would tell me exactly what he wanted me to do, and that he wanted me to try and do that, more than someone else who had done a lot of film work and would be given more freedom. But that was all right with me.”
Although Cronenberg’s script demanded that Debbie shoot scenes involving partial nudity and physical mutilation, she had little problem once it was demonstrated that these aspects were in no way exploitative or gratuitous. “From the first I just wanted to be reassured that she would end up on some kind of positive note. Because I find that I’m paranoid now about getting into acting categorised as the ‘Bad Girl’, or the evil sex caricature, or whatever.”
Although the narrative fails to arrive at any such unequivocal conclusion, Debbie believed that its exploration of issues such as passivity, exploitation and media manipulation validated Videodrome‘s more extreme aspects. “It is a fascinating idea that something essentially passive – whether it’s a media image or the media itself – can be more destructive than active weaponry.”
“One of the scenes I found extremely difficult. In a shower – it felt awkward and didn’t seem right,” Deborah recounted. “But that was cut. The other two scenes were a lot easier. Partly because Jimmy was so great to work with, and partly because everybody was so careful to create the right atmosphere for me. Of course, there were the minimum amount of people on set. I think Jimmy was more self-conscious than I was, or afraid that I was self-conscious and consequently self-conscious on my behalf. It was very funny actually. I was standing there with a towel wrapped around me wondering how on earth I could go through with the scene. ‘I can’t do this,’ I thought. ‘What am I doing?’ Then I thought, ‘You stupid fool, what are you doing here if you can’t do this? Just do it.’ So I did it then the fear was over. Once that happened it was fun. Once I get past a certain point I’m not shy any more.”
As with the role of Lillian in Union City, Deborah’s portrayal of the cipherlike Nicki was well removed from the image she established with Blondie. Although she had been offered a number of lucrative parts in rock-themed movies, she was determined to develop a separate identity as an actress. “The scripts are usually not written very well, really unimaginative and incorrect as far as rock’n’roll goes. Most of them have been really horrible. I think I got two scripts out of about 150 that were worth doing … I guess people always see you by what you’ve done, and there are very few people who have enough imagination to see you as something different. You either revolt everyone or turn everybody on by doing something new.”
On release Videodrome drew generally positive notices, with many reviewers describing it as sufficiently audacious and fascinating to outweigh any sense of pretentiousness and self-indulgence. For Debbie it made a refreshing change from her experiences with the music press. “Film criticism is a whole new world,
” she insisted. “It’s very remote – I’ve never met these people. I was totally amazed at the reviews I got for Videodrome. They were great – I expected it to be much worse. I was prepared! I think the film suffered more than I did, because of the gore at the end – but Cronenberg always gets slammed for that.”
The movie fared less well at the US box office, where it failed to recoup the money invested in its production, although its subsequent release in foreign territories and steady sales on the developing video market went a long way to addressing this shortfall. “It was taken off for one reason or another, but during the time it was being shown it was in the Top 10,” said Debbie. “I don’t think it was a failure for me by any means. I think it’s kind of confusing, but I thought it was a good part for me to do. Working with David Cronenberg was fun, but hard work towards the end of filming. It gave me the acting challenge I was looking for.”
Despite little adverse reaction to Videodrome‘s scenes of torture and mutilation when it was released across 600 US cinemas, when Debbie arrived in London to promote the film’s UK release, in November 1983, she unwittingly walked into a very British moral panic. Led by serial complainer Mary Whitehouse and her allies in right-wing newspapers such as the Daily Mail and Sunday Times, a campaign to enforce a ratings system on the then-unregulated video market had reached a hysterical pitch. At the urging of Whitehouse’s minority lobby group, the misleadingly named National Viewers and Listeners Association, Conservative MP Graham Bright introduced a Private Member’s Bill demanding that all commercial video recordings be subject to a strict system of classification. While the introduction of age restrictions that had applied to cinema releases for many years seemed logically consistent, some extremists saw the bill – which passed into statute the following year – as a golden opportunity to clamp down on any material they identified as offensive.