Blondie, Parallel Lives

by Dick Porter

Chapter Fifteen

  The Second Act

  “We’ve always tried to be positive. It’s our way of being political. The world is fucked up, so in lieu of actually making political statements we just try to make people feel better. That’s a good job.”

  Chris Stein

  With No Exit recorded but not due for release until the following year, Blondie travelled to London for rehearsals ahead of their first European gigs since 1980. After an opening show in Stockholm on October 26, 1998 that Chris later described as “dismal”, the group quickly hit their stride, shaking off any initial nerves, road rust and technical hassles to delight the sold-out crowds that packed the modestly sized venues. “We’re on a tight budget,” explained Deborah. “Regardless of all the exposure and all the interest, it’s been small halls and not a lot of money. We’re doing this in a very traditional fashion.”

  For those who had waited almost two decades to see the group play live, and others finally getting to see them for the first time, the reunion gigs were hotly anticipated. This time, Blondie didn’t have to impress anyone – enthusiastically partisan crowds welcomed them back with genuine affection. “It really has been extraordinarily good. I just can’t believe it. The audiences have been right there with us. In Scotland, they sang along to everything, except the new songs. And they even tried to sing along to them,” beamed Debbie. “They sang over the guitar intro. These guys usually frown at me when I do that, but they let the audience get away with it. But if we never do anything again after this, it’ll be fine.”

  The European tour took up the whole of November, with gigs roughly split between those in Britain and on the continent. Although the new songs were well received, Blondie’s set was weighted heavily in favour of crowd-pleasing older material. “We’re only doing four new songs,” said Chris. “As it goes along week by week, I think everybody’s getting much more positive about the whole thing. The last tour Debbie and me did, what’d we do? Two of the fucking hit songs, maybe. And I can remember people leaving and going, ‘Well, yeah,’ but I had no idea what that was about. Five years ago I wouldn’t have wanted to do the old songs, but now I feel real positive and real emotional about doing them. And unless we get heavily bombarded by tomatoes and beer cans, I think it’s going to be fine.”

  “We had a really high energy,” recalled Debbie. “And we got such a great response. The most typical comment we got was, ‘I never got to see you because I was too young, and I can’t believe I’m getting to see you!’ I don’t know if we satisfied them or not!”

  “I just wanted to do this. I knew this was going to be successful, but I had no idea to what extent,” Stein declared. “There seems to be a genuine enthusiasm. It’s hard to take compliments … When you have a fuckin’ roomful of people telling you that you’re an icon and a god and all this shit, it’s just ridiculous. It’s very hard to absorb that shit. It may be my own personal insecurities, but at the same time, it’s a little bewildering. Especially because having fucking done nothing for 16 years. Not nothing, you know, I’ve been active in music, with Debbie’s solo shit, but the level, the jump has been so pronounced, the difference between what we’ve been doing to what’s going on now is so severe. It’s like leaping off a cliff backwards. It’s very odd.”

  Among those delighted to see Blondie playing live once more was Chris Charlesworth, who had given Debbie her first UK press with his review of The Stillettoes for Melody Maker over 20 years earlier. “My wife, Lisa, and I saw the show together, enjoyed the hits and headed for the backstage bar when it was all over,” he recalls. “We were leaning against the bar when she came in, as lovely and blonde as ever, and she came straight over to me, ignoring a bunch of heavyweight-looking record company suits with outstretched hands. And she kissed and hugged me too, right in front of everybody, and hardly anyone there even knew who I was. ‘This guy,’ said Debbie to everyone who’d gathered round, ‘was the first man ever to put my picture in a magazine.’ It was great. She hadn’t forgotten what I’d done for her all those years ago.”

  In addition to being greeted as returning heroes, the band was also on the receiving end of several media baubles. Most notably, Q magazine honoured them with an ‘Inspiration’ award.

  “It was great,” Deborah acknowledged. “Very straightforward. They were concentrating on the awards, not making it into a TV show. Unlike the US, where everything is a TV show and it just drags on and on. But this was very down to business. So there was some spontaneity to it.” At the London ceremony Debbie demonstrated she could still kick up a sartorial storm, when she took the stage in a dress adorned with razor blades. “I always cut myself when I put on that razor blade dress,” she exclaimed. “It’s a Michael Schmidt and I love it. He spends hours blunting the razors on a stone, otherwise it would obviously be impossible to wear. The thing that catches you when you put it on is the corners because it’s so angular, but once it’s on it’s great fun to wear. It’s terribly comfortable when it’s on, very flexible, like wearing a snake’s skin. It’s very cool.”

  The band also created a stir when they were invited to receive a cultural award in Lugano, Switzerland. “It was this black-tie fuckin’ situation,” recounted Chris. “Clem got progressively drunker and drunker and tried to leap over his drums, and he fell on Paul and Leigh in front of this whole crowd of bejewelled courtesans. It was a disaster, but at the same time it was a major existential moment.”

  “It was like being in a Fellini film,” remarked Jimmy. “We did a lip synch, which we’re very loath to do as a rule.” He pointed at Clem. “For some reason, this idiot decides to hop over the drums. So he hops over his drum kit, doing his middle-aged Keith Moon, and knocks down our bass player, who he picks up by the collar. By now he’s in his 1977 ‘I’m a punk rocker’ vibe. So he goes out into the audience, picks up a chair, and starts swinging it above his head. And there’s this little Italian guy, who must have been a film producer or something, and he’s screaming, ‘No, no, no.’”

  “I had completely forgotten that I had drunk three bottles of champagne, and also that I had my Anello & Davide Cuban-heel Beatle boots on,” Clem explained. “So I go over the drums and next thing I know I’m on the floor on top of Leigh, and then the drums come crashing down in a chain reaction, and all you hear is 500 people going, ‘Oh my God’ – in Italian, of course.”

  “By the way,” chirped Chris, “the award was a really beautiful thing with a marble base and silver shit and a fuckin’ gold mask, whereas our fuckin’ Q award must have cost all of $4.”

  While Blondie viewed such awards as simply part of the music industry’s mechanism of self-promotion, the human response left a lasting impression on the band. “It was heart-warming and wonderful to have fans coming out of the woodwork and to see new fans … The other stuff is the downside,” Deborah observed. “It’s only now that I sense that I did actually touch people’s lives in Blondie. When we were in our heyday, we had a very young audience – little kids almost. Now all those kids are young adults, and sometimes they come up to me with tears in their eyes and say things like, ‘Oh, when I was eight years old …’ It’s funny and I laugh it off, but we’ve all been there. I find it very, very flattering.”

  “For me it’s been very stress-free as a result of so much acceptance,” concluded Chris. “I think Debbie’s the most worn out, because I get to sort of phase out, whereas Debbie’s level of focus is a lot higher.”

  “I actually enjoy what I do now more than ever,” Deborah revealed. “It’s odd, because the pressure is on. Yet the pressure is off. I’m pretty sane about it. I want to harken back, to give people a sense of what we were like in the past. But I like to be comfortable on stage, to forget about everything except the music. I do all that other stuff – style, make-up – beforehand. That’s what saves me. Then I can go out and forget about it. In the eighties, I had the lucky break of working with Stephen Sprouse. Stephen schooled me in being prepared, in getting my look together, so I could focus
on the important stuff.”

  After a short visit to Australia to see in the New Year by headlining the Falls Festival (a four-day event split between Lorne, Victoria and Marion Bay, Tasmania), followed by a gig in Sydney, Blondie spent the remainder of January shooting TV spots and making publicity appearances ahead of No Exit’s February 23, 1999 release date. The album would be trailed by the single release of ‘Maria’, which came out at the beginning of the month and went straight to number one in the UK. Almost exactly 20 years after ‘Heart Of Glass’ had reached that summit, the song became Blondie’s sixth British chart-topping single.

  ‘Maria’ is four-and-a-half minutes of transcendent pop that, when viewed on the following week’s Top Of The Pops, aroused genuine feelings of joy in anybody with the faintest regard for the band. For committed fans it was a long-awaited moment of sweet triumph. “What a fabulous moment that was,” enthused Debbie. “That kind of approval is unbelievable. ‘Maria’ was a good song, but for my taste a little too retro-feeling. I’d never have chosen it. So, good thing I wasn’t in charge, or nobody would have ever known we were back!”

  “Hearing ‘Maria’ for the first time, it was very moving because I realised that – even thinking about it gets me emotional about it – because I realised that it could be a hit,” confessed Chris. “The single is so accessible it’s amazing. It’s a strange mix of stuff, like some weird Buddy Holly modern dance rap thing that’s really easy for people to get. People pick up on it when they hear it for the first time … When I heard the finished thing – when we were working on it, I didn’t know – but when I heard the final, finished thing it knocked me out how strong it was.”

  Less happily, the single only managed to make number 82 in the US, in part due to it being issued on manager Allen Kovac’s Beyond Music label, financially unable to compete with the far larger promotional budgets of the majors. “Pop isn’t as strong or as big in the States, it’s more popular over here,” observed Debbie. “I was actually against it as a single in the States, I really wanted one of the more dramatic ballady things to go out, and I was right.”

  Irrespective of disappointing US sales, the hurricane of affection that had met the band’s European shows and their first UK single release since July 1982’s ‘War Child’ validated their decision to reform. “In a way it was providential,” Deborah declared. “It went in our favour because people were copying us and there was nothing I could do about it, and then when we came back we had taken on this status as being something legendary, or some ridiculous thing. By then I just felt flattered by it. It’s interesting to see what becomes style and what becomes acceptable.” By the mid-to-late nineties, the music scene was now awash with wannabe-Blondie figures like Gwen Stefani.

  Another factor that made the initial reunion enjoyable was that the group’s long-established penchant for internal strife was now tempered with humour, drawn from experience. “We keep using the analogy of us being a dysfunctional family, but I think it’s still very a propos,” asserted Clem. “It’s like any relationship you go back to, be it an old friend or an old lover – you bring a lot of emotional baggage back with you. Sometimes that can work to your advantage. We’ve all been in therapy over the years, so that’s a big help.”

  “I think we look at each other in a lot funnier light now. We don’t take each other as seriously,” added Jimmy. “We have a bigger background of getting reamed, so therefore we come with a little more cynicism. And that cynicism does breed a humour of like, ‘Oh, don’t tell me that!’ It puts a sort of lump in your throat and paints you a little green with envy when an artist that sells half the records you do is living in a mansion in Highgate. But then, some kids my age went to Vietnam and didn’t come home.”

  The release of No Exit returned Blondie to the American Top 20 and charted across Europe, reaching number three in the UK. “Someone asked me if we anticipated great success with this record,” recounted Chris. “And I said that, for me, success was that we’d made the record. I mean that sincerely. That we actually got back together and made the record. So we already are a success.”

  “We asked ourselves how we would go about being a band again,” stated Clem. “We were never interested in being purely a nostalgia act. Yes, we play our hits, but we needed to make the No Exit album before touring. It put the focus on being a band. No Exit is simply the next Blondie record. It just took 16 years to make, that’s all. And we’re very fortunate to have Debbie here to convey the whole thing.”

  Despite not being signed to a label that could provide enormous advances or large tour budgets, Chris was delighted to escape the Chrysalis/EMI corporate labyrinth. “Our new label gives us a much better deal. This is the first time we’ve done the cover art for example. The music industry is changing. Our manager is making a lot of enemies by coming out and saying that record companies won’t exist for much longer because of the Internet, and he actually runs our record company as well.”

  The deal with Beyond also gave Blondie greater control over when they toured and how they were presented, both of which had proven contentious during the group’s original incarnation. “It’s a lot different – it’s not as insane as it used to be,” Stein explained. “Everybody’s like mellowed out a lot and people know their place and the guys aren’t as jealous of Debbie. In the old days, we’d be doing the photo session and the photographer would say, ‘OK, can I just take some pictures of Debbie?’ and all the guys would start complaining. At this point it’s, ‘Oh, great, I don’t have to pose.’”

  “We all know who’s who and what’s what, what our specific roles are,” observed Deborah. “It’s much clearer. If you have the wisdom to accept who you are, then you might as well accept who everyone else is and make the best of a situation. Being bashed over the head a little bit when you’re younger gives you a kind of perspective.”

  After several one-off shows in March and April, Blondie set out on the US leg of their reunion tour in mid-May 1999. Again, the band was warmly received, although perhaps not with the same sense of abandon as in Europe. “I don’t think it’s quite Blondiemania any more,” Debbie remarked. “It’s been a nice reintroduction to our audience and our friends and the music business, but it hasn’t quite reached manic proportions. Cher coming back with ‘Believe’ was much more manic. I think our little musical input or position is a bit more complex than that.”

  “I think they come a lot based on their memories and stuff like that,” observed Chris. “I mean, songs have a lot to do with what they evoke in the listener and what the associations are. It’s partially that, maybe, for the older people … There’s always been a do-it-yourself quality to Blondie. I mean, everybody really knows that we weren’t the product of stylists and all those other kinds of junk. It’s always been a home-made thing, so I think people like that.”

  A second run of US gigs took place in August and September, after the group had spent the early summer on the European festival circuit. Blondie would wrap up their touring commitments with a return to the UK in November. “The only place we’ve had a difficult time was in Spain,” reflected Debbie. “We played in these bullrings with awful acoustics and bloodstains everywhere. It was like the old days – I felt we really had to go out and get ‘em!”

  As the group dispersed at the end of 1999, there was little question that their reunion had been a success. Although the single release of ‘Nothing Is Real But The Girl’ had failed to match ‘Maria’, there was a feeling of certainty that they would continue. “It’s as permanent as it gets,” assured Chris. “We’ll do another record.”

  Throughout the reunion period Debbie had continued to act, taking another role as a waitress in 1999 comedy thriller Zoo and playing ‘Ezmeralda the Psychic’ in Red Lipstick (2000), a comedy about two criminal drag queens. She also appeared in The Fluffer (2001) – a comedy-drama set in the sex industry. “I play a lesbian strip club owner. Isn’t it obvious they would want me for that?” teased Debbie. “I make a small appeara
nce in a very funny little movie. It’s sort of like a soap opera, but naked – and dirty!”

  In November 2000, Deborah returned to the theatre, taking one of the four pivotal roles in a Greenwich Village production of Crave, a one-act chamber piece by English playwright Sarah Kane, who had committed suicide the previous year. “I can’t really describe Crave,” admitted Debbie. “It’s not a play that’s plot driven. It’s about emotion. It’s about inner turmoil and personality. In a way, I guess it’s about madness.”

  Although the play received mixed reviews and only ran until the end of December, critics regularly singled out Deborah’s performance for specific praise. Writing in the New York Times, reviewer Ben Brantley noted her “subtle, pitch-perfect performance”, concluding, “Only Ms. Harry seems to have found this elusive tone. As the lead singer for Blondie, she managed both to send up and trade on her platinum-edged sex appeal without resorting to cheap quotation marks. Here her performance has a corresponding depth of irony, a tension between soul and surface that is never merely glib. There is pathos and a stylish brittleness in her intonations, and her thin, papery voice matches a phrase used by her character: ‘the stain of a scream’. The last words she speaks, ‘Glorious. Glorious,’ are delivered with a mixture of weary acceptance and girlish anticipation. It is the sound of a woman hugging the possibility of ceasing to exist.”

  For Deborah, being in Crave represented the realisation of another youthful ambition. “It was like a dream come true. When I was in high school I used to take the bus into New York City and walk around the West Village and just fantasise about being on stage. Then one night recently I was walking to the theatre, through the West Village, and it all came flooding back. I thought, ‘Wow, my dream came true; this is actually happening.’”

  In the four decades since Debbie had made those first exploratory trips into New York from Hawthorne, the city had changed considerably. During the eighties, Ronald Reagan’s administration slashed funding to many art projects but the downtown scene continued to thrive. Early in the decade, hip hop was still fresh, graffiti was still evident on subway trains, Madonna had just left her Danceteria elevator post and electronic dance music was starting to point towards the house revolution. But, with Wall Street on the up, the decade was most notable for the subtle changes that seemed to be under way, as the city that had been almost a no-go area 10 years earlier started attracting young upwardly mobile professionals. Consequently, rents rose as formerly abandoned areas such as SoHo started gaining boutiques, restaurants and condominiums. Although the crime rate was still lethal, Times Square remained sleazy and the East Village was spectacularly bombed-out, old timers from the downtown scene started moving elsewhere, either lamenting the loss of the buzz or simply priced out of the neighbourhood.