Book review: Face it by Debbie Harry

“That’s very heavy” said the librarian as she scanned in my book. She was right. It looks like a normal hardback but it’s twice the weight. I still haven’t worked out why.

Appearances can be deceptive, as Debbie Harry knows. She was never “Blondie”, as the book makes clear: that was always a character. Debbie’s own character is harder to make out, even after reading this book. She has a lot of stories to tell but she tells them deadpan.


There are two threads that she keeps coming back to, which are obviously important to her: punk, and art. And she keeps her “punk attitude” throughout: “holding stubbornly to an underground sensibility”.

As a teenager she was “desperate to live in New York and be an artist.” She couldn’t afford art school but she did move to New York, paint (but not much), do dead-end jobs, and absorb the art, music and culture of the 1960s New York loft scene.

There’s an argument that Blondie were as much an art school band as, say, Talking Heads. Debbie has a lot to say about the relationship between art and commerce – as relevant to Blondie as to her friend Andy Warhol.

You could almost say that downtown New York in the seventies was its own art school (a bit like punk-era Liverpool). I loved the descriptions of the punk/underground scene that took over from the hippie happenings: “a creative eruption of new art forms”.

That time and place doesn’t come across quite as vividly as in Patti Smith’s Just Kids, but it’s still a really important part of the story.

It’s retrospectively glamorous – just hear those famous names drop – and it’s dangerous. Not good, “edgy” dangerous: being robbed and raped in your own apartment dangerous. 

Actually, there’s a fair bit of sexual violence in this book, like the ex-boyfriend who turned into a stalker. What I found most chilling, though, is the bit where someone tells Debbie’s parents: “Watch out for that one, she has bedroom eyes.” When she was a BABY.

Oh, you want some “women in rock” stuff?

In the early 70s, she says, there weren’t any girls doing what she wanted to do – leading rock bands. She loved the New York Dolls because “I wanted to be just like them. In fact, I wanted to be them”.

How many of us have felt like that: wanted to be men so we can do what men do? I know, when it comes to music, I have. And I know I’m not the only one.

When Debbie finally got to front her own band, she invented Blondie: “partly a visual homage to Marilyn, and partly a statement about the good old double standard”.

She has a good art-schooly theory about the character, which will surprise most of the men I knew at the time. She sees Blondie as gender-neutral and androgynous (that’s to do with the songs) and  “a drag queen” (that’s to do with the look). You can read it for yourself, if you’re interested. And it is interesting.

There’s a bit in the book where her manager suggests she writes about how hard it was being a woman in a man’s world. She refuses: “I just got on with it.”

After all, as she tells us at the end of the story: “I’m still a New York punk”.