Heart of class

Debbie Harry, an icon of New York cool and the voice behind a generation of pop nuggets, has had her share of career highs and lows. 'It seems to me like the future is more interesting, because it is yet to be done,' she tells Tony Clayton-Lea

Unlike her bleached blonde hair, which shone like a torch in the garish spotlights of venues from low rent caverns to high quality stadia, Debbie Harry's real roots were somewhat more brunette and brittle. The Miami-born adopted child of middle-class New Jersey parents, living in upstate New York and venturing into NYC to work as a waitress in rock'n'roll venues such as Max's Kansas City, Harry was a failed pop star, a one-time beautician and former bunny girl in the early 1970s.

Bruised from the indifference shown to her late 1960s band, Wind In The Willows, Harry snuck back to the suburbs to cool off, waiting in the wings for something new, interesting and exciting to happen.

Come 1974/75, this is exactly what occurred, when the bubbling cauldron that was New York's punk rock scene spilled over, creating an opening for raw, talented and virtually directionless acts to evolve in their own good time.

The fact that Blondie - a wryly provocative bubblegum pop act, unlike their noisy, cathartic rock'n'roll colleagues - were looked upon as a joke when compared to the likes of Television and The Ramones was neither here nor there; the band had Debbie Harry, a woman who had little problem extending and maintaining a façade of trashy and quite stunning beauty. With dishevelled hair hanging just-so, ruby-red lips and a pencil skirt, she looked like a doll come to life.

"Like other people, I had good and bad days," is how Harry summarily dismisses her much lauded and drooled over features. Now in the latter half of her 50s and still with cheekbones as sharp as a dry cleaner's crease, Harry is clever enough to dismiss her 1970s period as one of branding.

Ultimately, she fooled us all, coming across as a trailer park Marilyn Monroe when in reality she was a serious, sardonic underground artist, who wanted to blend art with commerce.

These days, Harry says, she still regards herself as something of an underground artist, especially in her tandem career as an independent movie actress. Curiously, despite her looks, she has remained a fringe figure in this area, with not even appearances in popular cult movies such as John Waters' Hairspray or David Cronenberg's Videodrome acting as a springboard to greater, bigger films.

Pop music, however, is a different thing altogether. For a while in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Blondie were one of the most successful pop groups in the world; the music (primarily in singles format) prescient and precise, but always with a rough-tongued edge, blended punk, pop, disco, reggae and rap to brilliant effect.

A solo career for Harry from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s proved suitably anti-climactic, and slowly she disappeared altogether to nurse back to health Blondie band member and one-time lover, Chris Stein, who was suffering from the genetic disease pemphigus.

A few years ago, Blondie reunited for what many considered would be an ill-fated tour or album. How wrong those people were, as Maria proved to be a successful album and number one single. Now, with a new album ready for release next year - and midway through a European tour - it seems the good ship Blondie is sailing again with Harry once more as its siren-like figurehead.

Nostalgia, Debbie, nostalgia - do you tire of people focusing on those elements of the band and its music?

"It's all been written," she says, "and it seems to me like the future is more interesting, because it is yet to be done. So it's more fun to look at that and to have an optimistic outlook, instead of having to review what you've done all the time. I mean, it's satisfying to know that we've had such success and that we've maintained such a level of interest - we have a tremendous fan base, and we're proud of all the music we've done - but it's a double-edged thing. No one wants to live in the past, that's for sure."

She has little or no complaints, she assures me, and she steers clear of having regrets. Harry views her life as one long winding road - there's a beginning and an end, she implies, as well as a middle that takes her zig-zagging from one thing to another.

"I'm the kind of person who doesn't have an ironclad outline of the future. I have a general idea of what I want to be doing and just keep working towards that. That kind of approach gives me a lot of freedom to allow things to happen and to have an open attitude. It also gives me a generally secure feeling, where, if one thing doesn't work out, then I'm not completely destroyed by it. It seems that something else for me to do will come along.

"I suppose it's strength in ones own ability to keep doing things."

Her tenacious spirit and bottle-blonde talent provided her with an outlet for expressing her femininity (although she came under attack for a while in the late 1970s when she allowed her sex symbol status to undermine Blondie's music), although, as the years have gone by, she seems to have rested into a zone where her persona is virtually indivisible from the band she fronts.

One presumes she has a life outside Blondie?

"I don't know if I actually do! Having done Blondie for such a long time and been so successful with it is so rewarding and satisfying to me that I don't really look for a life outside of it. It's so completely woven into my life I couldn't really separate it."

It's right and proper that Harry has a good measure of her achievements: scratching a living in a male-dominated industry at a time when it was neither profitable nor fashionable; paving the way for many women after her to form rock bands; making sure that the projection of sexuality was an individual and not an invidious thing.

She might have seemed at one point an unsettling survivor - we have memories of the post-hit years, where Harry, in a blonde wig and a dress too tight for her figure, swayed unconvincingly on stage - but, ultimately, she plays a good game in the here and now.

"The best thing I've done musically from the past is Rapture," she says, looking back before she looks ahead. "It stands pretty high on my list, but I'm always excited about the latest thing we do. The new music that hasn't come out yet is what I'm most excited about."

Blondie play Dublin's Vicar Street on Monday, December 2nd and Tuesday, December 3rd. Blondie's Greatest Hits (Capitol/Chrysalis) is available from most record shops