Deborah Harry - Platinum Blonde

Before Deborah Harry became the face of Blondie, she was a suburban New Jersey girl, secretary, waitress, Playboy Bunny and participant in New York’s assorted musical undergrounds. It was an admirably indirect route to international pop stardom, but considerably more interesting than attending a suitable college and filling in an application form. In Deborah Harry: Platinum Blonde, Cathay Che traces the making of a performer whose cool stare, peroxide hair and refusal to behave like a conventional female celebrity became almost as recognisable as the songs themselves.

Written with Harry’s cooperation and drawing upon contributions from her friends, family and fellow musicians, the book follows her from her early life as an adopted child through the bohemian ferment of 1970s New York. There she encountered artists, musicians and cultural troublemakers, including Andy Warhol and William Burroughs, while gradually becoming part of the scene surrounding CBGB. This was a world of artistic ambition, limited funds and venues whose lavatories were presumably omitted from the tourist brochures.

With guitarist Chris Stein, Harry formed Blondie, a group initially embraced by the punk and new-wave crowd before committing the suspicious offence of becoming enormously successful. Songs such as Heart of Glass, Sunday Girl, Atomic, The Tide Is High and Call Me moved freely between punk, pop, disco, reggae and electronic music, irritating purists in several genres at once. Harry also helped bring rap into the pop mainstream with Rapture, long before such a crossover could be discussed by marketing departments over mineral water.

Che examines both the music and the image, including the curious tendency of the public to assume that Deborah Harry was called Blondie and that the other members of Blondie were decorative equipment. Harry became one of the defining visual icons of her era, but behind the photographs was a sharp, ambitious and self-aware performer navigating an industry delighted to sell female sexuality while remaining faintly alarmed when the woman concerned controlled it herself.

The story also encompasses Blondie’s collapse, Harry’s solo career and acting work, her relationship with Stein and her devotion to him during his serious illness, as well as the group’s eventual reunion. Fame, fashion, illness, drugs, money and artistic survival all pass through these pages, accompanied by the vitality and occasional lunacy of downtown New York.

Broad, candid and packed with anecdotes, Platinum Blonde offers a portrait of Harry as far more than a photogenic singer attached to some excellent records. It presents an artist who crossed musical boundaries, outlasted the culture that first labelled her and remained effortlessly cool while several generations attempted to reproduce the effect with hair dye and expensive sunglasses.

Published by Andre Deutsch in 2001, this copy is in As New condition: appropriately immaculate, remarkably well preserved and showing fewer signs of age than the average member of the music industry.

Small catalogue note: the author’s name is printed as Cathay Che, rather than Cathy Che.

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