Debbie Harry at 80: I want Florence Pugh to play me in the Blondie biopic
As Blondie reissue their 1999 album No Exit, the singer and her bandmate Chris Stein talk about death, partying and a new film
thetimes.com
By Ed Potton – 17th October 2025
Debbie Harry, the ice queen of CBGB and singer of July. How did she mark the milestone? She turns to Chris Stein, her Blondie bandmate and former lover, and says: “I put a hit out on Chris’s wife. Ha-ha.” The gag is a sly one, suggesting animosity between her and Barbara Sicuranza, who has been married to her old flame since 1999. Yet Harry and Stein split way back in 1985 and the three have been close friends for years; Stein and Sicuranza even asked Harry to be godmother to their two daughters.
It’s another example of Harry’s splendidly twisted sense of humour, which I experienced in 2023 after asking her about supporting Iggy Pop at a festival. “Iggy Pop?” she said nonchalantly. “I’m sitting on his face right now.” For a moment I was speechless. It seemed an unlikely thing to be doing during a Zoom interview, but Harry has had a wild life. Then, with a flourish, she held up the cushion she had been perched on, which bore a picture of Pop. She really was sitting on his face. “I really am!” she said delightedly. “Ha-ha!” When I remind her of this Harry, at home in her native New Jersey, cackles and goes off to fetch said cushion. Her hair is still platinum — she called one of her albums Once More into the Bleach.
The idea of an octogenarian rock star is not so outlandish these days — McCartney, Jagger and Dylan all have a few years on her. Does it feel like a natural thing to be doing? “Well, I’ve never been entirely natural,” she says. “As unnatural as I possibly could be, in certain ways.” Age has rarely been a hindrance to Harry. She was 30 when Blondie released their first single, X Offender — much older than many of her peers, but she tended to serenely sidestep the issue.
Rather than getting Sicuranza whacked, did she have a party for her 80th? “Gee, I don’t know. Did I?” she says.
“It’s ongoing,” says Stein, 75, who plays guitar in Blondie and wrote many of their hits with Harry.
“I think I invited some people over or something,” Harry says. “I don’t even remember.”
“Barbara gave you the gold hat,” Stein says, referring to a bling-heavy military cap that Harry showed off on Instagram.
“Oh, the gold hat. That’s right.”
Harry’s playfulness belies her image as the impassively cool frontwoman of a band who shimmied insouciantly between punk, pop, disco and hip-hop. Blondie have sold more than 40 million records and are particularly loved in the UK, where they have had six No 1s, including Call Me, The Tide Is High and Maria. They mixed with the cream of New York’s music, art, film and literary world during the city’s lawless creative peak in the late Seventies and early Eighties. David Bowie once showed her his penis, which she found “adorable, funny and sexy”, she wrote in her autobiography. And in 1979 Andy Warhol threw a party for Blondie at Studio 54 to celebrate the release of Heart of Glass — just typing that sentence is thrilling. Harry spent part of it talking to Truman Capote, but could barely hear his whisper above the music.
Her life could have been even more glamorous. In the Eighties she cultivated a sideline as an actress, playing a sadomasochistic radio presenter in David Cronenberg’s Videodrome and a bigoted housewife in Hairspray. She also appeared in a section of the anthology film New York Stories directed by Martin Scorsese. The sideline could have become the main event when Ridley Scott asked her to play an android called Pris in a new film of his called Blade Runner. Harry’s record label didn’t want her to take time off so she turned down the role. Daryl Hannah took it instead, sporting a Harry-style peroxide hairdo and becoming a star. Harry has described the decision as her “biggest regret”.
“You should have done it,” Stein says. “You got bad advice, basically.”
Would acting have become a bigger part of Harry’s career had she said yes to Scott? “Yeah, I think so,” she says.
It’s not the end of their association with the silver screen, though. They have two films in development: a documentary and a biopic, directed by Charlotte Wells (Aftersun). Who could play Harry?
“If it were somebody like Florence Pugh, I would be in heaven,” she says. “I just think she’s a great actor and she could do anything.” Just as well because it’s a complex role.
Before that there is a lavish reissue of No Exit , their comeback album of 1999 released after a 16-year break, which includes Maria, their most recent UK No 1. Harry rapped with Coolio on the title track, whose video featured members of the Wu-Tang Clan and Mobb Deep, continuing an affiliation with hip-hop that goes back to Rapture in 1981, the first American No 1 to feature rap vocals (by Harry). “The guys from both Wu-Tang and Mobb Deep told me that Rapture was the first rap song they’d ever heard,” Stein says.
Harry is used to being an outlier. “Early on, some people thought that I should get out of rock’n’roll,” she says. “It was a boys’ club.”
Now music is dominated by solo female pop artists. “Everything has turned into this grand pop music,” Stein says. “A showgirl, Las Vegas approach to putting on shows. Rock’n’roll is like jazz at this point — it’s kind of a niche thing.”
Born in Miami, Harry was adopted as a baby by a lower-middle- class couple who owned a gift shop in New Jersey and changed her name from Angela to Deborah. Her birth mother was a concert pianist, which may be where her musical talent came from, but she never granted Harry permission to make contact.
Stein grew up in a Jewish family in Brooklyn, where he was expelled from high school for having long hair. He met Harry, a former Playboy bunny, at a show by the Stilettoes, one of her early bands. “I was very taken with Debbie,” he says. “And I joined the band shortly thereafter.”
“We grew to know each other pretty quickly,” Harry says. That was in 1973, and they formed Blondie the next year. She and Stein were a couple for more than ten years, but carried on working together after the split. How straightforward was that? “I don’t think anything in the world of love is straightforward,” she says. “But being in a band you get used to the idea of dealing with egos. I mean, you have to work with editors, right, Ed? Ha-ha.”
It’s small potatoes, to be honest, compared with everything else that has happened to them. A man exposed himself to Harry when she was eight, the jazz drummer Buddy Rich propositioned her at 12 and in the early Seventies a burglar raped her at knifepoint after following her and Stein into their loft on the Lower East Side.
They also endured some grim years when they lived together in the Eighties, Harry struggling with heroin addiction, Stein with an autoimmune disease that almost killed him. They owed millions in taxes, lost their home and struggled to pay his medical bills as he lay in hospital, close to death.
You can see why Harry needs that dark sense of humour — she even claimed to be more upset by the guitars the burglar took than being raped. She and Stein often faced their despair with a rock’n’roll panache — at one low financial ebb he sold a painting by a friend of his, Jean-Michel Basquiat. “I sold the Basquiat when he was still alive and nobody really knew what he was going to be,” Stein says. “I regret it in retrospect.”
Worse was to come in 2023, when Stein and Sicuranza’s 19- year-old daughter, Akira, died after accidentally overdosing on fentanyl. “I thought I presented my own drug experiences in a negative light to our kids, but I’m racked with guilt that any discussions might have been misconstrued,” Stein wrote on social media.
“I will grieve for the rest of my life along with Barbara Sicuranza and Chris Stein, her mom and dad, and her sister Vali, at our terrible loss,” Harry wrote in another post. “Fentanyl is too dangerous, seductive and easy to get.”
Then, in April, exactly 50 years after joining Blondie, the drummer Clem Burke died of cancer. Harry remembers how the band would take a bow at the end of shows. “Clem would come out from behind the drums and it would take him a couple of minutes or so to get to the front of the stage. He would always be dripping wet and put his arm around me, this big bear of a guy. I will miss that.”
How do they keep going in the face of all this? “Chris has always been an optimist,” Harry says.
He does sound remarkably upbeat when talking about the irregular heartbeat condition that has stopped him touring. “I did the last two tours sitting down and finally I couldn’t make it any more,” he says, adding brightly: “At the same time I realised how much I really hated hotels and airports.” And now? “I’m a little weaker, but I don’t think it’s going to do me in.”
For Harry, Blondie is an escape from the trials of life. “I don’t feel privileged, except for the fact that I’ve been able to have a career in music,” she says. “What am I going to do — walk around being myself?”
Money isn’t an issue any more after the pair sold the public performance rights to their music in 2020, although Stein is kicking himself over the timing. “We did it very early in the trend of artists selling their catalogues and we should have held out for more money.”
Harry feels good, she says. “I don’t have as much endurance, but I can focus my energy a lot better. The new album — we really put it out on that one.” Due for release next year, it’s called High Noon and features songs written for them by Johnny Marr, once of the Smiths, and Glen Matlock, the former bassist with the Sex Pistols — whose featured song, Sleepwalking, “sounds just like a Pistols song to me”, Harry says.
They are itching to add new songs to their live repertoire, given that they have been playing many of them for almost half a century. “Matt Katz-Bohen, my keyboard player, has recently played with Bob Dylan and he complained that Bob would change the song in the middle of the show or right before you go on,” Harry says. “But then I think to myself, my God, he’s been playing since the Sixties — no wonder he wants to change the songs.” The two Blondie numbers that never cloy, she says, are Heart of Glass and Rapture. “You do songs so many times that it becomes mechanical. With those two songs, for me it’s never mechanical.”
There are certainly no plans to quit. “Sometimes when I walk out on stage and there’s such a terrific response, I feel like I’d better stop while I’m ahead,” Harry says. “But no, it’s still joyful.”
No Exit (Remastered & Expanded) is out on Oct 31
