CLEM BURKE (1955– 2025)

Clem dressed to impress; Elvis Ramone backstage at the Apollo in Glasgow, Scotland, 

December 31, 1979. 

(Photo by Bob Gruen.)

A PhD is generally awarded to those who have attained the highest academic achievement in a given discipline, be it scholastic or physical. I long ago realised that Clem Burke, whose death from cancer at the age of 70 was announced today, merited one in both. He was Blondie’s powerhouse, a tireless, rock-solid drummer whose energy never flagged – just listen to ‘Dreaming’ – but he was also a friend to anyone and everyone, from the big stars to the up-and-coming hopefuls and all the fans too, a bit of an Anglophile ever eager to share his knowledge or learn from others. In this way he amassed an encyclopaedic wisdom about every record of merit ever released, and every decent rock and roll band too, US and UK and everywhere else, from the fifties right up into the new millennium. What’s more, he did it for the sheer love of it. 

He was also a friend of mine. We first met way back in the 1970s, in New York, when Blondie were learning their trade at CBGBs and I wrote about them for Melody Maker. We bumped into one another again and again over the years, most recently at Blondie shows in London during the 2010s. He always put me on the guest list. It would have been about 15 years ago when he approached me to help him write a book about his life and we went out to lunch at an Italian restaurant on Berners Street. I encouraged him all I could but it never happened, though he did send me some sample text which I edited for him and returned. He requested that I keep it confidential and I complied, and, unfortunately, no longer have any of his text on my computer. 

        The passage I remember most was about his wide-eyed wonder at finding himself in some backstage dressing room somewhere with most of the Travelling Wilburys, Bob Dylan and George Harrison amongst them. He recalled the dialogue which was as droll as Michael Palin’s sleeve notes on the first Wilbury album. Whenever I saw him after that I got on his back about his book, but it never happened and now it never will. 

        But what a book it would have been for aside from playing at every Blondie gig ever, Burke played his drums for, amongst many others, Pete Townshend, Bob Dylan, Eurythmics, Iggy, and once or twice for a sort of Ramones tribute band, calling himself Elvis Ramone. He was also a member of a group called The Empty Hearts that featured others from name bands, and he loved it so much he even played in a Blondie tribute band when the real thing was between tours. 

        Clem sent me a copy of the first Empty Hearts album that I reviewed here on Just Backdated. “The obvious influence is the tougher end of sixties power pop,” I wrote, “those wonderful mid-decade singles by the Stones, Who and Kinks, but I think the Hearts have dug a bit deeper into their record collections and listened again to Beck/Page era Yardbirds and Roy Wood’s Move, and they also tip their hat to Cheap Trick and the garage rock that Lenny Kaye unearthed in 1972 for the first Nuggets compilation. Either way, all four of these grade-A students of rock history must have had a whale of a time writing and playing songs that pay tribute to their formative Brit influences yet at the same bring them into the modern era with crisp production, faultless playing and a rippling feel for the music, passion really, that rocks hard from beginning to end.” 

The Empty Hearts CD, its design a pastiche of The Who's debut LP, with Clem in Op-Art top.

        And in 2017, reviewing a Blondie show at London’s Roundhouse, I wrote. “Burke is still the band’s engine room, unrelenting, staunch and sturdy. I probably wasn’t alone in noticing that Clem wore – no doubt deliberately – a New York City t-shirt in the design favoured by John Lennon that for the encore he had changed to one emblazoned with the logo of CBGBs. Always the Blondie man most respectful of rock’s past, he is a showman drummer in the tradition of Keith Moon, chucking his sticks into the air, tumbling around the kit and at one point adopting one of those Moon poses with one arm high in the air and the other at right angles. He is largely responsible for bringing many of Blondie’s songs to a thumping close, soloing briefly before the final crashing chord, and tireless throughout.”

        Clem looked like a rock star. He wore his hair in a style that recalled The Beatles in their Revolver period, and he always dressed to impress, often like a Mod. Also, finally, he idolised Keith Moon. Blondie were in the midst of a European tour on September 7, 1978, the day Keith died, and two days later, played at the Hammersmith Odeon. “I went downstairs in the hotel and all the British tabloids had the headline ‘Keith Moon Is Dead’, so that day became kind of a dream sequence for me,” he told Blondie biographer Kris Needs later. “We played the Hammersmith Odeon and I wanted to get some gasoline and an axe to use on the drums and no one would give them to me. So I threw my whole drum kit in the audience, not wanting them back, because I wanted to sacrifice them for Keith. And the roadies went and got them back, which I was upset about. It was a real emotional time for me because he had meant so much to me.”

        RIP Clem. 

WHO'S THAT GIRL? Melody Maker 50 Years Ago This Week

Fifty years ago this week I wrote my first piece for Melody Maker on the bands that played in downtown New York, in places like CBGBs and Club 82. The photographer Bob Gruen was my guide and in Club 82 he introduced me to a beautiful girl called Debbie, one of three singers with a group called The Stilettos. 

I visited both CBGBs and Club 82 several times before I wrote the piece and it mentions many acts, the Stilettos among them. I now realise that this was the first ever mention of Debbie Harry in a British newspaper, music or otherwise, and Chris Stein graciously confirms this is in his recent memoir Under A Rock. A Bob Gruen photo accompanied the piece and when I got my hands on a copy I called Debbie at the beauty salon where she worked in those days and we arranged to meet so I could give her that issue of MM. She was very excited to have her picture in a paper, any paper, for the first time. I found the picture below, which was probably taken by Bob, on the internet and if my memory serves me correctly, this is the dress she was wearing on the night I first saw her, so the chances are it was taken that night.

This is the unedited piece I wrote for MM, issue dated July 6, 1974. 

“HEY MAN, what’s happening?” The inevitable hip American greeting is accompanied with “gimme five” (an invitation to shake hands) and responded to with: “Hey man, what’s happening with you?”

    The cynics who say that nothing’s happening in New York today are very wrong. There are dozens of immature young bands playing in scruffy late night places in Greenwich Village and the Bowery every evening, creating a similar atmosphere to that which existed in London in the early sixties.

    Excitement, sweat, crude and simple music and a “take-it-or-leave-it” attitude mingle together in this new generation of bands.

    Cynics dismiss them as trash. They will point out, quite correctly, that they’re not as good as so-and-so who can fill Madison Square Garden, but it’s a lame attitude. Rock must always look towards the future.

    In these seedy clubs inhabited by barely competent musicians lies that future. Somewhere, in among them, is the next generation equivalent of The Rolling Stones or The Who.

    In the same way that the Stones and The Who began their careers as brash and exciting clashes with the accepted music business establishment, so these New York bands clash with their superiors in rock. Through the passage of time the Stones and the Who and countless others have become the establishment they once clashed with so fiercely: the new young bands are railing against this establishment in the same way.

    While record companies promote their newly signed artists with expensive parties for press and radio jocks at established clubs, the new bands just play for the kids. They might not be very good technically but then so were all of today’s rock giants in their formative years. A parallel could easily be drawn between London’s pub rock and these brash new Manhattan bands and their shameless punk rock, overtones of bisexuality and happy untogetherness.

    Two similarities stand out immediately: both types of bands are young musicians from a different generation than the accepted heavies and their followers, and in both cases many of the groups have yet to sign record contracts if, indeed, they will ever be offered one.

    Both types are doing it for love.

    But here the lines draw apart. In the case of the British pub rockers, it seems to be a desire on their part to return to basics, to pull away from the accepted course that rock has taken over the past five years (all original numbers, masses of equipment, blistering guitar solos demonstrating the instrumental ability of the lead guitarist) and simply display general good taste in repertoire culled from the last ten years.

    The music is all important and the band takes second place.

    With the New Yorkers the opposite occurs. The effect is paramount to the music. Shock and outrage is the name of the game: the more freakish, the more outlandish the fetishes of the personnel and the more bizarre their clothes the better. It’s not much more than grabbing a guitar, learning a few chords, applying lipstick, and bingo!

    In general, the music is pretty duff, crash bang repeated riffs coupled with an amateurishness that smacks of taking the plunge before they’re ready. They seem to thrive on tuneless singing and have little concept of sound balance. Good PA systems are probably out of their financial reach, anyway.

    Nevertheless, these misgivings are lost in the atmosphere they create from a mixed bag of influences from rock over the past eight years. They’ve taken ideas from the Stones’ lawlessness, the Who’s punk, Bowie’s bisexuality and Zeppelin’s riffs.

    Who are they? Starting at the top we have the New York Dolls, who are no newcomers nowadays. Regardless of musical merit, they cannot be accused of jumping on the bandwagon as they set it rolling in the first place.

    The Dolls are really outside the confines of underground New York by now: they’ve released a couple of albums and toured on a countrywide basis. They’ve even been over to England.

    In the wake of the Dolls are scores more, too numerous to mention and chances are I’m missing some here and now. In no particular order we have Teenage Lust, the Fast, Jet Black, Television, the Stilettos, the Miamis, Palace, the Harlots of 42nd St., Star Theatre, Wayne County, Another Pretty Face and the Brats. At the time of writing some may be splitting, some may no longer exist and personnel from two or more may have formed a new band.

    They play at places like the 82 Club (far and away the most popular), the Coventry in Queens, CBGBs in the Bowery, Upstairs at Max’s (occasionally) and the Mushroom in the Village. Without exception, they’re seedy low-spots in a city that has managed to encompass the best of the best and the worst of the worst.

    ‘Phone up the 82 Club any time of the day or night and you receive a recorded message: “Dance, dance, dance,” says an oldish-sounding man. “Dance the night away. This is where the Stars hang out. David Bowie, John Lennon. Free roast buffet on Sundays and live music every Wednesday. This Wednesday...”

    Almost all of the above bands have played the 82 Club and even if they haven’t, the musicians who comprise them can be found down there. I’ve seen Bowie there once, and Lennon reportedly once paid a ten minute visit but left after being surrounded by kids.

    It costs anything between two and five dollars to get inside, depending on the night of the week or whether there’s a band. It’s more like an English discotheque than a club, but the premises (and name) have a long history. From the 1940s up to the end of the sixties it was one of New York’s most glamorous drag theatres.

    Female impersonators, transvestites and their ilk made the 82 their home, and even today the element of bi-sexuality runs strong. On the door and behind the bar are some of New York’s more celebrated butch women.

    But back to the bands. They play on Wednesdays and generally pack the place. Never had I seen the 82 more crowded than about three weeks back when Wayne County topped the bill over the Stilettos. Wayne came out in full drag which was pretty stunning, but the music was overly loud and under inspired for my tastes. He went down a bomb though.

    The Stilettos, who opened up, had more potential but less rehearsal. Fronted by a cuddly platinum blonde called Debbi [sic], they’re a girl vocal trio with a male guitar/bass/drums back-up band.

    The three chicks take turns to sing solo while the other two chant away behind, and some of the songs were well worth putting on vinyl. Ninety-five per cent were original, but the style was taken from the late ‘fifties era of vocal groups.

    In the same vein, but slicker and with an added male singer, are Teenage Lust who’ve been going the rounds for over two years now. Again there’s three girls aptly titled the Lustettes who are the focal point of the group. The girls have carefully choreographed routines which they stick to with rigid discipline.

    Their singer wears a white tail suit and white topper, and jumps around a lot, easing himself from the stage on to any piece of furniture available that will stand his weight. They were loud and visually exciting, but I felt the material let them down, especially when the girls weren’t on stage.

    Television are another whose expertise is overshadowed by their enthusiasm: I saw them a few months back when they were woefully under-rehearsed and little more than a joke. Last weekend at CBGBs (far less populated than the 82), they did better.

    They’re crude but young and the bass player needs a crash course in fundamentals before they’ll get any better. The second time I saw them they reminded me of The Searchers with their unison vocal work and ringing, trebly guitars. Again, they did all original material.

    Another Pretty Face are a five piece band who don’t rely entirely on their own material, but pick intelligently from British material which never caught on in America. They plunder savagely from Roxy Music and T. Rex and put over excellent cover versions.

    Though their initial impact is with the gay rock liberation movement, and the singer imitates David Bowie depressingly well, there’s talent beneath the make-up that’s gotta show through sooner or later. I think it will. Star Theatre actually drove me out of CBGBs the other night when I’d gone along to catch the Stilettos for a second time. They feature Eric “Love” Emerson on vocals, a one-time protégé of Andy Warhol who comes on rather like Arthur Brown, lighting candles and squatting like a Russian folk dancer to sing his songs.

    It was the volume that drove me away rather than the actual show as they’re as tight a band than any around. After the happy untogetherness of the Stilettos it was too much to take: miking up drums in a place no larger than the average living room is surely going too far.

    There are the Miamis who everyone assures me are “better than so and so,” and the Fast are forever filling my letter box with invitations to go and see them. 

BLONDIE, Brighton Centre, April 28, 2022

To Brighton for a Blondie concert and the realisation that what I’ve missed the most during the Covid-induced famine of live gigs is the feeling you get in your chest from a loud electric bass, the deep-rooted foundation of a rock band in action as they deliver their songs in the best way imaginable. To a certain extent I can recreate vocals and wailing guitars on my hi-fi system, and even the drums if I punch up the volume, but no way can I reproduce the boom of a Fender Precision plugged into a big amp and big speaker cabinet, then dispatched through a PA system into a decent-sized auditorium such as Brighton Centre. 

        It helped that the bass in question was wielded, deftly but unobtrusively, by Glen Matlock, the Sex Pistol jettisoned from the group for displaying too much in the way of musical chops yet lacking the tone-deaf nihilism of his successor. Glen went on to other bands and also became a bass man for hire amongst his peers, and a very good one too, but his arrival in Blondie – at three weeks’ notice, he tells me – came as a bit of a surprise, though it evens out the generational divide between the three younger members of the group as it is now constituted, and the two older hands, singer Debbie Harry and unrelenting drummer Clem Burke.

        With founder, principal songwriter and guitarist Chris Stein taking a sabbatical on doctors’ orders, it is left to Tommy Kessler and newcomer Andee Blacksugar – what a great rock’n’roll name – to handle the guitar duties between them, switching leads and generally adopting a sort of twin guitar duo role that reminded me a bit of the sparring that went on in Lynyrd Skynyrd. Both sing well, as does keyboard player Matt Katz-Bohen, and Glen chips in a bit too, so the vocal backdrop to their revered singer is never less than imposing. 

        But the spotlight, as ever, is on Debbie. Remarkably, this foremost New York punk siren, graduate with honours from CBGBs, turns a mature 77 in July but rather than occupy a rocking chair with a cat and bundle of knitting in her lap she prefers to rock the stage dressed in red leopard-skin tights and a black bin liner held in place with a wide red belt, her blonde hair flying wildly in all directions, her poise as energetic and turbulent as ever. Debbi’s voice remains clear and strident, though she wisely eschewed straining for some of the top notes in the group’s gold-plated catalogue of hits. Thankfully, she abandoned her sunglasses midway through the show so we could see her still-handsome features in close up on the video screens each side of the stage and, having taken the measure of the audience, she seemed sincerely delighted to be singing her songs again after the Covid postponements, grateful that Brighton’s Blondie fans turned out in such large numbers to see her band. 

        It was, by and large, a greatest hits show, accompanied by plenty of imaginative, occasionally quirky, personalised graphics on a large screen at the back. I liked how King Kong’s great paw held Debbie, the Lichtenstein comic and op-art style visuals, and the footage of the group from their Parallel Lines days. Someone had even drawn a glass heart that smashed into smithereens. 

        The concert opened with ‘X-Offender’ and closed, just over 90 minutes later, with ‘One Way Or Another’. The sound was fat and ballsy and well-mixed throughout, the band well-drilled, the set clearly and cleverly rehearsed to align with the visuals. Of the generous 21 songs delivered, 15 were from the 1970s, with the remaining six, among them ‘Maria’, including only two, ‘Long Time’ and ‘Fragments’, from their most recent album, 2017’s Pollinator which they promoted heavily on their last UK tour the same year and which I rated very highly. I wouldn’t have complained if they played two or three more from it. 

        Still, it was the hits the crowd wanted, and they weren’t disappointed. After ‘Sunday Girl’, ‘Picture This’ and ‘The Tide Is High’ there was a slight lull during ‘What I Heard’ but the concert moved up a gear during ‘Atomic’, Debbie inciting a mass singalong on that lovely ‘Oh, your hair is beautiful’ line, and thereafter she never looked back. Some songs were neatly segued together, ‘Fade Away And Radiate’ into ‘Tide’ – which featured two unexpected grungy solos - and ‘Shayla’ into a power-packed ‘Union City Blue’. The four-song pre-encore hell-for-leather ride through ‘Rapture’, ‘Maria’, ‘Dreaming’ and ‘Heart Of Glass’, heralded by jungle drums, seemed like a knockout blow, but they returned for four more, ‘No Exit’, ‘Fragments’ – an odd choice in the light of its complexity – ‘Call Me’ and ‘One Way Or Another’, another mass singalong. At this, the ninety-minute mark, I couldn’t help but be impressed by Debbie’s stamina and, of course, Clem’s unrelenting assault on his drums, a pace he sustained throughout with characteristic resilience. 

        The 2022 Blondie tour visits Hull tonight then five more UK cities before transferring to America’s west coast, Mexico and, in August, some big shows in the east, including a couple in their native New York. If what I saw in Brighton last night is anything to go by, there’s still plenty of life in Blondie, with or without founder Chris Stein.

        Finally, I should add that due to slow service in a burger joint on nearby Duke Street, we regrettably missed most of Johnny Marr’s opening set but the four songs I heard, among them ’How Soon Is Now’ and ‘There Is A Light A Light That Never Goes Out’ sounded terrific and, as ever, the former Smiths guitarist looked great too. 

MY STINT AS MM’S MAN IN AMERICA Part 19 – 1974 continued

My Melody Maker credentials made it remarkably easy to infiltrate New York’s rock’n’roll scene. The paper was selling 200,000 copies a week back in the UK and labels were well aware that coverage in MM would help their acts sell records there. I soon became a familiar face among the rock’n’roll cognoscenti. I saw the same men and women at clubs like the Bottom Line and Bitter End or backstage at gigs or at record company parties and was soon on Christian name terms with all the city’s music writers, PRs, and a few managers and concert promoters. It was a bit of a closed world but, boy, did we enjoy ourselves. 

        As far as I was aware, there were three rock photographers operating in New York in those days: Bob Gruen, who was everywhere that mattered, Leee (note the three e’s) Black Childers, who was outrageously gay and favoured the glam world, and Chuck Pulin, who seemed the least well connected, at least to me, and worked for Sounds. Leee’s pictures had already appeared in MM when Roy Hollingworth was our man in NY but my instincts told me Bob was the man to approach as my photographer of choice to accompany me to interviews and shows where I needed a picture to illustrate my story. We cut a deal that suited both of us. Any picture he took where access was enabled by me belonged to Melody Maker for one month. Thereafter it was his to sell to all and sundry in perpetuity. We saw a lot of rock together and became good friends. Still are. 

Bob operated out of a cramped apartment on the Lower West Side and could be counted on to fill me in on whatever was happening in the New York rock world. Every time I called Bob he’d say, “What’s happening, man?” and sometimes he’d call me and open up the conversation with the same question. Of course, Bob always knew what was happening more than anyone else I knew in New York, whether it was on the streets or in the clubs. It was instinct with him, and I liked the fact that he was just as enthused about taking pictures of some unsigned punk band as he was taking pictures of The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin or John Lennon, with whom he developed a close relationship. Bob was an energetic, wiry little fellow with afro-styled hair. He drove a beat-up old VW Beetle, always wore a black leather jacket, t-shirt and jeans and more often than not had a tiny spliff clamped between his lips. For all his energy, he was as laid-back as anyone I’d ever met, unflappable, Mr Cool. Still is.  

Bob Gruen. I think this is a self portrait. 

Inevitably, it was Bob who introduced me to the New York Underground. It was a matter of routine for me to write about acts, famous or otherwise, that were contracted to record labels but it was quite another thing to venture out on my own initiative to see an act that wasn’t signed and wasn’t expecting any interest from a paper like MM. I’d heard a bit about rowdy young bands playing in a rough downtown club on the Bowery called CBGBs and in a club not far away called Club 82, and I decided to check out this scene for myself. I was a bit unsure about all this so I called Bob for advice. He suggested I join him in a couple of night’s time in Club 82 where a band he liked called The Stilettos was playing. “There’s this singer, a blonde girl, looks just like Marilyn Monroe,” he said on the phone. “Check her out man, you won’t believe it.”

Club 82 was an old-style drag club with mirrors everywhere, famous in its day for its risqué floor shows but now fallen on hard times, and the girls who worked it, all of them of a certain age with short cropped hair and dressed in dark men’s suits with buttoned-up shirts and ties, had figured that a bit of rock’n’roll might keep the creditors at bay. For a while it became a sort of sister club to CBGBs, of which more later, but it was never as well-known. Still, it was fun, with more of a party atmosphere than CBGBs. On the night Bob suggested I paid my $3 on the door – no freebies for MM writers here – and went inside, bought a beer and found him by the stage, camera at the ready.  

The Stilettos turned out to be supporting Wayne/Jane County, with whom I was already familiar because I’d seen him/her at Max’s Kansas City. The support act, The Stilettos, was a trio, backed by a four piece, who took their cue from the girl groups of the pre-Beatles Sixties. There was a black girl, a redhead and a blonde who stood in the middle and appeared to be the leader, and Bob was right. She wore a clingy, low-cut, full-length, off-the-shoulder, satin ball gown in all gold that flattered her figure, and she was a dead-ringer for Marilyn, with platinum hair, a cute smile and strawberry lips. Their set was under-rehearsed and short – everybody’s was down there – and afterwards Bob took me backstage to meet her. 

Her name, of course, was Debbie. Up close she was incredibly beautiful, but she was also cool, committed and she knew her pop. I tried not to let her appearance interfere with my interviewing technique as we talked about this and that while Bob took some more pictures. She told me she wanted to be a full-time singer but she had a daytime job in a New Jersey beauty parlour right now. She hoped someday to get into the music business full time. I told her I’d stay in touch and she gave me her phone number. Bob took some more pictures, and I went away and, in a week or two, mentioned her and The Stilettos in a generic piece I wrote about several unsigned New York bands who were operating downtown. 

        “Never had I seen the 82 more crowded than about three weeks back than when Wayne County topped the bill over The Stilettos,” I wrote. “Wayne came out in full drag which was pretty stunning, but the music was overly loud and under inspired for my tastes. He went down a bomb though.” 

        The piece mentioned 10 other acts, but I found room for Debbie. “The Stilettos, who opened up, had more potential but less rehearsal. Fronted by a cuddly platinum blonde called Debbi (sic), they’re a girl vocal trio with a male guitar/bass/drums back-up band. The three chicks take turns to sing solo while the other two chant away behind, and some of the songs were well worth putting on vinyl. Ninety-five per cent were original, but the style was taken from the late 'fifties era of vocal groups.”

        I have good reason to believe that the 74 words in that second paragraph – out of a total of about 1,500 in the whole piece – were the first ever to be written about Debbie Harry that appeared in a British paper, music or otherwise.

The Stilettos on stage at the 82 Club. Left to right: Chris Stein, Debbie H, Elda Gentile, Rosa Ross & Frankie Harlot. Picture by Bob Gruen.

It just so happened that Bob gave me a few pictures of Debbie that I sent over to London and, somewhat inevitably in the light of her appearance, someone on the subs desk at MM opted to use them to illustrate the feature. A week or two later that issue of MM landed on my doorstep so I called her up at the beauty parlour where she worked and told her that her picture was in Melody Maker. She was very excited about this. It was evidently the first time she’d ever had her picture in a magazine, or so she told me, and she seemed desperate to get her hands on a copy. 

        A night or two later she drove up to my apartment on East 78th Street in an old green banger with bench seats. I gave her three copies of the paper and took her out to dinner at a Japanese restaurant on the West Side. Over sushi and tempura and sake she told me that The Stilettos were breaking up and she was forming a new band with her boyfriend, Chris Stein, their guitarist, its name as yet undecided. I took note of this and would mentioned her plans in my next MM New York news column, no doubt the first mention of the fledgling Blondie anywhere. 

        It was around midnight when Debbie Harry drove back through Central Park to drop me off at my place over on the East Side. Before getting out of her car I pulled her towards me across the bench seat, kissed her on the lips and invited her inside. But I was too late – she’d already met that other Chris.

FACE IT by Debbie Harry

It is a popular misconception that once they have tasted chart success and seen their faces in magazines, music stars like Debbie Harry enjoy a lifestyle of great comfort, sustained by sizeable royalty cheques from past endeavours and a limitless flow of substantial offers for future projects. Think again. “We were broke,” writes Harry in her newly published memoir, referring to the period in 1982 when Chris Stein’s ill-health brought about the cessation of Blondie. “What else could you be but broke when you’ve sold more than forty million records, you’re at the top of your career, and you’ve worked nonstop for seven years with no vacation…”

         It’s a sobering moment in an autobiography with its fair share of sobering moments, a hard life lived to the full for richer and poorer, in sickness and health, the only compromises forced upon her by commercial decisions in which her opinion was neither sought nor acted upon. This may explain the rather detached and occasionally bitter tone in which Harry recounts many of her rock’n’roll experiences, of which she has a lorry load. When David Bowie shows her his dick while Iggy Pop watches on she expresses no alarm, merely wonders why Iggy didn’t do the same.

         Born in 1945 and christened Angela Trimble, she was adopted as a baby and re-christened Deborah Harry by her new family. She grew up in New Jersey and became fascinated with the way she looked from an early age, experimenting with make-up and creating her own style by blending colourful thrift shop clothes in ways that made her stand out from the crowd. It didn’t take her long to escape to New York where she worked as a model, a secretary, a waitress at Max’s Kansas City and as a Playboy bunny. She is particularly good at evoking the scuzzy ambience of downtown NY where she lived in various seedy apartments in the late sixties, a street-life environment rich with drugs, promiscuity and physical danger. No stranger to all three, her survival instincts would stand her in good stead for decades to come. 

         Falling in with the artsy Bohemian crowd that patronised Max’s she decided her calling was in music and in 1974 joined a girl trio called The Stillettoes. Chris Stein, formerly a roadie and bassist with Eric Emerson’s Magic Tramps, contemporaries of The New York Dolls, became their guitarist and her lover, and the two soon paired off to form Blondie. Both enjoyed dabbling in heroin. “For those times when I wanted to blank out parts of my life or when I was dealing with some depression, there was nothing better than heroin,” she writes. “Nothing.”

         As the group ascended the pop ladder there were inevitable contradictions in their identity. Was Debbie Harry ‘Blondie’ or was ‘Blondie’ a group – a conundrum that didn’t always sit well with the other members. “My character in Blondie was partly visual homage to Marilyn [Monroe] and partly a statement about the good old double standard,” she writes. “My Blondie character was an inflatable doll but with a dark, provocative, aggressive side. I was playing it up yet I was very serious.”

         Once the hits started coming the group found themselves on an album-tour-album-tour treadmill that did them no favours, and Harry blames the relentless schedule for the illness that debilitated Stein. Not only was he the musical lynchpin in the band, she points out, but as her partner he felt responsible for her welfare, a double burden of responsibility that eroded his well-being. Crowd disturbances on tour, wretched fatigue and the need for her, as figurehead, to do additional promotion work all begin to mount up in a way that suggests tragedy is just around the corner. Which, indeed, it was.

         By 1981 Blondie were amongst the most popular groups on the planet but they had little to show for it. It was their misfortune to switch labels after one album and incur a $1 million ‘transfer fee’ debt against future earnings. Their first manager enriched himself at their expense, taxes went unpaid and when the IRS caught up with them they lost their house, her car and even some of her clothes. They even took away Stein’s health insurance. “Anything we could have done wrong business- and management-wise, we did it,” writes Harry. “We had terrible contracts and the people we paid to look after us were naturally more concerned with what was in it for them. We got taken.”

         Harry debunks the myth that she was some kind of ‘Mother Theresa’ as she nursed Stein back to health. “We were partners. Of course, I would look after him,” she writes, adding that she kept him supplied with heroin while he was in hospital. “I think the doctors and nurses knew he was high all the time but cast a blind eye because it kept him relatively pain-free and mentally less tortured.”

         Still, Harry’s friend the film director John Waters is not a million miles off the mark when he remarks: “Debbie blinked for two minutes while she was looking after Chris and Madonna stole her career.”

         The final third of the book is devoted to many film roles that Harry undertook in the post-Blondie years, along with solo albums. By this time she and Stein had dissolved their romantic partnership but there is something very touching in the way she writes about their ongoing friendship, his marriage and becoming the father to two girls for whom Harry acts as godmother. Then Blondie reunite in circumstances far removed from the chaos of yore, an orderly, money-making institution in keeping with the business-like structure of the music industry as configured from the 1990s to the present day, none of which makes for reading as interesting as their disorderly, loss-making past.

         Harry appears to feel the same way. Musing on a compilation album titled The Best Of Blondie, she writes: “I’ve been trying to think of what the best of Blondie was for me. I’ve come to the conclusion it was the early days of the band when we were struggling artists, scuttling around the Lower East Side just trying to get something going, walking home from work before dawn through the dark, dusty, sweet-dirt smell of the city. Everybody got by on no money. Nobody talked about mainstream success. Who wanted to be mainstream? What we were doing was so much better than that.”

         Face It has been written in collaboration with Sylvie Simmons, the British-born, San Francisco-based music writer whose outstanding biography of Leonard Cohen is reviewed elsewhere on Just Backdated. I came away from the book with the feeling that Simmons’ job wasn’t easy; Harry seems a reluctant memoirist unwilling to let us dig too deeply into her soul. Though each chapter opens with some philosophical, occasionally whimsical, digression, by the turn of the page we’re into stories that are more about the people, places and events in Harry’s extraordinary life than about the life itself. Bearing that in mind, it would be interesting to know whether the book resulted from an approach by the publisher with a generous offer to Harry, or whether the book was her idea in the first place. I suspect the former but I’m still glad she got around to it.

         Finally, Face It is magnificently illustrated throughout with hitherto unseen photographs, some from Harry’s childhood, and there are almost 50 pages of painted portraits sent to her by fans. The text is not lengthy, just succinct and mostly to the point, and the book is printed on coated stock that enables the many illustrations to be reproduced in four-colour. Far denser than the paper used in most books, it is therefore much heavier to carry (or mail) than similar books with 360 pages. There is no index.

BLONDIE, The Roundhouse, May 3, 2017

Anyone labouring under the misapprehension that Blondie is an oldies act sustaining their career into the 21^st Century by relying on a catalogue of juicy hits from yesteryear would have been rudely awakened at London’s Roundhouse last night. The group’s tight and assured 15-song set included no fewer than five new songs from the album Pollinator, due for release tomorrow, and it must have been heartening for them to observe how the packed crowd responded, evidently enjoying the new material almost as much as they did tried and tested favourites like ‘Rapture’, ‘Heart Of Glass’ and ‘Atomic’. This probably had something to do with the fact that they sounded a bit like Blondie of old, of which more later.

Indeed, it is a tribute to the confidence of the present-day Blondie that three of their biggest hits – ‘Sunday Girl’, ‘The Tide Is High’ (both UK number ones) and ‘Denis (Denee)’ (their UK chart debut at number two) – went unplayed. This is a supercharged, thoroughly modern Blondie, match fit through extensive touring; together now since 2010, when guitarist Tommy Kessler replaced Paul Carbonara, joining the core trio of original members – singer Debbie Harry, guitarist Chris Stein and drummer Clem Burke – alongside relative newcomers Leigh Fox (who arrived in 1999) on bass, and multi-keyboard player Matt Katz-Bohan (2008).

Arriving on stage promptly at ten minutes to nine the group tore into ‘One Way Or Another’, the same opening song as when I last saw them about two and a half years ago at this same venue. On that occasion it was a double bill with Chrissie Hynde, who opened the show, but this time Blondie were on their own, poised and in command of the stage from the outset, and after a slight adjustment to the sound levels – up in the balcony I couldn’t hear the vocals at first – we had lift off.

Throughout the group played before a backdrop that alternated between futuristic films of the sci-fi variety and footage from their first flush of success, and for the first four songs Debbie chose to wear a black smock with the legend ‘Stop Fucking The Planet’ over her red dress, leaving little doubt about her attitude towards the current incumbent of the White House. Almost 40 years to the day from Blondie’s UK debut (Bournemouth, May 17, 1977), their singer is a legend now and rightly so, but she’s no Greta Garbo, shrinking into a closeted hinterland of introspection to grudgingly observe the many who have jumped on the bandwagon she herself launched. Using the whole of a large stage to greet her fans, she has an affable, warm personality that comes across rather like a favourite aunt, the one in whom you could confide when you were a teenager. As I noted at that earlier show, however, she is still as pretty as a picture, an ageless miracle in fact, her peroxide blonde hair falling over her shoulders and shimmering beneath the spotlights as she sings. Her voice is in good shape too, with solid vocal back up from Stein, Kessler and, most especially, Katz-Bohan. Immediately behind her Clem Burke is fronted by a transparent Perspex screen and from where I was sat it was possible to make out Debbie’s rather ghostly reflection when she was stage centre and the lighting just so. I suspect she wasn’t even aware of the effect.

‘One Way…’ was followed by ‘Hanging On The Telephone’, preceded by a brief explanation from Debbie about the nature of phones in the era it was recorded (1978) in case any in the mobile-fixated audience found the lyrics bewildering. Next up was ‘Fun’, the first of the five new songs and, like the others (‘My Monster’, ‘Fragments’, ‘Long Time’ and ‘Gravity’), it was clear that the group is seeking to replicate the power pop sound with which they triumphed in their heyday. Less experimental in tone and with more emphasis on uplifting choruses, they sound like the Blondie of the late seventies, though ‘Fragments’ goes through varying tempos, and a keyboard solo in ‘Long Time’ sounded like the theme from one of those old westerns when a male voice choir serenaded a coffin up Dead Man’s Hill.

Judiciously blended with the new material were old favourites like ‘Call Me’, which featured Katz-Bohan soloing on one of those portable keyboards around his neck; ‘In The Flesh’, their first hit, given a slow, dramatic but slightly ponderous reading; and ‘Rapture’, which as before segued into ‘Fight For The Right To Party’, a rap extravaganza reflecting Blondie’s early pioneering of this style. It gave Chris Stein a chance to solo, playing with harmonics and feedback, his most upfront contribution to the evening, while Clem turbo powered consistently from the back.

These days Stein seems content to play a supportive role in the stage group, the wise old lion looking on while the younger cubs prance around. ‘Rapture’ aside, he confines himself to chords and riffs, usually on the lower strings on his guitar, cool as ice, permanently shaded, his hair white now, the soul of the group. His fellow stalwart Burke, on the other hand, is still the band’s engine room, unrelenting, staunch and sturdy. I probably wasn’t alone in noticing that Clem wore a New York City t-shirt in the design favoured by John Lennon that for the encore he had changed to one emblazoned with the logo of CBGBs. Always the Blondie man most respectful of rock’s past, he is a showman drummer in the tradition of Keith Moon, chucking his sticks into the air, tumbling around the kit and at one point adopting one of those Moon poses with one arm high in the air and the other at right angles. He is largely responsible for bringing many of Blondie’s songs to a thumping close, soloing briefly before the final crashing chord, and tireless throughout. 

A glorious ‘Atomic’ proved a crowd favourite, greatly extended as Tommy Kessler, as skinny as a whippet, played the guitar hero in an expanded coda, ending up on top of a speaker cabinet and playing behind his neck while Debbie watched from the side, content to let the spotlight fall elsewhere. ‘Heart Of Glass’, more muscular than the discofied hit single, brought the set proper to a close before a three-song encore that opened with ‘Maria’, another sing-along, and closed on a full-tilt ‘Dreaming’, Clem as busy and irreplaceable as ever.

Ninety minutes had passed remarkably quickly, and on my way out I found myself in step behind Keren Woodward, Sarah Dallin and Siobhan Fahey, the reunited Bananarama, unchaperoned and no doubt deep in thought after watching Debbie Harry and her men demonstrate how it should be done. If Bananarama can muster up half the panache of Blondie they’ll do ok.