Blondie’s Debbie Harry Reflects on Her Past, But Has No Regrets

Blondie’s Debbie Harry has had a pretty extraordinary life. From being a Playboy bunny, a muse to Andy Warhol, and a pioneer of new wave music, the singer has endless stories to tell.

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“You look back and everything looks a little bit rosier, but it was a good time. It was a good time to be a young person,” she told The Guardian after her autobiography, “Face It,” was released. “Everybody in the 70s was living in squats and everything; it was kind of romantic.”

There were also many difficult events in her life. And while some people get older and wish they’d done some things differently, Harry is not one of those people.

Debbie Harry Used Drugs to Try to Stabilize Her ‘Emotional Rollercoaster’

In an interview with Vanity Fair, Harry revealed that she and her ex-boyfriend and former bandmate, Chris Stein, “were struggling with a lot of stuff” in the early 1980s. Although Blondie had sold 40 million records and had several hits, including “One Way Or Another,” “Heart of Glass,” and “Call Me,” they were broke, and also in the throes of drug addiction.

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“We needed to do some drugs to stabilize ourselves from some kind of emotional rollercoaster. Had we gone to a shrink, we probably would have been severely medicated,” she said. “But that also was a sign of the times, because drugs were everywhere. In my social circle, people would come over and just do drugs together.”

When Stein ended up in the hospital due to the autoimmune disease pemphigus vulgaris, a rare chronic blistering skin disease, Harry would bring him heroin in the hospital. She wrote in “Face It” that “doctors and nurses knew that he was high all the time, but cast a blind eye because it kept him relatively pain-free and mentally less tortured.”

Harry Believes Life Was a Lot Different in the 1970s and 80s

To Harry, life was simply different then. “It was just a very small, elitist art world,” she told Vanity Fair. “Up in a loft. Look at my pictures! Aren’t they neat? Yeah? Okay, let’s do some drugs to celebrate, then. It was just a fashionable situation.”

She acknowledges that she went to treatment and eventually got straight, but “at that time it was part of the scene,” she insists. “Everything was like, ‘Hey, man, this is the latest drug and this is the newest drug and here comes the next drug and you really ought to try this!’ So I tried it. Whatever it was.”

“It was a different atmosphere,” she admits. Nonetheless, Harry believes that life is too short for remorse. With life, you have to accept the good along with the bad.

Now, I feel it was a waste of time, but I don’t regret having had the experiences,” she said. “I can’t go around regretting everything in my life; that would be such a waste.”