When middle-age met Harry

By MICHELE HEWITSON

The man buying the Blondie T-shirt would like a carry bag. "It's not K-Mart," growls the guy with the earring. Except for the T-shirt flogger behind the stall set up in the foyer of the Civic - he looks like a roadie - you'd be hard pushed to remember what we are doing here.

There is something wrong with this picture of middle-aged people sipping strawberry-flavoured champenoise and chardonnay. There are tea and coffee urns set out on tables. No drunks, no drugs. This could be a theatre crowd.

But we are here to see Blondie. A band who once ripped apart hotel rooms. Who ripped each other apart in hotel rooms. And who had a member who influenced some of us to wear ripped fishnets and peroxide.

Of course we are not here to see the band at all. We're here to see the blonde: Debbie Harry.

She now prefers to be called Deborah.

As we walk in through the stage door, a telly crew walks out. Harry, they impart, is flat, monosyllabic.

We meet Machine, the tour manager. He has a handshake like a vice. He's not at all sure about this taking of pictures (you think this might be fairly standard) during an interview. Harry hasn't been told, and he's not going to be the one to upset her. I think, "Oh what a wimp."

I have yet to lay eyes on Harry.

She is huddled on a couch winding up a radio interview and she would obviously rather be anywhere than in this room.

As would I. She looks exquisitely bored and utterly intimidating. She does blank beautifully.

She indicates the couch beside her, shrinks further inside her layers, and begins her answers to most questions by saying "I don't know."

The title of the new Blondie album, The Curse of Blondie, is "supposed, actually, to be funny. I don't know if it is. But there you go".

It could be ironic, she supposes, because, "I don't know. I think all of our lives are probably pretty ironic." She is distracted by the camera flash. "I think I really can't do this if he's going to be shooting the whole time. If you don't mind ... "

It is impossible not be distracted by her beauty. It is so finely etched - those sculpted lips and cheek bones - as to be glass-like in its fragility, framed by that peroxided anti-halo.

She has her own long-held fascination with the idea of the blonde; with the effect of blondeness on people. "I was just in love with it. I think that whatever those silver screen sirens were supposed to do for the audiences obviously worked on me and left a great impression on me. And you know, I brought it to rock and roll."

The enduring mystery she says is "probably a combination of red-hot sexuality combined with purity and innocence. It's almost like an impossibility in real life: this sort of fragile shimmering coloration of a human being, then this full woman under - the second half".

This is the problem with an encounter with Harry. It is a very peculiar experience: an "impossibility in real life".

She was engaged, and engaging, talking about the idea of Blondie in the abstract. Talking about herself bores her into that blankness.

Blondie did begin life as a stage character: part cartoon, part parody. Harry is not sure, or no longer sure, about the difference between the character and the person. An attempt to distinguish between performer and the private Harry earns another "I don't know". Blondie has always been "a personal experience. I've always written about personal ideas and experiences. I think at one time I probably felt I had to represent the guys as well as myself. I don't really feel that any more".

Blondie broke up in 1982; they released a reunion album in 1999. In between Harry had a solo career: she sang jazz and did some acting. "I really felt I couldn't go back and be Blondie realistically for the audience. I felt like they had been through a lot with me ... so I felt it was time for a more personal expression."

What everyone knows about Harry is that she was a Playboy Bunny, did plenty of drugs, was the world's most beautiful pop punk princess. That the band stopped talking. That Harry's former lover Chris Stein got very ill. That she nursed him. She was reclusive, came back as a brunette, ended up in the gossip sheets for the crime of not being a size 10. Or aged 20.

A few people, women mainly, are very rude about the fact that a 58-year-old woman should still be cavorting about on a stage. She puts her pixie hood up, the conversational equivalent of a door closing and says, oh, Mick Jagger gets it too. "Ageism is one of the worst prejudices that we face. What alternatives do we have? Age or die. Darling I mean face it: you might as well do it well if you're gonna do it. Choose something you really like and just go out with a big bang."

And here she is, creating a big bang noise on the stage of the Civic. She is wearing - one can't help but notice - a peculiar new wave meets military frock with a skirt like curtains, spotted boots and a headband.

You have a moment of doubt: is this ageist scrutiny? All you can do is shrug. This is Blondie: image is all.

Anyway she looks terrific. The audience, many of them wildly over-excited blokes who are old enough to know better, certainly think so. There is dancing in front of the stage and in the aisles. Knickers are thrown. You suspect they have been bought from the Smith and Caughey sale for the occasion. Such wickedness.

That's about the extent of it. Possibly. Harry "doesn't know" if the band have given up trashing hotel rooms and are now terribly polite to each other. She doesn't know what she does in her hotel room? "Guys were guys. Leave me out. It wasn't me," she says in her stagey little girl's whisper.

She's such a good girl she once had it put to her she had made a career out of showing her underpants. "I just think it's funny. You know I think it's completely natural and, bravo. Sex is the greatest thing, right underneath love. [And] I don't have an hour-long show made about my arse. I mean I wouldn't mind it, but it just hasn't happened."

We are all supposed to agree that Madonna's a feminist icon: didn't Harry get there first? She once joked she had "prototype" tattooed on her butt. Has she? She replies by wriggling her rear: "I should."

On Blondie and feminisim, she says, "I think that has always been sort of the question. At the very beginning there was quite an uproar about that: whether Blondie was a fair representation of women striking out or being true feminists or being a turncoat to the feminist cause. I think it's a matter of what's in the eye of the beholder."

She genuinely doesn't know, of course she doesn't, when she first knew she was beautiful. She sometimes looks in a mirror and "thinks that I am but I don't ever think that I'm beautiful every day. My mother always said not to rely on my looks and I think that it was probably really good advice. Because I think I've had a bigger life than that".

And, in a strange way, a smaller life. Her allure is that blank beauty. We need the distance: all the better to gaze and gaze.

From any distance she likes to confound expectation. She took the final encore clutching a cup of tea - with the teabag still in it.

And managed to make it look classy.