I guess you could say that Blondie have a very street-wise glamour but they're also a band for romantics. Are you a romantic person at heart?
DH: Personally? Hmmmm. I don't know. I probably have a good imagination but I don't know if I'm a true romantic. But I do like romance. I don't know, it's a word that's been so mistreated. I mean, what is romance?
As I've only heard three of the songs off the album I had to make some guesses about the other tracks based on title alone. Does 'D-Day' stand for 'Debbie-Day'?
DH: YES! [punches air] But I really wrote it because I thought, if I play it over here it will be like [blows air through lips] … you know… it'll go down really well.
And there's 'The End, The End'. Now I'm kind of hoping this isn't The Doors song played twice in a row.
DH: That was a collaborative effort with this guy Ben Phillips and he had this idea about finding someone that you wanted to be with until the very end. So I guess that is a very romantic idea. He gave me this idea of what it was about and then we fleshed out the lyrics.
'Wipe Off My Sweat' sounds rather saucy…
DH: That's because it is [laughs]. It's in Spanish: 'Kiss me, kiss me, she has a tattoo on her skin where only he can see it…' And then when they're dancing she says: 'Kiss me, wipe off my sweat, don't stop, don't stop for anything.' It's simple and direct.
I'm also intrigued by the idea of 'China Shoes'.
DH: That's a ballad. Mid-tempo. It starts off, 'Cheap china shoes, tie on my feet, all man-made fabric worn out and beat, from pacing the floor, from walking the street. You fly over Brooklyn, back in a week.' So it's about someone leaving and you want them to come back. And then the chorus is, 'I left a note in the back page of your book, volumes away but it's worth a good look. Remember me, remember that you're mine, remember me when you get to the last line.'
You are a romantic! When I think of Blondie, I think of a pop group who had equals and contemporaries in the worlds of art, writing, photography, etc. I wonder if that's something that's missing from today's pop scene? How important was it for you to know people like William Burroughs and Andy Warhol?
DH: Really important. They were such great influences. It might be a little bit different in New York, because of the area — because everything is located so closely together and it's very easy to jump into the art world, to jump into the music scene, into the photography scene. It's all compacted together. Maybe that's why it happens. It seems kind of natural.
Do you think this concentration of people and ideas causes a continuum? When I think of The Velvet Underground I can see that there are clear lines through to Television, Suicide, Blondie, Sonic Youth…
DH: Yeah. Oh yeah. Well, I hope so…
Were The Velvet Underground still playing when you moved to New York?
DH: They were. Actually, the first time I saw them was one of the best shows I have ever seen. I didn't have a clue who they were. I used to go to this place — a big room called The Balloon Farm… [laughs] Well, it was the psychedelic period, right? So we went in this place, which was like a former Ukrainian nursing home, and it was The Velvet Underground playing live with Nico. The stage set and colours were designed by Andy Warhol who was also doing the lights. It was beautiful. And you know, Moe Tucker on drums was fucking great. And you could just wander in and watch them.
In a way you got the whole drug thing out of your system before you started Blondie. I was wondering how you got into heroin — was it just that there was a lot of it about?
DH: It was the time. It was all over the place. At first we felt that it might have been political [to take heroin]. Yeah, I know… [giggles and shakes head] It was everywhere and it really had a lot to do with the end of Vietnam and the fallout from that. What's that airline they talk about bringing everything in on? Air America. That's how the junk came in. It was very noticeable; it was everywhere.
A hundred and fifty years before Blondie, the popular perception of anyone female singing for their supper would have been that she was a prostitute. Do you think the music industry has ever got past seeing its female talent in terms different to commodities that could be sold or traded with?
DH: We are all commodities and I don't think it's necessarily just women. That was the game, you know? It outlived itself, didn't it?
Do you feel more in control now that the music industry is shrinking rapidly and is pretty much crippled in comparison to the monolithic thing that it used to be?
DH: No. No. Not necessarily. I mean, commerce and art have always had difficulties co-existing from the very beginning. I'm sure there were problems back when they were building the pyramids. I feel, perhaps, under the same amount of pressure to write another 'Heart Of Glass'. We're more in control of the creative end, yes, but it's not really fair for us because we've been around for a while and I think we have our thing figured out. And if we make a Blondie album we make a Blondie album. You know what that is. We've done our experimentation, basically. We've set up a framework that has a broad field of reference musically and we play with that. That is what our format is. The industry makes it hard to get a record out. It's like that for everyone. I mean, how many big artists are there? There are 10 or 20 major artists out there now and those are the ones who have big record deals.
You've said that the Plastic Letters album was about death. I was wondering how you dealing with Chris's illness in 1983 affected your view of your own mortality?
DH: I think that, up until that time, I had a lot of what you would call 'childish ways' and then the idea of taking complete responsibility for my life and not seeing it as just sheer fate or luck really hit home. Then, BAM! I knew death. I knew it right then. And I think everyone should know it. Everyone should know it, because we aren't really taught that, are we? We're not taught it and it's the total truth. I don't really want to talk about Chris getting ill today, but there are a few pictures of the last tour we did [in 1982] that I saw recently. I hadn't really seen them for a long, long time and I was so shocked. He must have gone down to 120lbs. It was just… horrible.
I guess you must get asked this quite a lot, but I'm interested in knowing what you put the bond between you and Chris down to. Because it is a very strong bond that transcends physical relationships. It goes beyond that.
DH: Yeah, it does. I think we just had a meeting of the minds…. Maybe it's because we've both got such accepting natures and we have a lot of room for a lot of different kinds of people and different dispositions and things like that. We both have a temper, though.
What do you think would have happened if you had changed the band's name to Adolf Hitler's Dog?
DH: The label would have dropped us. I loved that name, though. It's really funny, isn't it? Do you want to help me finish this salad?
This article originally appeared in The Stool Pigeon. For all things Pigeon, go here
