ET sat down with the Blondie lead singer and co-founder and guitarist Chris Stein to talk about Harry's new memoir, 'Face It.'
Debbie Harry is sharing it all.
The iconic Blondie frontwoman is opening up like never before in her new memoir, Face It (available now). ET sat down with the 74-year-old singer and her Blondie co-founder and guitarist Chris Stein, to talk about their decades-long friendship, why she decided to pen her life story and who she would like to see play her in a movie.
"Everybody asks me [why now was the right time to write a book]," Harry tell ET. "I really don't have an answer. It just evolved. My manager met a writer on a plane and I guess they hit it off, and it went on from there."
Face It is a candid tell-all that includes stories from Harry's early life, rise to fame, drug addiction, troubling times and more. It also shares insight as to how she and Stein met and went on to form Blondie.
"I don't know if there was that kind of [instant] connection," Harry details about meeting Stein during a show. "Chris was in the audience and he was in a really great sight line for me, and he seemed into what we were doing. So I should have delivered a lot of what I was doing to him, and afterwards we met in the stairwell and then later on we had that band that wasn't a permanent band. We just had guys come in and play. Later on, he stood in for the bass player, and that's sort of when we really officially met."
After forming the new wave band in 1974, the two went on to gain worldwide success with such major hits as "Heart of Glass," "Rapture," The Tide Is High" and more. But, with any rock n' roll story, there are highs and lows and even struggles with addiction. In Face It, Harry opens up about a time when Stein was in the hospital with an illness and Harry was getting heroin for him.
Harry explains that she doesn't necessarily know if that was a "rock bottom" moment for them and their drug use. "I think it was pretty rock bottom health-wise," she says. "And I think our whole, sort of, universe was imploding. So that was pretty rock bottom."
Stein, on his end, says that his drug use escalated "later in the late '80s and '90s. I was doing so much blow that I really f**ked myself up, or messed myself up, as we should say to be polite."
As for their relationship with drug use now? Stein says it's been 20 years of being clean and sober.
"I have a family and I had to stop. It just takes its toll, you know. I mean, it's difficult because I look back, I have teenage kids and I look back fondly on getting stoned with my buddies and all that stuff," he explains. "But I did end up going really crazy when I was 19, also as a result of all the stuff, chemicals, LSD, all that stuff. But I still have these fond memories, so it's a weird place."
Meanwhile, in Face It, Harry says that she can't put the blame on Stein for their drug use. "No, it was my fault," she tells ET.
"I introduced him to it, right?" she turns to ask Stein, to which he replies, "Yeah."
Harry and Stein have definitely gone through so much together over the last decades, and now the world will get an inside look at their rock star lives. As always, their tale could easily be portrayed on screen and, if so, who would they like to see play them in a movie about their life?
"[Robert] De Niro. He would have to be de-aged," Stein quips, with Harry chiming in and saying, "What about Emily Meade?"
"She volunteered [to play Harry]. I know she knows what she's getting in for," Stein adds.
"I don't know," Harry says. "I tend to sort of disagree with a lot of music films and they seem so formulated. Our lives are formulated because of the nature of the industry, so it's hard to break away from that."
Face It is now available.
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