H.R. Giger: Debbie Harry Metamorphosis: Creating the Visual Concept for KooKoo

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While Deb­bie Har­ry pur­sued the act­ing she had start­ed in punk rock film­mak­er Amos Poe’s works, she also went the solo album route. During a Blondie hiatus, she embarked on an acting career, appearing in lead roles in the neo-noir Union City (1980) and in David Cronenberg's body horror film Videodrome (1983).

His star was a newly brunette Harry re-imagined as a cross between a Xenomorphic Giger monstrosity, the Bride of Frankenstein, and the legendary borg creation of Metropolis. Har­ry wrote about this in Heavy Met­al mag­a­zine, which often fea­tured the artist, say­ing “Giger’s work has a sub­con­scious effect: it engen­ders the fear of being turned into met­al. Instead the com­mer­cial flatlin­ing of the album threw Har­ry off-track, while Giger went on to be the go-to album artist for met­al and punk bands, from the Dead Kennedys to Blood­bath.

And he shares previously unpublished images of such iconic figures of the era as Debbie Harry, his musical partner in Blondie; Andy Warhol; Iggy Pop; David Bowie; and the Ramones. Debbie Harry picked up on the personal interpretation theme when asked to describe the album, explaining, “the words simply mean what they say. Born in 1940 to a chemist’s family in Chur, Switzerland, he moved in 1962 to Zurich, where he studied architecture and industrial design at the School of Applied Arts.

The result was a very unusual effigy of Debbie – without her characteristic, disheveled blond hairstyle, thanks to which the viewer concentrates on her face. Undoubtedly, the 1981 image would go on to play its hand in influencing Clive Barker’s Hellraiser, its race of antagonistic Cenobites, and particularly their leader, Pinhead. With more than 50 million albums sold worldwide and acclaimed solo projects, Debbie has also engaged in a successful acting career with over 30 film and television roles to her credit (including Videodrome, Hairspray, and Heavy to name a few).When I listen to these old tracks, it puts me there like I am a time traveler,” Harry said about the collection. Like the rest of the world since, Stein was taken with Harry’s charisma, her spirit and – of course – her style. Blondie co-founder, guitarist, producer, photographer and co-host of cult cable show TV Party, Chris Stein began shooting in 1968 and hasn’t put the camera down since. It’s a unique chronicle of a unique event and a glimpse into the creativity of two icons of the 1970s and 1980s. Her spectacular voice drips with a sophisticated elegance rarely heard in pop music as she continues to infuse her work with an exquisite artistic sensibility.

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. The book begins with pictures from the trio’s first meeting in New York – the Alien exhibition and socialising afterwards. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. The fantastical videos for two of the tracks on the album, ‘Backfired’ and ‘Now I Know you Know,’ featured Giger himself piercing an Egyptian sarcophagus and a newly brunette Harry reimagined as a xenomorphic Giger creature.The group toured and performed throughout the world during the following years, and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2006.

Harry continued to appear in independent films throughout the 2000s, including Deuces Wild (2002), My Life Without Me (2003) and Elegy (2008). The album will be reissued in late September, and the book will come out via Titan Books on November 11. The band became noted for its eclectic mix of musical styles, also incorporating elements of disco, pop, reggae, and early rap music. Dismissed for decades by the mainstream art scene for Giger’s popular status in Hollywood, Alien indeed made Giger famous just as Giger made Alien famous.A beautiful coffee table art book chronicling the extraordinary collaboration between Debbie Harry and H. His strange, enigmatic artworks are a combination of industrial stylistics and apocalyptic vision of the future.