“The interior décor was overpowering, gothic to the extreme. “I remember it was a fairly modest bungalow from the outside, until you went in,” Emerson told Prog magazine in 2020. “Some of his artwork was in head shops then, and it was so cool and weird.” Giger’s was a burgeoning name in late ’60s counterculture, but he exploded onto the music scene when Keith Emerson-of the English progressive-rock supergroup Emerson, Lake & Palmer-dropped by Giger’s Zurich, Switzerland, home in the early ’70s.
“I knew about Giger from the ’60s,” recalls Stein. “ Alien was just what it fucking was, and everybody was crazy about it." I mean, what kind of mind could dream up huge, abandoned spaceships equipped with pulsating alien eggs, and creatures that pop out and wrap their tentacles around your neck, feeding off you, before exploding out of your chest? “That movie was a cultural phenomenon,” Stein tells me. Giger: Debbie Harry Metamorphosis: Creating the Visual Concept for KooKoo, Stein’s recently published coffee table tome that chronicles Harry’s collaboration with the late Swiss artist, reveals the world that the trio created around the singer’s 1981 solo album, KooKoo.īut it was Giger’s Alien monster that first captured the cultural imagination. Giger, the cult artist who created the mechanical lizard-monster in Ridley Scott’s 1979 sci-fi classic Alien. Harry and Stein were always open to wacky and original ideas, so I can only imagine the fun they had when they met H.R. Stein, Harry’s songwriting partner and Blondie bandmate (as well as her boyfriend for 15 years or so), contributed his fantastic photos to the projects. She was one of the funniest and most professional stars I ever worked with.
They were two full-length photo-cartoon issues of the magazine, written by me and starring Harry. I had the pleasure of working with Debbie Harry and Chris Stein in the mid-1970s on two fumetti-style features in Punk magazine-“The Legend of Nick Detroit” in 1976, and “Mutant Monster Beach Party” in 1978. All images courtesy of Chris Stein and Titan Books.
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