“Especially right now, with all the problems in the world.” “People want to reconnect with a more innocent time that made them feel free,” she decides, calling from her Las Vegas home on an old-school, non-visual landline. This autumn, she shimmered through a Las Vegas residency duetting with New Kids’ Joey McIntyre. No wonder she has been a staple on heritage pop tours since the mid 00s, including 55 dates in 2019 alongside New Kids on the Block, Salt-N-Pepa and her supposedly deadly 80s rival, flame-haired Tiffany (they’ve been pals for ever). With Foolish Beat she became the youngest-ever female to top the US charts with a song she wrote, performed and produced herself, a record that stands today. Her first two albums Out of the Blue and Electric Youth – rereleased this autumn as deluxe editions – showcase her enormous, self-written and produced hit singles, time capsules of twinkly, cheery, sax-parping synth-pop and whimsical balladeering (from the tot-pop jamboree Only in My Dreams to the teen-dream colossus Lost in Your Eyes). Look, even I have a therapist on speed dial!”Īt 51, Gibson is a significantly more effervescent personality than she was at 17, describing her oddly sensible teenage self as “an adult as a kid”, who employed 100 people, even if she did wear double denim, a porkpie hat and two Swatch watches. The price of fame these days is definitely high. Young minds are not wired to process that. You need a backbone of steel, like the Kardashians.
But with social media, there’s unsolicited feedback coming from everywhere. Everyone changes, you lose weight, gain weight, dye your hair, change your aesthetic … life just happens. “I hope Billie is handling all the pressure as beautifully as she appears to be handling it,” ponders Gibson today. If popular culture is unrecognisable from 1988, as it should be, one aspect remains identical: the constant judgment of female public figures over their physicality, as Eilish always is and Gibson still is, harangued on social media for being “too thin” since her 2013 Lyme disease diagnosis. Eilish, peerlessly cool and critically sacred, remains a sad-eyed cynic singing unapologetically disturbing songs about death, sex and generational neuroses. Gibson, uncool and critically dismissed, was the wholesome, toothsome innocent who sang upbeat, unapologetically weedy songs about adolescent love.
At 17 she was as loved by teenagers as Billie Eilish was at 17, in polar opposite ways. T hirty-three years ago – in musical terms, an epoch – Debbie Gibson was the most famous American teen pop star on Earth.