The title of the new Billy Idol documentary, Billy Idol Should Be Dead, speaks volumes about the English rocker’s uninhibited and frequently reckless embrace of hedonism and debauchery at the height of his fame. Idol had a moderately successful career in England with London punks Generation X -once dismissed as “really dreadful garbage” by Elton John – who scored three Top 40 singles and one Top 30 album in the UK before disbanding in 1981. But it was only after he relocated to New York that he truly realised his potential, with the invaluable assistance of guitarist Steve Stevens, and career guidance from Kiss‘ wily manager Bill Aucoin, who encouraged his new client’s reinvention as an MTV-friendly pop-punk-New Wave cartoon character.
“One of the things Bill Aucoin told me was, ‘New York’s bankrupt. Anything goes’,” Idol, now 70, recalls in a new interview with The Times. “It was a post-apocalyptic place, like the bomb had been dropped and we were living in the rubble. The cops didn’t care about anything. They were looking for the real criminals – unlike England, where the police were always bothering people like us.”
Idol’s first solo album, 1982’s Billy Idol, sold half a million copies in the US, and spawned two hit singles, Hot In The City and White Wedding, which made the singer a household name. His second album, 1983’s Rebel Yell, was an even greater commercial success, selling two million copies in the US alone. Unfortunately, this success also enabled him to develop a ferocious cocaine habit and turned him into, in his own words, a “sexual maniac”. One of the more memorable quotes in his new films finds him telling an interview “I just wanna get screwed to death”.
“The free love of the Sixties was still happening,” he tells The Times. “We’d heard about this thing called Aids but until Magic Johnson [the American basketball star] got it in about 1991 no one cared. Until that point, it was just our generation’s time. We were very young and having fun with it.”
“There was a no-holds-barred feeling about the eighties,” he recalled to Classic Rock in 2016. “We were partying as if it was the end of the world, as if tomorrow there’d be no more drugs and there’d be no more fun. There would be nothing. We were all living in a fool’s paradise.”
In 1984, Idol almost died of a heroin overdose while back in London. Upon his return to the US he sought to kick his addiction to heroin by smoking crack. This didn’t go terribly well, as one might imagine.
Idol’s ‘carefree’ approach to life did however help rejuvenate the career of another English ex-pat musician.
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One evening in 1982, while partying in NYC with Nile Rodgers, Idol spotted David Bowie drinking alone in a club.
“Fucking hell, it’s David Bowie,” he recalls saying, before promptly vomiting all over himself. Idol then offered Bowie a vomit-covered handshake and introduced him to Rodgers. This meeting would ultimately lead to Bowie and Rodgers working together on 1983’s Let’s Dance album, which resurrected his flagging career.
“I did the world a favour by being off my face, didn’t I?” Idol suggests.
A much calmer man now, the singer is ‘California sober’, largely restricting his vices to wine and marijuana, and is hugely appreciative that he’s still around to share his stories.
“The idea that I would get to live this life is incredible,” he tell The Times. “Like I said, I should be dead, but someone up there likes me.”
Billy Idol Should Be Dead is on Sky Arts in the UK from March 26
