by Billy Idol
I arrived in Eisenhower’s America in 1958, not quite four-years-old, with a banjo on my knee, given to me by my maternal grandparents. When I first stepped off the S.S. America in the States, I wore that banjo proudly, a foreshadowing of my musical destiny. We rented an apartment in Rockville Centre, a suburban community on Long Island, where most of the residents were commuters who took the railroad to Manhattan for their jobs. That I wound up living in a town with “rock” in its name now seems yet one more harbinger of my future. Truth hidden in the soul?
We would often walk through our neighborhood and past the home of then heavyweight boxing champion Floyd Patterson. Mum remembers him saying hello to us, my very first brush with fame. My mum’s approach to people was always open and friendly. If we were waiting in a line, she would get to know everyone we were standing with by the time we reached our destination. Sometimes it embarrassed me, but it would hurt her if I said anything about it. My mum was teaching me by example how to be outgoing; the lesson would prove an invaluable one.
Some of my earliest memories of visiting Manhattan involve the canyons of skyscrapers that towered above me, menacingly glowering, reaching into the sky and pulling me into the future. In the city, we visited my uncle John, my mum’s brother, and his family, who were always in a good mood—even when Uncle John had to work nights. All my Irish relatives had a healthy glow about them, and there was always music in the air. Much of my mum’s family now lived in the States, which I’m sure was one of the reasons we moved. When Dad got a job as sales manager for Blue Point Laundry, we moved to Conklin Avenue in Patchogue, all the way out in Suffolk County, not far from Fire Island, just before the island splits into two fins, terminating at the wild breakers of Montauk Point.
Winters there would prove to be disorienting, with freezing blizzards and six-foot snowdrifts whipped up by sometimes tornado-force winds. The snowplows would come through to create huge mounds on the sides of the streets. But I recall the summers being long and hot, the tarmac on the roads melting under our thick, rubber-tired push-bikes. Big, gaily colored cars with giant fins cruised the streets. Dad had a turquoise Dodge with just that kind of wings.
The burning sun proved a warm umbrella for my childhood activities. I was only four, but I felt a freedom that was right and natural. I remember company picnics on Fire Island, people docking their boats, the size and polish denoting their status. Tartan coolers and Bermuda shorts were permanent features in our Kodachrome-colored, late-’50s home movies that picture a young English family enjoying and coming to grips with life in America. The deep reds and greens of the color palette saturated my young mind, leaving an indelible imprint.
In back of our house was a creek that led out to the ocean. It was quite narrow in spots, and someone had fastened a rope to a tree so we could swing over and into the water. I learned to swim from the Red Cross, taking to the water easily, despite the occasional sting from a stray jellyfish, which a trip to the lifeguard would cure. We would surf the big, powerful Atlantic waves with car-tire inner tubes.
My dad’s hobbies included golf, hunting, fishing, diving for clams, and catching swordfish. He tried to teach me to fish, but I hated the thought of the hook in the fishes’ gills. I would often watch as he wrestled with and finally ensnared one, frozen by watching pain coursing through its body. I didn’t care much for the gutting part, either.
I made friends with David Frail, who lived next door. His father suffered from multiple sclerosis and was confined to a wheelchair. I was especially impressed that the family had a maid and not just one but two vacuums—one for upstairs, the other for downstairs.
Once, my dad’s boss invited all his favorite employees to his big house for a Sunday afternoon barbecue. We kids ran in and out of the water sprinklers. Life was good. The highlight of my young life, though, was when the Good Humor ice cream truck would roll through the neighborhood, the man in a white suit and black bow tie behind the wheel.
Television, especially color TV, was another huge discovery for me, a wonder with eight different channels as well as early morning, pre-school programming. I was attracted to the slapstick comedy of Captain Kangaroo and the history lessons of Walt Disney movies such as The Swamp Fox, which depicted the American Revolutionary War, portraying the British as fops and the Yanks as devilishly clever.
The realization that I was one of those fops, and considered the enemy, was a shock to me. I quickly lost my Limey accent and adopted cowboy slang to out-American the Americans. When I started school in 1960 at age five, however, I felt that, as a Brit, I shouldn’t have to pledge allegiance to the flag at morning assembly. For me, the past and present weren’t so far apart, and still aren’t. Deep inside, I felt a connection to what has happened on earth through the ages, with history and music keeping me grounded.
Still, like many other youngsters, I fantasized about being little Joe in Shane. I wore a Davy Crockett coonskin cap, both Union and Confederate caps, and a Steve Canyon Jet Helmet. I was impressed with the sheer scope and size of America, which I’d gotten a taste of when Mum learned to drive and took me on a trip to Niagara Falls. After marveling at that natural spectacle, we crossed the border into Canada, where we saw the source of the Great Lakes. Was there no end to the wonders of this land? There was magnificence to America, but also a violence that colored its beauty, given the nation’s history of American Indian tribes fighting for existence, squeezed between the frontier settlers and imperialistic British forces.
Violence, or the threat of it, colored my life in another way: I experienced fear in the slow-screaming, wailing, mournful sound of the early warning nuclear air-raid sirens, which reverberated on empty streets as we would “duck and cover.” I contemplated deep, caliginous, silent thoughts that hinted of a darker America, one a child could only guess at. Pioneers had founded this prosperous country but at great cost, and their suffering gave birth to the blues and, eventually, to rock ’n’ roll.
* * *
MY EARLY MEMORIES OF MUSIC are intermingled with wild, out-of-body experiences of my first presidential election. Eisenhower’s eight years were up, with John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon battling it out to succeed him. My mum, a Catholic in spirit, adored JFK. He was the new hope, a sort of independent thinker. She loved his election speeches and collected gramophone records of them. I can still recognize his words today, as he spoke to “a new generation of Americans.”
My mum took me to see him on a campaign stop nearby. It was just a dirt road in the middle of nowhere, but soon enough, young Kennedy roared by. Sitting in the back of an open limo, he was smiling and waving, then gone in a flash. He carried the promise of America in that voice: “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” I felt him speaking directly to me.
I can still see my mom’s albums of those speeches, big black hard plastic records, with various logos decorating the center labels, and serial numbers scratched in the vinyl where the grooves ended. When JFK won the 1960 election, it was a glorious day for my mum. No one in our family was eligible to vote, but it sure felt like we had something to do with his victory. These emotional journeys I shared with my mum made me feel really close to her. I dreamed wild thoughts that a whole nation’s future lay in the grasp of a charismatic individual with brains.
My mum’s record collection also included jazz, by greats such as Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and particularly Louis Armstrong, who I thought was fantastic. What a wild sound to his voice, which proved yet another musical instrument. She also favored Broadway musicals including My Fair Lady, Camelot, South Pacific, and The Music Man (“Seventy-six trombones led the big parade”). I discovered Richard Burton as King Arthur in Camelot and enjoyed the way he spoke-sung the musical’s songs, little realizing I would use the same approach years later. He was the first person I heard sing about being bored, his lackadaisical tone inflected by a combination of acting and alcohol.
I listened to other albums, too, like Frank Sinatra
’s Songs for Swingin’ Lovers! and Ella Fitzgerald. But I preferred the simplicity of Tex Ritter’s acoustic guitar, the symbol of the people’s freedom from all forms of oppression, the plucked strings the united sound of our spirits singing out for justice, for our rights as individuals. The guitar was the people’s weapon, a soulful “gun,” and “bullets” were the songs it created. As a child, I could feel without knowing, hear and understand without total comprehension. Tragedy! Promise lost! Death! Disaster! Hubris!
Tex was not necessarily the greatest technical singer, but he had personality, and his believability factor was great. Truth was in his voice. I was five when I first heard him, but the many parts that sum a person run deep and wide. “Billy the Kid” was one of my favorites. “Out in New Mexico long time ago / When a man’s only chance was his old .44 . . . Shot down by Pat Garrett who once was his friend / The young outlaw’s life had now come to its end.” Tex also sang the theme song to the movie High Noon and performed children’s songs, like “Froggie Went A Courtin’ ” and “The Pony Express.”
Tex’s voice was weathered by time; he wasn’t young and good-looking, but his sound was warm, thanks in part to the old tube recording microphones that were in use then, and flavored by real-life experiences. Murder, betrayal, and death were his subjects, and the songs came off real dreamy to me, evoking the old American frontier, people livin’ on the edge and singing about it. I wish you could feel the wild rush of pleasure I get from songs that mean so much to me. It starts in the pit of the stomach and flows outward, flooding the body with warm, pleasure-giving endorphins. The brain sizzles with well-being. I sing the body acoustic!
It’s interesting that I fell for the guitar-and-voice combination, for it was just that which would set the modern world on fire: Robert Johnson, Bukka White, Woody Guthrie, and Hank Williams paved the way for Elvis Presley—The Hillbilly Cat—and Johnny Cash. If Western music was a modern musical frontier, I wanted to see the elephant, but back in 1960, I didn’t know about rock ’n’ roll. I had the usual kiddie songs on colored vinyl: “Three Little Pigs,” “Scruffy the Tugboat,” and “Popeye the Sailor Man.” But my love of music started young.
My sister, Jane, was born November 22, 1959. I was fascinated with her, as one can see from our home movies. She could hardly see over her huge cheeks. We went on a family holiday through the Shenandoah Valley along the Blue Ridge Mountains, stopping at the Battle of Gettysburg site. I remember pushing the button on an information kiosk and hearing an actor speak Lincoln’s famous words, “Four score and seven years ago . . .” This land set aside to commemorate such a terrible event played its way into my mind.
Although we were enjoying our stay in America, Dad got a job offer that returned us to England in 1962. He was hired by a company that sold medical equipment, including a new blood pressure machine called the Baumanometer. When we flew back in a large prop plane, I asked my parents where God was. If he was up in the sky, how come we couldn’t see him? It would be a question that would plague me for the rest of my life.
CHAPTER TWO
ENGLAND SWINGS LIKE A PENDULUM DO
Dorking to Goring-by-Sea, England
GOOD OLD BLIGHTY, BACK TO England, a return to my dad’s old London stomping grounds, the place where I was first spat out into the world, one perilously in danger of suffocating under the claims of then Conservative leader Harold Macmillan that we “never had it so good.”
What the fuck did I know about England? I was really an American kid. I had a Yank accent and a crew cut. I wore sneakers, not plimsolls. I said man instead of mate; elevator, not lift; and cops, not bobbies.
I felt like a fish out of water. We lived in the side rooms of a pub at the foot of Box Hill, which people climbed on weekends, but was pretty much empty Monday through Friday. I had a heavy Long Island accent with a cowboy twang, the outcome of a life led in a multilingo world gone twisted. I was called “Yank” during soccer matches, where I was “good-naturedly” tackled because the local boys knew I had no idea how to play the game. I was a foreigner in my own country, a stranger in a strange land.
One of the first things to catch my young, impressionable ear was Bernard Cribbins’s novelty song “Right Said Fred,” about three bungling workmen attempting to move an unwieldy yet unidentified item, eventually leaving it standing on the landing after all but demolishing the client’s house (and drinking many cups of tea). It was produced by George Martin, the very same gentleman who would go on to work with the Beatles. Funny that it was his comedy stuff that got to me first, as it did with John and Paul.
Music always pulled me through, voices laying out a tale of their lives, musicians riding the wave. I didn’t know that a cultural revolution fueled by rock ’n’ roll was right around the corner, to purge this land with sound. England’s postwar recovery would reveal a new kind of comedy; a kick was on its way, a new thrill to push away the traditional British blues. Could a six-year-old really recognize the Abbey Road production team put together by George Martin by their feel and expertise? How could I know what was happening? “You know what you like,” my dad would always say.
My ten-year-old cousin David Hofton came to stay with us and took me up Box Hill. I had my Excalibur sword because the Robert Taylor movie Knights of the Round Table was popular at the time. We were having a mock fight when a group of a dozen teenage boys in leather jackets and jeans descended on us. At first they just tried to scare us, but then they began talking about incomprehensible things that teenagers on the run from the “Smoke,” as London was called, might talk about. That feeling of not quite knowing what was going to happen frightened me. When I was three, some boys playing cowboys and Indians had tied me to a tree and repeatedly punched me in the stomach, landing me in the hospital for a hernia operation. But nothing serious happened on this occasion, and soon we were all joking with one another. I realize today that they were just some lads trying to escape the sprawl of the suburbs that spread deep into Surrey. They let us go and we ran down the hill, but when I told Mum about what had happened, she called the bobbies nevertheless. They took us up the hill in their police cars, bells clanging. We rode along to show them where it had happened, with me in the passenger seat. It was quite exciting as we identified the boys, who were still where we’d left them. I felt a little sorry for them as they were driven away, but fear and excitement do go hand in hand.
When I was around six, my parents noticed that when I entered our living room and looked at the TV, I would squint. I always used to sit right underneath the telly, practically in the set (I suspect a lot of cathode ray kids did back then). So they sent me to an optician, who said I was badly shortsighted and that, horrors upon all horrors, I would have to wear those horrible National Health Service–issued round specs with tortoiseshell on the edge that all the old grandpas wore. For some reason, it was a really shitty and embarrassing feeling, leading to being called such names as “four-eyes” or “you squinty git” at school. For three years, I managed to get away with not wearing my glasses at school, and I sat near the back of the class. When I was nine, my parents found out and my dad sent a letter to the school telling them I had to wear my glasses and sit at the front. Blast, foiled again!
So I put on my glasses, sat at the front, and heard the calls of “four-eyes” for about a day, but gradually everybody got over it and they seemed to forget the fact that I was wearing them. A year or so later, John Lennon started wearing his own glasses openly. I found out later he’d always been blind as a bat, but he never wore his glasses—he’d been hiding it from most people, especially the fans. Then he thought, Fuck it, he wore them, and it became really cool. It just goes to show you: be a trendsetter. Don’t follow what others think is cool. It taught me a lesson in a quite personal way. You are going to be who you are. Might as well embrace it or forever be at the mercy of the human fears and trepidations of life that can devastate and drag us down.
Not long after that, we left Dorking and moved to Goring-by-Sea
, a neighborhood of the southern British coastal town of Worthing, a few miles from Brighton, a spot favored by the royals, as it was just an hour outside London. Year round, the wind-blasted trees stripped of their foliage bent and twisted their naked array, forced to lean back north away from the English Channel’s fierce chilling winds and rains. The dark gray sky gave an angry face to any human walking around. Another gust of wind and I was nearly taken off my feet. This was nothing as fierce as the winters in Long Island or the hurricane I had witnessed in person from the Conklin Avenue kitchen window, which overturned cars and tore out trees, but British weather was unrelenting, its terminal gray broken only by the occasional brilliant lovely summer day. Then, for a second, hope shone through, only to be swallowed up.
Maybe there was something poetic in my dad wanting to move back to England that I couldn’t grasp then, but now I think I do. That gloom can piss you off, which leads you to find things to do to cheer yourself up. It was another move, another home, another group of friends to make, and new turf to which to acclimate.
I was a young, fresh-faced lad. My hair, sun-kissed blond in the U.S., began to darken into a mousy brown with a tinge of red—my Irish side coming out, I guess, although Mum had jet-black hair. We lived at the southern end of Falmer Avenue, about one block and a hundred yards from the seafront, which had a grass verge that rose up to the few trees that could take the weather; then the land fell away into a stony beach that led down to the dark green of the murky British Channel. We had the second-to-last house on the east side of the road, with one house after us, then a long, high wooden fence that led into the backyard of another house you could see into. So began my lifelong penchant for living by the sea. Knowing there’s a vast expanse that reaches out as a conduit to the rest of the world is exciting, even if it also appears like a great forbidding territory.
