by Billy Idol
We went to as many concerts as we could afford and saw Roxy Music, Lou Reed on his Rock ’n’ roll Animal tour, and Sparks at the Rainbow. We caught Lou Reed once more, this time opening for Beck, Bogert, and Appice on his ’72 Transformer tour, and then again two years later at Charlton Football Ground, on his Sally Can’t Dance tour, playing with the Who and Bad Company.
I also remember attending a massive three-day, twenty-four-hour outdoor music festival at Weeley, in the countryside north of London. In the spirit of Woodstock and the Isle of Wight, the lineup included Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young; the Faces; the Groundhogs; King Crimson; Mott the Hoople; Lindisfarne; and Marc Bolan. It rained a lot during the weekend but it was still fantastic, everyone sitting on plastic covers on the ground, with all sorts of music, from rock, folk, and blues to hard rock, fusion jazz, and on and on. I fell asleep to King Crimson and woke up at seven the next morning to Mott the Hoople doing “Thunderbuck Ram” to a mostly comatose audience of 250,000, except for those still freaking out on the acid they’d taken the night before.
The largely hippie audience had already decided they hated Bolan and T. Rex, booing en masse when he took the stage, but I liked his simple rock, having been turned on to him when I dated a girl named Deborah in the early ’70s. He actually wrote great melodies and used the regular guitar chords that I knew, instead of the more complex and slightly more sophisticated shapes of the Beatles, which was interesting to me. He also favored the twelve-bar blues, so he was returning to pop, blues, and rockabilly, but in a modern way. When T. Rex went on Bolan walked to the front of the stage and confronted the hooting mass by saying, “Fuck off!” Amazingly, the crowd shut up and listened to the band’s set, including a mad, twenty-minute jam on “Ride a White Swan,” during which Bolan bashed his guitar with a pair of tambourines. When he finished, the audience stood up as one and gave him a standing ovation that went on for quite a few minutes. Amazing to think he cowed a quarter million people with the words “Fuck off.” This wasn’t far from a punk-rock attitude, especially coming in the middle of the hippie era. I still think that somehow what he did that day was a turning point, a new attitude creeping back into rock that wasn’t so touchy-feely.
Around this time, I started to go out with a girl named Valerie. I remember after another memorable party at someone’s house, she was so drunk and fucked up that she took a shit in the bathtub and wiped her ass on the shower curtain. One day, while we were walking along the street with my mates, they asked Valerie if I had a big dick. For a moment, I was mortified. What would she say? If it was unfavorable, it could lead to years of ribbing, but, thank God, after a pregnant pause, she replied, “It’s like his last name—Broad!” Phew, that was a dodgy moment, but she came through.
By now rock ’n’ roll had taken over our lives. I was working a double paper route so I could afford to buy albums, see shows, or drop a tab of acid for the weekend. That’s how I funded my extracurricular rock ’n’ roll activities. But then, at seventeen, I had a decision to make. Either I had to join the workforce or go to university.
I had no intention of getting a nine-to-five job. Under pressure from my parents, I began attending the University of Sussex, near Brighton on the south coast of England, in 1974. This meant I would only be an hour from London, so I could still see all the concerts I wanted while there, and wouldn’t be far away from my friends. My hair was now cropped short in a Lou Reed cut, and I wore black or denim drainpipe jeans, having completely transitioned from the flares and long hair of four years ago, still favored by most of the other students. Thanks to my short, dyed jet-black hair, some of my classmates thought I was on an army scholarship.
I didn’t yet know just how intent I was on following my heart, but I knew I didn’t want to be in anyone’s power—not my dad’s or that of the job marketplace. Never be in thrall to anyone but your own wants and desires, because only you can make yourself happy. Fly your own flag, and be true to it. Your soul is the true captain.
During my one year at Sussex University, my one true accomplishment was getting to play in a rock band. It didn’t have a name, but we didn’t care about that. We only played once a week on Fridays in the cafeteria, but at least we were playing. Talking about our set list and finding a place to rehearse took up the rest of our time. As far as I was concerned, we were tripping the light fantabulous. My dream of singing and playing guitar had started to come true. I had yet to learn that, in order to achieve your dreams, you must sometimes struggle to ultimately survive, and that to write meaningful songs, you must live, so that your experiences inform your words. These experiences must color the world you live in so that you can touch the ears and hearts of others. In 1975, I had yet to live enough life to know this.
My bandmates and I were looked down on and shunned by the other college groups, like the jazz fans. My attitude was, fuck ’em and their tired allegiance. I dreamed of storming barricades; they could keep their small-minded approach. I loved rock. I was being faithful to myself. Their dismissive nature hurt, but as I blared Iggy Pop and the Stooges’ Raw Power in my dorm room, I had the future firmly in my grasp. All they had was past dreams, a fad disappearing into the backwaters of the music world. With rock, one could conquer the known and the unknown. With rock ’n’ roll, one ruled the heart.
It was around this time my sister, Jane, recalls me asking her to attend one of my gigs at a pretty run-down church hall in Burnt Ash, just north of Bromley, where a group of greasers came in, shouted, and started throwing raw eggs and tomatoes at us as I kept playing, unfazed.
I was still a big fan of old rockabilly, ’50s doo-wop, and rock, especially the stuff the infamous Morris Levy was reissuing on his Roulette label in the early and mid-’70s. It was pretty fantastic hearing Little Richard’s Specialty sides or Jerry Lee Lewis’s Sun recordings, plus Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, Gene Chandler’s “Duke of Earl,” and the Cadillacs’ “Speedo.” It was a great relief to hear this rhythm-based music, short and to the point, the antithesis of the bloated prog rock of the ’70s.
At the same time, I was listening to a lot of folk, as I appreciated the fingerpicking styles of playing guitar. I bought a twelve-string acoustic and listened to the Incredible String Band, Steeleye Span, Dylan’s Freewheeling album, Linda and Richard Thompson’s accordion-dominated Morris dance albums. I was musically educating myself.
Siouxsie Sioux was Susan Janet Ballion, a self-described loner who was a fan of the same bands I followed. She left school at seventeen, and her unique fashion style—fetish/bondage outfits that often featured her exposed breasts—turned heads when she began to follow the Sex Pistols after seeing them with Steve Bailey in February 1976.
Steve first met her in late ’73 or early ’74, when she lived in Chislehurst, near Bromley. They were really boyfriend and girlfriend, and I was always knocked out for Steve that he had met someone as cool as himself. I was never jealous of them, but in love with them as a couple and as friends, and this feeling grew the more I admired Susan as the type of girl one would wish to find for oneself. She had a larger-than-life personality and was brimming with ideas that flowed throughout her conversation. Susan didn’t feel she had to suck up to males or their ideas or feel dominated by them. If anything, she gave any man she met a run for his money and could put him in his place with a sharp, witty saying that left him nonplussed or mouth agape. She is a liberated woman who is not bound by any other female’s idea of what freedom is. She rules her universe like the deity she truly is. Don’t get in her way, as the forces of the universe will be arrayed against you.
CHAPTER FIVE
AND THEN THERE WAS PUNK
100 Club, Oxford Street, London
“GET BACK TO LONDON!” THE fateful postcard from Steve Bailey read. I took the train as soon as I could, and on March 30, 1976, at the 100 Club on London’s Oxford Street, I saw the Sex Pistols play for the first time. On that night, the Pistols onstage were unlike anything we’d ever seen
before. Johnny Rotten, with orange, razor-cropped hair, was hunched over, holding a beer and staring bug-eyed out at the crowd through tiny, tinted square glasses. He was wearing a ripped-up sweater, striped baggy pants, and big flat rounded shoes with thick rubber soles dubbed “brothel creepers.” He was constantly bantering back and forth with the band’s manager, Malcolm McLaren, who stood in the wings of the stage. While hardly moving, John radiated a defiant intensity that demanded your attention. I remember him noticing a few people in the audience with long hair and flares, then haranguing them for being out-of-date hippies, demanding they go back to their Melanie records. It all made a strong impression on me. The Pistols began a residency there every Tuesday night, and we would be there for the duration—Steve, Simon, Siouxsie Sioux, and the rest of the crew journalist Caroline Coon would later dub “the Bromley Contingent.”
One particular night, Pistols guitarist Steve Jones showed up wearing a T-shirt from Malcolm’s Sex shop with zippered slits revealing his nipples. Glen Matlock, looking like an urchin from a Dickens novel, played really good bass. At first glance, he could have been mistaken for a member of Small Faces. On another occasion, Glen turned up in a white outfit with paint splattered all over à la Jackson Pollock. That was the start of a fad that would be copied by the Clash. And then there was Paul Cook, whom Jonesy later dubbed “Cookie.” He was a solid drummer, underrated, never wasting a move, everything counted—it was all in the beat!
Even at this early stage, the Pistols had their signature sound—tight and aggressive, with lots of blistering guitar riffs from Jones—but they were still playing covers, including the Monkees/Paul Revere and the Raiders’ “(I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone,” the Who’s “Substitute,” and the Stooges’ “No Fun.” They had just begun writing some of their own material and, at a later date, I was on hand when they introduced “Anarchy in the UK.” With the initial rolling bass riff and pounding drums, as Johnny snarled, “I am an Antichrist / I am an anarchist / Don’t know what I want / But I know how to get it / I wanna destroy the passerby!” It was a long overdue call to arms.
John would take a song that said “I love you” and instead sing “I hate you,” as he did covering the Small Faces song “Whatcha Gonna Do About It,” where he’d opt for, “I want you to know that I hate you, baby, want you to know I don’t care.” To me, it revolutionized the kind of attitude a singer could take with a song. Johnny’s whole demeanor was that the rest of the world was boring and complacent, and it was his duty to shake us up by administering a sucker punch in the gut.
In mid-’70s England, you couldn’t get a shit job, let alone have a career. It didn’t matter if you were a garbage collector or a college graduate. We didn’t have any money to spend at expensive fashion boutiques. In those early days, Vivienne Westwood was the only designer doing stuff we could relate to—not that we could afford her clothes, either. To create your own image, you had to invent your own fashion, something original to put on your back. We needed something new to evoke the way we felt, and as fashion necessity turned fashion statement, we came up with our originals by cutting up old T-shirts or spray painting our own designs on them—anything we felt would set us apart.
When John’s clothes fell apart, he safety-pinned them back together, or he took a Pink Floyd T-shirt and scrawled I HATE across the front. His look was more than mere fashion—it was a declaration of war against the self-indulgence and indifference that had come to permeate not only British bourgeois life but even what passed for the counterculture in the ’70s. The Pistols’ don’t-give-a-shit attitude and their own extreme sense of style gave voice to what I was feeling and what I wanted out of life. They spoke to me. Steve Bailey was right. We had found what we were looking for.
What’s more, the Sex Pistols seemed to be doing things on their own terms. It was a reaction to everyone who was telling people our age what we should do to succeed. After the Pistols’ 100 Club residency came to an end, my Bromley friends and I would see the band at other venues several times that summer of ’76, and we would come to believe that there was hope for our generation. Now it was up to us to start our own bands, following Johnny Rotten’s example of how to make the ordinary extraordinary. The dull gray English skies suddenly opened up to a rainbow of possibilities. The fans embraced safety pins and spiky, razor-cut hair. Although the latter had been around since at least the mods and then David Bowie, Johnny started the home cut, the bad haircut that looked really good. This has remained the hair fashion statement among hip white kids to this day.
But punk was not all about hair color and clothes. John had brains and charisma, too. He spoke as if he knew something we could never know. He was wise beyond his years and dangerous to the establishment, a kid with his own ideas and way of thinking. He challenged England to get off its collective arse and demand something better than, as Rotten put it, a “holiday in the sun, a cheap holiday in other people’s misery,” a line that hit home for me, trying, as I was, to avoid the middle-class aspirations of my parents. The songs screamed with social consciousness. John warned us about the powers-that-be, that they promised “no future, no future for you!” Disgust poured from every rolled syllable, every upraised brow, every sneer, and every pop-eyed stare. No one was safe from his vitriol.
John was both old and young at the same time. I always thought he was older than me, but it turned out I was actually two months older than him. Seeing the Pistols plug their new songs into the set, gradually finding an audience, their fashions spreading, was thrilling. Soon we’d have a scene of our own to rival the ’60s Merseybeat and trippy Carnaby Street pop explosions.
This was protest music retooled by youthful frustration and ambivalence, aggression with no outlet. The seething rage and spurned disgust we felt inside would inform the lyrics. Where the reigning arena-rock bands of the ’70s stressed size, power, and superiority while keeping a healthy distance from their audience, punk embraced attitude, street smarts, and intimacy—much like our hero Bruce Lee, fighting with our bare hands. They had long hair and flares; we cropped our hair, dyed it, and wore pegged trousers. Forget My Generation. This was Our Generation. If you couldn’t play your guitar like John McLaughlin or Frank Zappa, why not write a great song with three chords? Heck, Howlin’ Wolf did it. And then the Rolling Stones copied him.
Still, a world that offered “no future” also required new artists and new rock stars. I finished out the year at Sussex University, returned home, and promptly informed my parents I would not be returning. Needless to say, they were horrified. When I told my folks I was quitting school and instead would be joining a punk-rock group, they experienced an onslaught of emotions. They were astonished, worried, confused, and hurt. They were from another generation, one that survived Hitler and the Blitz, and then the postwar reconstruction. They believed you couldn’t dream of a successful future if you didn’t have the right qualifications, the right education, and social connections. When I told them I wanted to be a rock star, it was their worst nightmare.
That summer, I worked at my dad’s tool and hire company, responding to ads in Melody Maker placed by others who wanted to play this new brand of music, including a small ad from Tony James. He had been in the group London SS with Mick Jones, who would eventually form the Clash with Joe Strummer and Paul Simonon. I came from South East London and Tony from Fulham, but for both of us, everything revolved around Kings Road and Wardour Street. We met at the Ship, a pub on Wardour Street in Soho, London’s West End. We hit it off immediately and began to discuss putting a band together. Tony was a clever, knowledgeable guitarist and bass player who liked to write lyrics and riffs.
At that same time, I had answered a Melody Maker advert to audition for a band being put together by Acme Attractions, a Kings Road clothing store and competitor to Malcolm McLaren’s Sex. I went to the tryout wearing my pointed Sex winklepickers, with watch buckles on the side, skintight black drainies, a secondhand striped shirt with the collar up, my hair short, flat, and
dyed black. I strapped on my Epiphone semi-acoustic and played, not very well, but good enough to beat out two long-haired musicians who complained I couldn’t even tune the guitar. Acme owner John Krevine, who organized the tryout, said, “Yeah, but he’s got the right attitude.”
I could play and sing a bit, but I must admit to having been somewhat surprised to be offered the gig. It confirmed what I truly believed: Follow your own course, be the captain of your soul. Also, I had an intimate knowledge of the burgeoning scene they wanted to plug into. They already had a singer and drummer, so I brought Tony in to them, claiming we wrote songs together, even though we hadn’t actually penned a single note at the time. I insisted I wouldn’t be in the group if they didn’t hire Tony, too, which they agreed to. The singer was an older guy named Gene October. Krevine came up with the name Chelsea, as everything that was cool emanated from Kings Road. Things were starting to take off.
The Bromley Contingent continued to make the scene with a series of wild parties, including one memorable bash at Bertie Berlin’s house, with Siouxsie, Steve Severin, Simon Barker, a bunch of workers from Malcolm’s Sex shop, and Johnny Rotten. Those were the fun times. We were fine young cannibals, ready to conquer the universe, poised to become stars in our own right.
CHAPTER SIX
IN A REVOLUTION, ONE YEAR EQUALS FIVE
Louise’s, a lesbian club in a basement just off Oxford Street, London
“YOU’LL NEVER FIND, AS LONG as you live, someone who loves you, tender like I do,” the bass voice intoned. Slickly, the DJ moved the ladies around the downstairs dance floor at Louise’s, a basement club off Oxford Street frequented mostly by lesbians.
One had to enter through a narrow side street, which opened into a small reception room with a few scattered tables and chairs. Toward the back was a stairway that led downstairs to the bar and dance floor. The clientele was mostly butch women and fashionable lipstick lesbians.
