by Billy Idol
As in the Wild West, in punk rock, the uglier the scene was, the more romantic it became. I was gradually shedding my past. We played gigs through the sweat and stench of beer and vomit mixed with the sounds of fighting and people having sex in the middle of a dirty floor, a grime-encrusted dream. We took that world of piss and shit—like IRA prisoners scrawling their message on the walls of their cells—to mark our territory and spell out our resistance. The sounds of dry humping, the grunting, twisting, turning, and squeezing of flesh became a world of white heat, the kind Lou Reed sang about at Warhol’s Factory in New York back in his “sucking on my ding-dong” days. Speeding, drinking, and staying up all night. Surviving on a mixture of booze and babes, we were paid in liquor and sex. The nights blended into one another as the dream continued. We got by on our adrenaline, and then, helping us discover the way, powerful chemicals.
CHAPTER TEN
YOUTH YOUTH YOUTH: BREAK ON THROUGH TO THE OTHER SIDE
London
BRITISH YOUTH WERE DISAFFECTED. MOST were unemployed or on the dole. If they had a job, it amounted to some soulless work that deadened their minds, like being stuck on the London Underground Circle Line going round and round in circles with the same timetable day in and day out. In contrast, we believed we were fighting for our freedom on the stage across the country every night.
Punks would do anything to subvert the status quo, spawning the disgusting act of gobbing—or hocking a loogie of saliva at the performer. The first known instance took place during a show by the Damned at the Red Cow in Hammersmith, where Captain Sensible spat on the audience, who immediately returned the favor, launching what became a repulsive ritual. After that, all the bands played in a hail of spit. Christ, it was revolting, but then again, so was punk at times. Thank God it never caught on in the States, because it was a filthy habit. One night I had blood on my T-shirt from someone spitting his bloody meningitis at me. Derwood would have to chisel the dried flob from in between his frets so he could hold down the chord. The tops of the cymbals shone green in the light from the freshly deposited grolly. Oh, bollocks!
By June, we had become dissatisfied with drummer John Towe’s playing, or maybe it was his curly hair, so we replaced him with Mark Laff, who had previously played in Subway Sect, a group connected with the Clash. Laff was a great bloke with a fun personality and a fantastic outlook; he wouldn’t let life get him down too much if it threw him a curve. Derwood’s musicianship required a more adept style of drumming, and we needed to continually step up or die in the fast-paced punk scene. There could be no passengers on this punk-rock locomotive. Grow stronger or be consumed. The fire needed constant fueling. Laff was our Keith Moon, as Tony used to say. With his short, mousy hair, Mark even looked like Moonie, who was his idol. The Who’s drummer was one of the wildest, but also most innovative, musicians of his time.
Tony and I increasingly looked to the Who as a guide when attempting to suss out our development. I listened to their albums My Generation and The Who Sell Out a lot because I loved “I Can See for Miles,” “Tattoo,” and “Rael.” The last began the story of Tommy, a serviceman who dies before he can reach his family. In this case, the protagonist is a ship captain; in Tommy, he’s the son of a World War II bomber pilot. I also loved Pete Townshend’s schoolboy vocal on “Odorono” and his singing on “Our Love Was.” The conceptual story lines, the faux commercial vignettes, and the pirate radio station adverts in between cuts were great, with the memorable segue “More music, more music, more music . . .”
The Who celebrated the quasi-legality of the pirate radio stations because access to this new cultural force was like manna from heaven. The band was very into fashion, op art, pop art, and kinetic art in their clothes. They’d co-opt English military medals and turn their meanings inside out. I discovered a Pete Townshend Eel Pie songbook with notations for some incredible chords and progressions. I used this book as a guide, taking off from Townshend’s ideas with some of my own, making it up as I went along. I wanted our songs to ring out as if they were a call to arms. We craved and needed that kind of energy.
We had gained enough notice to attract a real full-time management team. Jonh Ingham was a tall, well-spoken American who knew everything about what made great rock. An established music journalist for Sounds magazine, Ingham, along with Caroline Coon, had been at least partly responsible for breaking punk in the UK. Stuart Joseph was his partner, brought in to handle the money. In hindsight, I’m not sure that Joseph was the best choice for the job. But he had a great deal of energy and was hungry to do something in the burgeoning punk-rock world and was so broke at the time, he was living in his car. Vivien Goldman, another Sounds writer, worked with the two of them for about a month before deciding to split. She later told me she was concerned at the time that they were strictly in it for the money. I knew from the rock books I’d read that bands always got ripped off at the start of their careers. My thinking at the time was that it was simply the price you paid to get the necessary experience before eventually you got a handle on it—if you lasted that long. At this point, midway through 1977, we were just glad and amazed we had any managers at all.
One of the first things we did under our new management team was record a demo of four songs so that we had something to play for interested record companies. We demoed “Ready Steady Go,” “Day by Day,” “Your Generation,” and “Youth Youth Youth.” It was my first time in a studio recording anything. We allowed the engineer to do pretty much what he wanted. The demo was fairly rough, but it had that punk spirit. In that same vein, we decided to bootleg it ourselves but pretend we had nothing to do with it. It was as if we were so hot, someone had pirated our demo, not too far from today’s online file sharing. We had Steve Strange take some white labels to a few different independent retailers like Rough Trade, making them available in a limited number. They sold out in a second. We had proved we could sell out London clubs; now we proved we could sell records. The label offers started going through the roof.
Being in Generation X and getting caught up in the punk scene was my education. I was growing up in public. The band was naked to the world as we began to learn our trade, but what an exciting way to apprentice. I had always dreamed of being in a band, but now I was acquiring the skills to succeed, with all of England watching.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
WHITE LIGHT, WHITE HEAT, WHITE RIOTS
Charing Cross Station, London
THE SUMMER OF ’77 WAS blazing hot in England. One day, the temperature reached 84 degrees, prompting the newspaper headline PHEW, WHAT A SCORCHER! After we crashed the van in March returning from Iggy’s gig, I would walk everywhere or use public transport, and I didn’t mind the heat.
To get to rehearsal at the Roxy from Bromley, I would walk to Bickley station and take a train to Charing Cross, a twenty-minute ride, then walk up Charing Cross Road, across Piccadilly up Wardour Street to Neal Street. But I soon learned that danger lurked for a lone punk wandering the streets of London. One morning, I ran straight into a parade of chanting Scottish football fans coming right at me. They took one look at my bleached hair, tight jeans, earrings, and pointed shoes and saw a lone London punk, easy prey. For a second, I thought about running. Then, quite spontaneously, they burst into the Ramones’ “Sheena Is a Punk Rocker,” and what seemed like 20,000 singing Scots marched past me. I was lucky it was before their match, because they lost to England that afternoon, and if they had seen me then, I surely would have had my head kicked in.
The Pistols’ “God Save the Queen” had offended all the royalists, including the teddy boys, lovers of ’50s rockabilly, who by now had declared all-out war on the punks. Since Kings Road was so identified with punk, the teds would march every Saturday from World’s End down Kings Road in their finest Edwardian-style drape coats and bright, multicolored crepe-soled “brothel creepers,” looking for any hapless punks to kick the shit out of.
John Krevine’s new store Boy London, on Kings Road, had i
ts front window smashed. The police tried in vain to keep order. The teds also took exception to our co-opting their look. One day, while I was standing on the platform at Charing Cross station looking to see the arrival time of my train, something suddenly struck me on the left jaw with great force, knocking me to the ground. Through my haze, I saw the telltale sign of a pair of rather cool-looking black patent leather brothel creepers walking away. I’d been punched by an angry ted! I got up more dazed than hurt, and saw he was now standing over by a magazine store with a couple of mates, but he had lost interest in me. Another time, I turned a corner only to run into a gang of more than twenty teds hanging out on the south side of Hammersmith Bridge. They surrounded me, and their leader sneered, “Well what have we here, a little punk rocker. What shall we do with him, boys?” I nearly shat myself, expecting a quick demise. But after a moment of silence, they all burst out laughing, probably at the sight of me shitting a brick.
YESTERDAY BY THE PAPER STAND / I FELT THE POWER OF ANOTHER RELIGION / REBELS WITH A CAUSE CAME OUT OF THE SUN / AND SPOKE THE ONLY LANGUAGE THEY’D BEEN GIVEN.
—“RUNNING WITH THE BOSS SOUND”
Sworn right-wing enemies of the punks, the skinheads, who were aligned with the fascist National Front political party, were demonstrating on my train route one Saturday as I traveled to Charing Cross. Between the teds, the skinheads, and the punks, it seemed as if all of London was fighting. I passed by the skins’ demonstration with their signs of hate on my way to meet some friends from North London I’d known from punk gigs. As we met at the Underground station, some teds came through the turnstile in force and we blokes took off, relying on discretion as the better part of valor, since there were too many to fight. I cowered in fright in the Main Line train station toilet stalls, which they searched. I waited a while to see what happened to the others. One of our group, Wendy May, fought a ted girl and kicked the shit out of her, which showed how wild she was—a punk girl sporting style and a don’t-fuck-with-me attitude. The violence in the air was palpable, and it wasn’t just the punks who were pissed off. The whole country was taking up our fiery rhetoric.
Punks continued to take their share of abuse in the streets. Johnny Rotten was attacked and cut with a razor; royalists beat up Paul Cook in the Earls Court Underground station. Punk was polarizing London with people wanting to enforce their wills by violence if they couldn’t achieve those goals any other way.
Those of us in punk bands believed in the power of song. Like the Who’s Pete Townshend sang in “Pure and Easy”: “I listened and I heard music in a word / And words when you played your guitar / The noise that I was hearing was a million people cheering / And a child flew past me riding on a star.” Our job was to make our statements in music and song. Others were called to use their fists.
The punk scene continued to evolve. The Vortex, a new club in Soho at the top of Wardour Street, opened in response to the numbers drawn to the Roxy and the Marquee. The Vortex was a bit bigger and provided even more bands with a venue to play. More hard-core right-wing bands like Jimmy Pursey’s Sham 69 and Skrewdriver began playing these clubs. Professing their working-class roots and with a minimum of pretension, they appealed to skinheads as much as to punks, and played to the lowest-common-denominator goons in the audience. Sham 69 went on to be one of the most successful bands during this period, with singles like “Hurry Up Harry” dumbing down the punk message. They brought a more violent, soccer-crowd mentality to their shows, which, while amusing at first, turned increasingly fascist in nature.
More people began jumping on the bandwagon, because punk appeared to be a road to quick success. There was a huge difference in mentality between the punk bands who came before 1977 and those who formed after. The first-wavers sincerely believed in the music and created an audience where none had existed before. But now bands of all types appeared, many of their members recently long-haired hippies, tailoring their images to the burgeoning punk scene. This proved disheartening to those of us who had been there since the start. Still, they would soon bring about their own demise, by appealing to the thug mentality.
CHAPTER TWELVE
NOT SELLING OUT, BUT BUYING IN
Notting Hill Gate, across from Kensington Gardens, London
THE RECORD COMPANY OFFERS FOR Generation X were getting too attractive and lucrative for us to ignore. The best one came from Chrysalis Records, an independent label owned and run by Terry Ellis and Chris Wright. Terry was the more outgoing and charismatic of the two, while Chris was more the businessman. The two began promoting shows at their university in the mid-’60s, branching out into managing, then starting their own record company in 1969. They had started their label with one of their management clients, Jethro Tull. They also signed the New York punk band Blondie, fronted by Deborah Harry, who would eventually hit with a single from their second album, Plastic Letters, “Denis,” a gender-swapping cover of the American doo-wop group Randy & the Rainbows’ 1963 hit “Denise.”
Our first dealings were with Terry and A&R executives Roy Eldridge and Doug D’Arcy. Roy was a nice, mild-mannered chap who actually lived near my parents’ home in Bromley. Doug, also on the quiet side, always seemed deep in thought, weighing the pros and cons of every situation. He was almost a little too serious at times, but then again, he had a lot on his plate, running the label’s day-to-day operations. Chrysalis was one of only a handful of “major” indies doing business in the UK at the time, the others being Chris Blackwell’s Island Records, Richard Branson’s Virgin, and A&M Records, owned by Americans Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss. After witnessing the problems between the Sex Pistols and EMI, we wanted to be with an independent label. We admired the freedom that the Ramones had with Seymour Stein’s Sire Records, a label we nearly joined at one point. We finally decided on Chrysalis because it offered us the best of both worlds—an indie, British-based record company with strong ties to the U.S.
We signed with Chrysalis Records on July 20, 1977. We hired a lawyer to look over the contract, but I also took a copy to my dad. Our relationship had been strained by my decision to pursue a career in music, but my father was a trained accountant, so he was able to read the agreement and explain what it entailed. He was quite amazed at the size of the deal, which included a million-pound advance over three albums. I was knocked out that my dad could help me. I think it helped to mend some fences between us, as here was a side of rock ’n’ roll he could fathom. Of course, based off what I’d read in all the rock books about the rip-offs that took place, it was likely that we would never see any of the money. But I wasn’t in it for the personal wealth so long as we were able to pay for our albums and it gave us the freedom to pursue what we loved to do.
When the deal was done, every member of the band started receiving a weekly wage of eleven pounds. I used my share to lease a tiny, coffin-shaped room in a flat in Notting Hill Gate, across from Kensington Gardens. I shared it with two girls: Karen O’Connor, daughter of the singer Des O’Connor; and a black actress named Bukie. I would have to either walk through their rooms to get to the toilet and the kitchen, or, alternatively, walk across the public landing. There was nothing in the kitchen, not even a refrigerator, just an old stove that didn’t work. In the morning, I would go next door to the newspaper shop to buy a can of Coke so I could wake up. But the important thing was that I was officially living in London.
To celebrate the signing, our managers took us to a Fulham restaurant. The clientele seemed a bit strange at first, until I was told that it was a place for cross-dressing men to meet.
The night we signed our record deal, we played a gig at the Marquee that Chrysalis filmed for promotional purposes. It was directed by David Mallet, who would go on to shoot a number of my ’80s videos. The set started with a cover of Gary Glitter’s “Rock On!,” a song I suggested; then we followed up with a new song, “From the Heart,” which would open the album. And then into “London Life,” “Above Love,” “New Order,” “Listen,” a song I wrote t
he lyrics and music for, and “Wild Youth,” which would be our second single. Later that summer, we played a pair of shows at the Vortex on Monday, August 1, and Tuesday, August 2.
At this point, the band’s creative method had started to crystalize into a partnership between Tony and myself. My writing process consisted of sitting hunched over the guitar singing into the voice box, serenading myself into a place of confidence. I would sing Lou Reed’s “Sweet Jane,” “Coney Island Baby,” “White Light/White Heat,” “Heroin,” “Into the Sun,” and “Rock and Roll”; Iggy’s “Down on the Street,” some Who, the Kinks’ “Set Me Free,” “All Day and All of the Night,” and a few Roy Orbison tunes, “It’s Over” and “Blue Bayou.” These were all songs I liked to play on guitar to back my singing.
Then I would get inside Tony’s lyrics and try to find a melody and guitar figure I could hang a song on. I really wanted the songs to be melodic, even if we were going to scream them out. I wanted them to work on both acoustic and electric guitars, loud or quiet, so the feelings could come through. Occasionally, I would write lyrics, as I did for “Trying for Kicks,” “Prove It,” and “Listen,” but mainly I enjoyed the camaraderie and team spirit Tony and I shared. I knew I needed to learn quickly and not let ego get in the way. The punk ethos we followed was all about sublimating the will for the greater good.
Mick Jones wrote a lot of the Clash’s early songs, and his approach helped us with our own. Songs like “From the Heart,” a number Tony and I started to write at a crash pad where Mick lived with the Slits’ lead guitarist, Viv Albertine, demonstrated our desire for our songs to speak about our true feelings. Also living in the same pad was Glen Matlock, who had left the Pistols in February and was now writing songs for his new band, the Rich Kids. Glen told me how he nicked the massive bass line hook to “Anarchy in the UK” from an Abba record, which I found amusing and creative. He did a bunch of writing in the Pistols, contributing catchy riffs, backing vocals, and melodies that carried over to their album, Never Mind the Bollocks, even though he didn’t play on it. Glen continues to get a raw deal from Pistols fans, but I always thought his talent and contributions to the band were underrated, as was his innovative sense of style. He introduced me to a girlfriend of his who made me some see-through black and multicolored patterned short- and long-sleeved singlets, one of which I’m wearing underneath my leather jacket in a famous picture of me with Keith Moon in ’78. We were all having fun being part of a movement; we felt like part of one big community.
