Dancing With Myself

by Billy Idol

  Generation X played “From the Heart” at the Marquee; the song that distanced us from the Pistols, who had made the negative thing their own. We wanted to create a new optimism rather than continue to wallow in self-pity. We were young and idealistic! We believed in the healing power of music and its ability to challenge society. We felt this new world should express the full range of emotions. The Orwellian nightmare of 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World could not be allowed to take place. In “From the Heart,” we described personal emotions of the moment with love, feelings that came from the heart. Even amidst the negative scene of punk, I was searching for love. The landscape of ’70s England led us to look for it in the darkest corners of the mind and soul, and then value what we found there.

  We wanted to express ourselves in every way possible. I was now wearing tight black jeans, some dirty Converse sneakers, and a dyed-black soldier’s battle dress over my homemade Soviet constructivist T-shirts. I was influenced by the Russian propaganda poster BEAT THE WHITES WITH THE RED WEDGE. I couldn’t draw, but I could create shapes and artfully place them on my T-shirts. Tony could draw really well, and he had made a T-shirt of Patty Hearst as SLA member Tanya. The home-designed and hand-drawn T-shirts gave us a unified, grassroots look, one our fans could easily re-create themselves if they wanted to. One of my design concepts ended up as the cover of the “Ready Steady Go” single the following year.

  All of this was topped off by my spiky, bleached blond hair, which created quite an impact. Steve Strange and I bought a load of soldier gear at an army store and dyed it black. I would walk around in these fatigues, with my lyrics, tapes, and records in a plastic bag. That’s how I looked in ’77, captured in Julien Temple’s aforementioned Sex Pistols documentary, The Filth and the Fury. It was a style that came out of having zero money, which forced us to transform secondhand clothes into something cool. It turned out to be well within our fans’ ability and budget to take our ideas and use them to create their own style.

  I loved mixing fashion eras—punk hair, Gene Vincent leather jacket, military chic. That was part of punk’s magic, that it embraced the creation of new designs or just the mixing and matching of styles from the past. Tony had a pair of leather trousers I was quite envious of, and after we signed with Chrysalis, I persuaded Jonh Ingham to give me some extra money from our record deal so I could buy my own. I wore those pants for six months nonstop to break them in, gig in, gig out, night and day. Channeling the power of leather pants gave me a great feeling. They were something I’d wanted ever since I saw pictures of Gene Vincent, the Beatles, Jim Morrison, and Lou Reed in leather, and now I had my own! My rock ’n’ roll dream of fronting a punk band in leather pants had come true.

  Soon after that, I added a box-shaped secondhand thigh-length leather jacket, the one I’m wearing in that picture with Keith Moon. To me, leather somehow stood for freedom. Because of the hippie rule of denim, people had stopped wearing leather, at least until the Ramones donned their motorcycle jackets. Black performers like Smokey Robinson wore leather, as Robinson did when I saw him perform in 1974. While Elvis Presley had worn all black leather in his ’68 comeback special, by the ’70s, there was definitely an unspoken sexual thing about leather because of the leather-boy look in the gay world. But we brought a youthful innocence to it that somehow spoke volumes. It was definitely an outsider fashion, since most people didn’t go to work dressed in it. Leather for me was no longer about sexual repression or bondage but about a birth of freedom, at least for my heroes, like Morrison, Lou Reed, the Ramones, and the like.

  It was during this “white light, white heat” summer of ’77 that we started to think about recording our first single. We considered working with Phil Wainman, who had produced the Sweet. I liked Mick Tucker’s drumming on those records. Drumming and groove was always important to me. If the groove isn’t there, you might as well go home—nothing is adding weight to the words or the guitar playing. The Sweet records had an energy and excitement. No matter what you thought of the songs, the tracks all sounded good. We also used the fast eighth-note grooves that I was beginning to incorporate into “Ready Steady Go” and other Generation X song ideas, which would soon become a Billy Idol trademark.

  Wainman was not the coolest choice as a producer, but he was an instinctual one for me, and Tony went along with it. We were a fast-paced, energy-infused three-piece who used speed and dynamics to make up for what we lacked in musicianship. We weren’t a pop band, but I loved all kinds of rock ’n’ roll and refused to cut myself off from a pop producer just because some bloody revolution was going on. No one’s taking “Be-Bop-a-Lula” away from me—I don’t care who the fuck you are. The punk credo was to stand up for your own beliefs and tastes, not bow down to yet another new set of rules. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss, indeed.

  We felt that it was up to us to come up with the song concept and ideas and then bring in a producer to help record those ideas. For all his hit pop records, Wainman was actually a talented drummer and musician who expected a certain level of playing. Unfortunately, we didn’t quite have that down yet. Our punk-rock attitude couldn’t always make up for our lack of experience.

  The recording of our first single, “Your Generation,” went well regardless, as we’d been playing the song for nearly nine months. There were no major differences with Phil on that one. He let us play and recorded it as is. “Day by Day” was the B-side. Tony seemed to know more about the recording process than I did, but I had good instincts—I knew what I liked—and I think we made a good team, as Phil produced the songs and we got on with playing them. Some of the other members, however, were not happy with his criticism of their abilities.

  For the single cover, Jonh Ingham took my Russian constructivist ideas to Barney Bubbles, an artist who made a great cover out of circles and rectangles in red, black, and white, which still looks good today. I was knocked out.

  Tony picked out a font for Generation X, which we stenciled with red, diagonal stripes on all our gear and guitar cases. This same font was used on the lettering on the single sleeve. Characteristic of our punk ethos, we were as involved in our artistic image as we were in the music.

  Our first single, “Your Generation,” came out on September 1, 1977. Elton John, writing as a guest reviewer in the Record Mirror, panned it: “This is really dreadful garbage . . . hideously recorded.” Of course, we were singing precisely about not having to listen to old farts like him, so we actually took the review as a compliment. (Ironically, years later, I did a guest spot with Elton for the Who’s Tommy charity show at Universal Amphitheatre in 1988 as Cousin Kevin, and he came to a London gig on my 1990 Charmed Life tour, where he told me he liked my song “Lovechild,” the B-side to the “L.A. Woman” single.)

  The single cracked the Top 30, and we were invited to perform it on the BBC’s Top of the Pops, a decision for which the punks mercilessly criticized us. Still, the Pistols had appeared doing “Pretty Vacant” on a video for that same show, so I thought, Bollocks, we need to get through to as many people as possible. Who gives a fuck about the medium—the music is the message!

  We celebrated the single release by playing the Marquee with the Jolt on Tuesday, September 6, and later that week, with two nights at Barbarella’s in Birmingham. We returned to the Marquee again on Tuesday, September 20. Tuesday nights at the Marquee were the slowest of the week, so if you could sell one out, it was quite an achievement, something the Who had done in the early ’60s. When we attracted lines around the block, the weekly music magazines suddenly began to take notice.

  One of the first stars we met was Marc Bolan. He had a weekly kids’ TV show, Marc, featuring live bands. We were invited to Manchester to appear on what would be the show’s final episode. Previously, he had debuted his album Dandy in the Underworld at the Roxy, where we met him first. We drove up from London and arrived, to be greeted by Marc with wine bottle in hand. Unfortunately, our gear, which was also coming from London, had got st
uck somewhere along the way and wouldn’t arrive in time for us to play. The producer of the show wanted to cancel our slot, as she had David Bowie coming from Switzerland to debut “Heroes,” and couldn’t be bothered to find a way to accommodate this “little punk band from London.” We were mortified, but Marc came to the rescue. “I won’t do the show if you can’t find a way to make this work,” he said. When the producer freaked, Bolan calmed her down by offering to let us use his Les Paul guitar and amp. The other scheduled band, Eddie and the Hot Rods, lent us their bass rig and drum kit so the show could go on. We played what would be our first television appearance. A week before it aired, Marc died tragically in a car accident. Everyone in Britain watched the show, which featured Bowie, and what turned out to be Bolan’s last performance. I will always remember Marc for standing up for us. He had true rock ’n’ roll spirit and is today regarded as one of the pioneers of punk.

  The recording of our second single, “Wild Youth,” proved more problematic. After three days in the studio, we still hadn’t laid down a drum track, which was very disheartening. Everyone had gone home, and I found myself alone with Wainman, who said to me, “This lot is useless. You’re the star. Why don’t you just leave them?” Quite taken aback, I said, “I can’t just leave a punk band. It has to first disintegrate.” He just shook his head and sadly walked away. But his comment planted a seed of thought in my mind, the idea of being a solo artist. In any case, I had to continue with Generation X, as the punk ideal was not just about music, but an experiment that had to be seen through to its bitter end.

  We eventually began tracking over one of the takes. “Wild Youth” had tons of energy, and boots stomping on orange crates gave it some sound effects, adding to the chanted background vocals over the roller-coaster backing. Derwood plays some great guitar on the record, but the real experiment came with doing a dub remix for the B-side. Phil wasn’t interested in this at all, so we produced it with the engineer. We broke down the backing track to drum and bass, setting up many spin-and-echo effects aping dub reggae, but in the context of a rock ’n’ roll track. Then we all took turns manning different faders on the control board, as we brought in the guitar tracks and small slices of the vocal at certain moments to catch the music of the track and send individual or grouped notes into an echoed dub or repeat, which eventually dissolved into distortion. It was a blend of punk-rock aggression and the dance-hall, dub-wise beats of the Jamaican sound, and a forerunner of the world beat that would later mark the music of the Clash and two-tone bands like the Specials, the Selecter, and Madness.

  In a way, it was good that Phil left us to do the dub mix, as we were able to actually be hands-on in delivering the concept in sound, and I think it still stands up today. When I heard it in a club, it sounded great as an example of punk’s ability to expand beyond three-chord thrash. I was always proud we did it.

  Phil was a great drummer, and I can understand why he was so critical about the drum tracks. But we were a band learning and honing our act in public. I was beginning to see the validity of his suggestion about going solo, but I knew I had committed to the band when I signed the record deal. Anything else was out of the question, since we were just starting out. The plans Tony and I had made couldn’t be easily cast aside. I also felt a strong sense of loyalty to these blokes who were sticking with me; and I knew I had a long way to go if I was ever to do it on my own. In 1977 it wasn’t possible, but I could see that when Phil sat behind Mark’s kit, the groove picked up immediately. It was something to think about.

  “Wild Youth” came out on Friday, November 18, followed by another Top of the Pops performance, for which I wore a black leather motorcycle jacket with a red lining, leather trousers, and black leather gloves, bleached white spiked hair, and some facial acne for good measure! It was a strong look, for everyone from Gene Vincent and the Beatles in Hamburg to Billy Idol on Top of the Pops.

  My rock ’n’ roll punk-rock style was all attitude and a belief that somewhere way deep inside I’d find a way to exorcise the demons—my inferiority complex, the emptiness that couldn’t be satisfied; that possibility fueled my tireless drive to succeed. It was about never sleeping and never being completely clean, either. The battle is both inside and outside. I was just a bloke fronting a punk-rock group and having a whale of a time. I was writing and singing my own music, and now performing for the nation I came from.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  BANDS ACROSS THE OCEAN

  Fulham Palace Road rehearsal studio, London

  AS WINTER ARRIVED, I WAS caught up in a movement that was truly inspiring Britain. But I loved the Velvet Underground and the New York Dolls, so it would certainly be a dream come true, and a career milestone, for Generation X to play in New York one day. I always envisioned New York as rock ’n’ roll heaven. I sang with a slight American accent underneath my native British one, a Yank inflection from my childhood in the U.S. I was still British, but wanting to be rock ’n’ roll, which, in my mind, was American. Many punks were anti-American and proudly Anglophilic, but I knew that music’s impact was international. There were scenes breaking out in New York, Chicago, Cleveland, L.A., and San Francisco. It wasn’t just the UK—punk was a rock ’n’ roll world war!

  That battle was reflected, for me, by the sound of Bob Marley and the Wailers’ revolutionary album Exodus, which seemed to be coming out of every boom box. “Get up, stand up / Don’t give up the fight.” The reggae we listened to told of other people and races denied a true and free future. The Rastafarians talked of themselves as taking part in a spiritual rebellion. Were we sainted, too? Were we on some holy mission, or just rude-boy rebels? We were young and idealistic and set to conquer the world, our enthusiasm often overtaking our common sense in the year of the two sevens’ clash.

  Meanwhile, we continued to work on writing for the first album. Tony played me Bruce Springsteen’s “Jungleland,” which rocked but also had a gripping story line and several moving parts that built to a crescendo. I dug the idea of a narrative culled from his personal history; it inspired me to dig deep and come up with my own equivalent out of the raw materials of my life. Tony had a set of lyrics for a song called “Kiss Me Deadly,” which we decided wouldn’t be a three-chord bash, but a sequence of chords building dynamically from quiet to loud, emphasizing the narrative. It was what the Who did in their mini-operas. We thought about doing the same thing except with the speed and roller-coaster aggression of punk and our own street-smart attitude.

  The setting for “Kiss Me Deadly” was Fulham. London, SW6, where Tony lived and we now rehearsed in a basement. I strung some picked chords together and spoke/sang the lyrics so the song would start very quietly. Then we added bass and drums to kick it into gear at the end of the first verse. We came up with an explosive middle section of wild drumming, with a guitar break leading into a full-on 4/4 final verse, with the recorded version running 4:24 in length. It told the story of two punks facing the turbulent violence, sexual exploration, and drug experimentation of the time. It could have been about Tony and me or you and your best girlfriend or any two people facing the politically and violently unsafe world in 1977. We were trying to communicate our experiences in a romantic but still realistic way, instead of just shouting grievances, as was the fashion at the time. This new direction pulled us away from the old punk, allowing us to maintain its aggression and attitude while advancing musically by exploring other, more complicated emotions and feelings.

  The Ramones were touring England on their album Rocket to Russia and asked us to support them at their gig at the Rainbow, the biggest venue in Central London. We ended the year on New Year’s Eve ’77 by seeing what it was like to play a big hall. It was the same big hall where I had seen Captain Beefheart back in 1970, and Roxy Music in ’73 with Sparks. Now I was treading those same boards myself!

  The English crowd anointed us in a hail of gob. We loved playing with the Ramones. It was great to open for a group that was so influential to us, and
to the whole punk scene. The Ramones were unabashed about their love for early-’60s groups and Phil Spector, which was something we had in common. “Blitzkrieg Bop” and “Sheena Is a Punk Rocker” blasted us into 1978.

  Meanwhile, while we’d been writing songs and working on what we hoped would be our own unique style, the Sex Pistols had been finishing a small tour of Britain to prepare for a U.S. tour in the New Year. We all had high hopes they’d be successful there. They’d had a fourth hit single in October with “Holidays in the Sun” to launch them across the water. We thought the Pistols would spearhead the way, even clear the path for us other punk bands, much as they had in England.

  So it was really dumbfounding when they arrived back in England in February, having broken up in San Francisco at the end of a tour where they didn’t even play New York, the mecca of punk! Their manager, Malcolm McLaren, seemed to grossly misunderstand the process of breaking a band in America. Everything that’s big surely goes through New York. If you don’t make it there, you won’t make it anywhere. The U.S. brought out the Pistols’ weaknesses, both personal and professional, and they were over as a band, at least as far as Johnny Rotten was concerned.