by Billy Idol
I saw Steve Jones at the Speakeasy in London when they had just returned, and he was moaning, “What can I do, Bill? I’ve lost my band.” I was torn up to see him look so lost and vulnerable—I know that’s how you can feel without the security of those once-strong ties with your bandmates. You get used to being a part of something like that. They had gone to America in triumph. I had seen one of their gigs at a college outside London just before they left, and they were great. I guessed America’s vast spaces could eat you whole. Or was it our inner demons? Whatever had happened to the Sex Pistols, I vowed not to let it happen to me.
Blimey! If the Pistols couldn’t make it, what did that say about Generation X’s chances? John would quickly drop the Rotten and go on by his real name, Lydon, emerging after the breakup of the Sex Pistols to launch a great new group, Public Image Ltd., or PiL. His new band had a more experimental sound, a droning, slow-tempo, bass-heavy noise rock, overlaid by John’s distinctive, castigating rant.
But we had our own album to worry about. The first item on the agenda was to record a third single to accompany the album’s release. We picked “Ready Steady Go,” which by this time was a Generation X standard. Full of excitement, we returned to the studio with Phil and began to lay the track down, but when we left the studio at the end of the first day, we were still unsure about the drums. We were somewhat surprised, therefore, when we returned the next day and listened. Mark’s beats were much tighter and more rhythmically sound than we remembered. And yet, some of his raw energy was siphoned from the track.Tony and I always wondered if Phil took matters into his own hands and got on the drum kit after we left.
Cracks had begun to form in our relationship with Phil; he didn’t understand punk or how it was springing up from a nonprofessional ideology—he really had no time for that—so we weren’t surprised when he decided he didn’t want to do the rest of the album. At that point, we turned to Martin Rushent, who was already known for his work with the Stranglers and would later become an ’80s pioneer of the influential Brit techno-pop sound when he produced Human League. We decamped to TW, a small studio that was a converted garage in Fulham, near the Hammersmith Odeon. Martin just let us play while he recorded. We bashed through some of our stage songs and worked on some new ones. Then we recorded "Ready Steady Go," retaining Laff's beats the way they were meant to be heard. It all went quite fast because it had to be done in two weeks, including mixing. Rushent’s young engineer, Alan Winstanley, who prepared the board mixes of the whole album, was great. We loved what he’d done, but Martin remixed the songs. We always thought Alan’s mics were better. Winstanley, often with his partner Clive Langer, went on to become a huge power in British rock and pop, producing the likes of Elvis Costello, Morrissey, Bush, and Madness.
This first Generation X album was essentially our stage show with a few overdubs. Recording it in a converted garage made it garage-rock, which was perfect for punk and our musical abilities at the time. Derwood shines on this stuff more than the rest of us, because he really is a great guitar player. As lead singer, I simply let loose, relying on my own instincts to lead the way. Who gives a shit? It’s not jazz. It’s punk. I only have to be me, which was what I did onstage. I had to work from those feelings and remember to have fun. What else did I have to depend on? The other lads were all supportive. In the 1970 Rod Steiger film Waterloo, Napoléon’s Imperial Guard, when faced with a challenge, declared, “We can’t go around, so the way is forward!”
Now, working with Martin, we felt that we weren’t quite under the same scrutiny as we were with Phil Wainman, and this seemed to put everyone in a better mood. Phil was too much the professional journeyman to appreciate that Tony and I had a concept for a punk band, not a run-of-the-mill pop group.
Chrysalis had drafted Martin at the last moment to get an album out of us. Whatever his true feelings about our music were, he was a professional, and we worked well together. Every now and then, he’d give me a pointer on singing, but mostly, I was on my own, doing it my way, because I realized that I would have to live with it. You have to believe in yourself even when others don’t, or you won’t achieve anything. When you see people wavering in their belief, you have to be twice as strong to hold them in place. That’s what I felt at the time. It’s like being on the battlefront in wartime. Some will break and run when the shooting starts.
The first song on the American version of our album was a cover of “Gimme Some Truth.” I loved John Lennon and wanted to do one of his songs. We originally performed this for a BBC session in ’77, and that’s the version on the 1991 Generation X compilation Perfect Hits 1975–81. I loved that Lennon basically excoriated everyone in this song, and we included “punk rockers” in the lyrics to update it a bit. I have always felt that Lennon was right up there with Dylan at fitting in those rolling, spat-out lyrics. He always did have a bee in his bonnet, lashing out against politics, or art, or sociology, or religion. There was something very punk rock about that attitude. We sped it up by playing eighth notes, added a ska guitar offbeat, and presto, it was a punk song. The American record company loved the idea of a Lennon cover, removing “The Invisible Man” from the U.S. version of the album. I loved our version, so that was all right by me.
“From the Heart” was a song we usually opened our live shows with. You might look at it as our response to the Pistols wanting to “destroy the passerby” in “Anarchy in the UK,” our proof that we could write a punk love song.
“Promises Promises” was a song about how the vows you make sometimes get forgotten with the distortion of time. Perhaps it was a dig at our own heroes, who seemed to have left their youthful ideals behind. Today I understand how life can take the idealist and wreck him on the rocks of his own words.
We had read that in the ’60s, the Who had a hundred core fans who networked through the phone system to help build the band’s audience. In “One Hundred Punks,” we thought of ourselves as Jimmy in Quadrophenia, the wannabe who self-destructs at the end, number 101. We created a way of drawing fans out to the shows with an early stab at viral marketing involving phone trees. We called them the Hundred Punks, and this was our song about them.
“Prove It” was another song for which I wrote the lyrics. I felt I had a lot to prove at this time in my life, that I needed to put my money where my mouth was, and that meant getting up onstage and performing as if our lives depended on it.
At first I wasn’t confident in my own lyrical skills, and the work was always a joint effort. In those days, Tony would quite often arrive with finished lyrics, and then I would work on those. We needed songs, and we used most of the ideas that popped fresh into our minds. It turned out to be a fantastic learning experience, first making some singles, and then, quickly, an entire album of songs. The first Generation X album was now complete.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
READY STEADY GO
Notting Hill Gate, London
THE SINGLE “READY STEADY GO” B/W “No No No” came out on February 7, 1978, with a cover Jonh Ingham copied from one of my T-shirt designs. Once again, we appeared on Top of the Pops to perform our new single, and this time we had an album to support. I also started to develop a feel for my own fashion as distinct from the prevailing punk style. I worked with a girl to create my own look, one that I would be comfortable in, and advanced the idea of punk fashion from ripped T-shirts and bondage clothes. For this show, I wore a light blue jacket with black lining and collar over a two-tone shirt that was pink on one side and yellow on the other. I had dyed it myself in the bathtub at Notting Hill Gate—I’m sure the girls at the flat loved that! I also had some white shoes with black piping made and I wore them with my leather trousers. I looked pretty colorful and, with my bleached hair, the look perfectly fit the song’s lighter subject. The usual punk uniform of leather and denim had become too limiting for me. I wanted to stay one step ahead of the people who were copying us. I strapped on my Epiphone semi-acoustic, which I still used when I wrote, since I di
dn’t own an acoustic guitar.
My status as an up-and-coming rock star led to some new and intriguing romantic possibilities. I began to meet a variety of interesting women. One was a makeup artist who taught me a little bit about her craft. We’d go to the art-house movie theaters when I had an off night. I also enjoyed the company of a thirty-five-year-old woman who worked at Chrysalis and lived near Notting Hill. She wore all these sexy stockings and garter belts. I could also take a bath at her flat. The photographer Sheila Rock was another friend of mine. And I was meeting plenty of birds on the road. One was a punk-rock chick with blue hair who styled my hair and screwed me until her boyfriend found out. With the avalanche of birds, I became a quick learner in the sack, as I hadn’t had a ton of sex before this.
The band played up and down Britain as we traveled in a rented transit van, sitting on top of the gear. It was a nonstop blur of gigs, chicks, sweat, spit, bleach, more sweat, noise, screaming horrors, chicks, chicks, and more chicks. One good thing about being in Generation X was we were a fun band, without the political posturing of some of the other punk groups. The younger crowd loved our punk-rock hybrid. When we heard that our show in Glasgow was to be canceled because of the ban on punk bands within the city limits, we bused three hundred kids to a venue outside town and watched as they, in their excitement, pogoed their way from the bus to the ballroom floor. It was worth going the extra mile for our Scottish fans.
That July, Tony and I traveled up to Birmingham to see the Clash. They were great, but I was even more blown away by Suicide, the opening act from New York. The “band” was composed of two members, Alan Vega on vocals and Marty Rev on keyboard and drum machine. Wow! What an anarchic duo. Their electronic rock ’n’ roll was a bit outside the scope of Clash fans, who proceeded to throw stuff at them. Alan was a menacing presence onstage, a Puerto Rican/Jewish Elvis by way of Iggy. The constant throb of “Ghost Rider,” with its sixteenth-note bass lines and Marty’s chord stabs, drove the dyed-in-the-wool Clash fans crazy with frustration. Alan antagonized the crowd and then smashed himself in the head with the microphone, drawing blood. This drove the audience over the top, and they bottled the band off the stage. As for me, I felt like Jon Landau seeing Bruce Springsteen: I had seen the future of rock, a future that would include not just guitar, bass, and drums, but electronics as well. Suicide were ahead of their time, but this crowd was not ready for it.
Chrysalis sent me to the States in the spring of ’78 to do publicity for the album. Because the label wouldn’t spring for two members for budgetary reasons, I went without Tony, which probably began an erosion of solidarity in the band. This was the beginning of me doing interviews and promotion on my own.
It was fantastic to be in New York. I stayed at the Warwick Hotel on 54th, the strange, steamy subway currents blowing my dreams into the night. I hung out with Blondie, and Debbie Harry took me to meet the New York Dolls’ David Johansen and Syl Sylvain at their rehearsal space. I hung out at the Mudd Club and Max’s Kansas City, where I saw Patti Smith showcase her Easter album, and met her backstage. I was a big fan of her Horses album. At one point, she turned to her mother, and said, “Look, Ma, it’s the face of the next generation!” I don’t know exactly what she meant by that—maybe it was her way of referring to the band Generation X, but I was glad to be there digging on the scene and hanging out with someone who was a hero to us. Patti and her guitarist Lenny Kaye gave us hope that punk could be huge in the U.S. for the right reasons.
I was knocked out to meet some of the American punk bands we dug in England. At CBGB’s, I saw Lux Interior and the Cramps. I met Bleecker Bob, who owned a popular Lower East Side record store of the same name that doubled as a hangout for many of New York’s finest punk bands. Roberta Bayley, who shot the cover of the Ramones’ first album, took my picture. If punk was a movement in England, it was still in its nascent stages in America, but these groups were my idols.
After a few days in New York, we flew to L.A., where I spent time with Joan Jett and about twenty of her very girlish lipstick lezzies in cute punk go-go boots. Then I saw the Germs and Darby Crash at the Whisky a Go Go. I went on Rodney Bingenheimer’s KROQ show to debut some tracks from the album. He was using the “Wild Dub” instrumental remix as his theme music. I visited Licorice Pizza, a hip record store, and hung with local scribe and scenester Pleasant Gehman. Sunset Strip seemed to wind its way like a snake through the bowels of West Hollywood. I crawled along the scales of its back as it took me toward the heart of the music world where, after the ’60s and early ’70s hippies, the punks had taken root. I stayed at a small motel just across from Tower Records. Compared to the fast pace of central London or New York, L.A. seemed to be very slow. That hippie laid-back vibe was still prevalent in Hollywood, which is really quite a small town, but punk was the new interloper. Over time, the two cults morphed together and became the edgy alternative scene we have today, with its focus on modern primitivism, scarification, tattooing, and piercing. Back then, the peace-and-love scene, which had saved people from Vietnam, was fading: with the war’s end, its purpose had become thwarted. Punk had come in to express some of that angst toward society, with the economic depression hitting both the U.S. and UK. America hadn’t seen a downturn since World War II, which had helped lift the depression of the ’30s. While the ’60s had seemed quite forward-looking and optimistic about the future, by the mid-’70s, those rose-tinted glasses had been removed.
Punk had enlivened the Strip with its burst of energy. Seeing Darby Crash sing that night gave his later death particular meaning for me, making it seem as tragic as the demise of Sid Vicious, both in their early twenties.
After two nights in L.A., we were off to San Francisco. I had quite a wild time in the Bay Area, where I hung out with the Avengers, a local punk band, and visited the legendary local FM station KSAN. At Mabuhay Gardens, a former transsexual bar turned premier punk venue, I jammed on “Johnny Too Bad” with San Francisco punk/ska band the Offs. It was my American onstage debut! I took a girl in the audience back to the hotel with me, where she insisted I put my fist in her pussy. She was pretty wet and I gradually got it in. As soon as I did, it was as if I set off an electric current in her body. She started rolling around on the bed and then onto the floor in a kind of ecstasy, eyes pinned to the back of her head. After about an hour of me having to follow her rolling around the room, she instructed me to “pull it out now.” At this point, her pussy had already started to close up, trapping my fist inside. Wherever she went, I had no choice but to follow, lest I break my arm. I finally got it out, but my hand blew up to twice its normal size, so I had to sleep with it in a bucket of ice. By morning, it had gone down. At that point, I kissed her and America goodbye and was soon on a plane back to the UK. What a wild week, meeting punk-rock heroes and fist-fucking. The Clash may have been bored with it, but I was in love with the USA.
* * *
UPON MY RETURN TO THE UK, we began writing our second album, Valley of the Dolls, in between gigs, during any spare time we had. The Clash’s second album, Give ’ Em Enough Rope, came out around this time, and it was a lot more rock than punk. This seemed to encourage Tony, who wanted us to move in a similar direction, like his heroes, Mott the Hoople. I had chosen the producer of the first album, so I let Tony do the honors for this one, and he wanted Mott the Hoople’s lead singer, Ian Hunter.
Tony was a bigger fan of Mott the Hoople than I was, though I remembered waking up to them doing “Thunderbuck Ram” at the three-day, twenty-four-hour outdoor music festival in Weeley back in August ’71, and I liked the stuff they’d done with Bowie. We needed someone who understood what we had to do as a band, who would work with us on making the next step. Our eye was on making an album that would break us in America.
Along with Ian, we got Bill Price, who was a top engineer. The sound and quality of his work still hold up today. Ian had a young, inexperienced singer to work with, a little out of his depth; I had to reach beyond myself. We weren�
�t going to be pigeonholed as just another Anglophile punk band. We had to change and grow or wither and die.
When we got to Wessex Studios to record the second album, we were a different band, at least in the sense that we were stepping beyond punk musically but keeping it as an attitude. It was strange to be in such a high-class studio after the converted garage where we made our first album. But we set up the gear and got down to business. The budget was small, so we worked as hard and fast as we could, but the luxury of the technology now within our grasp meant that there was a lot to learn, and quickly.
At first, I found it difficult to write for the second album. Tony had penned a load of lyrics that he gave me to work on, but I didn’t feel the same connection to them as I had our initial stuff. I could feel the lyrical direction getting less punk, but Tony’s enthusiasm and the success of “Kiss Me Deadly” drove me to contribute, as I had to the first album. We took a risk in order to develop our own style, and though we didn’t realize it at the time, we began to create our new sound.
While writing, I thought of all the ringing guitar-picking I loved and put a lot of chiming, revolving “flags” in songs like “Paradise West” and “Valley of the Dolls.” “Kenny Silvers” is almost an acoustic strum-along with a rock arrangement. I also tried to employ curb-crawling riffs, which we hadn’t tried much on the first album, such as in “Night of the Cadillacs,” and “Love like Fire.” It was rock informed by punk. A band had to be adventurous. You had to expose yourself and bare your soul to find out what you were all about. All or nothing was the spirit that prevailed back then.
