Dancing With Myself

by Billy Idol

  Tony was deeply involved with a girl named Katy, so it wasn’t so foreign to start singing about love or sex. We were one of the few punk bands to have females in our audience. Most punk bands really played primarily to guys, so it was liberating to have another subject to write about, one that was taboo for other punk bands, as their manifestos precluded presenting love in a positive way. “Valley of the Dolls” was about the sincere love we got from these dedicated female fans and the genuine excitement they brought. That factor changed the group’s dynamic in the sense that it encouraged female participation. We also sang about our love for rock ’n’ roll, such as in the fictitious fight for supremacy between Elvis and the Beatles in “King Rocker,” or just sticking to our punk guns in “Running with the Boss Sound,” about the time I was attacked by a teddy boy at Charing Cross station.

  In “Paradise West,” I sang: “And I thought it must be me who’s crazy / The things I do for fun / Choosing poison to get to paradise / Paradise west one.”

  I had to pour myself into the songs to sing them. We were focusing on our own obsessions, problems, and frustrations, but also adding in romance instead of just negativity. It was a time of no hope in society, so you had to get positive to even have a chance of overcoming life’s difficulties, or wallow in endless self-pity. We started recording our second album in the autumn of ’78 and didn’t have the luxury of a ton of time, so we kept up a certain momentum and worked hard.

  When Valley of the Dolls came out in January 1979, the leap we had taken was hard to follow for some of the music critics and our punk fans, although on the positive side, with our slightly more straight-ahead rock ’n’ roll direction, we picked up an audience that wasn’t exclusively punk. So we outraged some purists but drew in music lovers and started creating the larger-than-life images that went beyond punk and into the ’80s. Though it was horrible to be criticized so harshly by several critics and some of our fanbase, it was fun running into the dark, seeking light to illuminate our own expression.

  We went on a short tour of England when “King Rocker” came out, performing twice on Top of the Pops. We had a hit with this single, and my glam outfit on TOTP signaled we weren’t gonna wear “no uniform,” as we stated on the first album. On tour one morning, I went down for breakfast and the chef was singing “King Rocker”—it was the first time I’d overheard someone singing one of our songs. The fact was, we were getting played on the radio quite a bit, and this brought in a whole new audience: not just punks, but fans of straight rock.

  We played most of Valley of the Dolls on this UK tour, which was barely three weeks long. We basically owned nothing but the clothes on our backs, but our bid for rock stardom did fly a bit in the face of the punk purists’ “no more heroes” theme. We had already sung about our love for rock ’n’ roll on the first album, so I didn’t think we were doing anything so wrong. This was two years after 1977. Was life quite so hopeless now that punk itself had brought back an aura of positivity to English dreams? We felt we had helped each other, band and audience alike, to break through the barrier of boredom. The political situation was just as bleak, but the grip of nothing happening had been finished, and people had polarized into separate groups.

  * * *

  AFTER “VALLEY OF THE DOLLS,” the single, came out in March 1979, we started to appear in some teenybopper magazines. Our more girl-friendly image made us popular, and that was another thing that wasn’t kosher with hard-core critics and fans, who believed punk was the revenge of the rotten and the ugly. Fuck them! Punk shouldn’t be just one thing, but that was what some fans wanted. I had to experiment with my image, keep evolving or perish. My hair was longer and not just spiky, but almost in a long quiff. I experimented with baggy pants, high heels, pink “Elvis” sport coats, waistcoats, and diamanté jewelry, but I mixed it in with my leather pants and boots. We were attempting to find a style beyond punk, mixing images we loved. Derwood wore a red soldier’s dress coat. Mark got a big shiny metallic kit and he used his tom-toms on certain drum breaks. We drove around in a rented station wagon on yet another quick three-week tour. This time we hired a road manager and a couple roadies. Generation X was expanding fast.

  With Jonh Ingham gone, Stuart Joseph was now managing us alone. We were young, brash, and had to move forward. While Valley of the Dolls was a relative commercial success, the criticism of its musical direction by our punk fans, as well as other factors both creative and personal, had begun to eat away at the band. Tony and I were starting to drift apart, and all sorts of dissension followed. Our well-oiled democracy was dissolving into fighting and unspoken dark thoughts.

  Doubts about the prevailing group dynamic had begun to arise amongst all band members. It seemed to me that Tony had begun to suffer anxiety issues, and as an unwelcome result, I was doing the lion’s share of the interviews. This was certainly not my choice—at the time, doing major press interviews put me well out of my comfort zone. And while I’ve never shied away from pressing my limits, I found myself answering questions on the meaning of our lyrics. That begged the question, if I was the singer and the press spokesman, shouldn’t I write my own lyrics? Derwood and Laff wanted to write songs, too, but where were their ideas?

  We rented a house out in the Oxfordshire countryside to write songs for our third album. That might have worked for Led Zeppelin, but it didn’t for me. I was an urbanite. I didn’t want to write songs about cows. Some really shitty songs came out of those sessions that should never have seen the light of day (but that didn’t stop our record company from later exercising their rights to release them without our approval under the original Generation X contract we naively signed).

  By now, we were all influenced by different music. I was still friends with Steve Strange, and he was getting involved in the New Romantic movement. I found it hard to ignore some of the synthesizer and drum-machine groove records by the likes of Kraftwerk and Human League. I have never only listened to rock ’n’ roll. The way an endless disco groove turned into a soundscape intrigued me. I was also listening to Joy Division, who used straight-eighth pumping bass notes and constant rhythmic drumming.

  I have always loved dance music. To this day, “Land of a Thousand Dances” is a favorite of mine. I was intrigued by Giorgio Moroder’s electronic disco productions for Donna Summer, like “I Feel Love,” with its classic four-on-the-floor beat and every instrument playing eighth or sixteenth notes in syncopation. The European avant-garde element was a direct outgrowth of Kraftwerk. The constant repetition of the groove has always appealed to me. It’s what I have always loved about early rock ’n’ roll, the forward momentum of music that is meant to be danced to. Nothing lets up; the groove won’t let go. You are drawn inside it and released with abandon because of its certainty of purpose. Exemplified by the Rolling Stones’ “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” it’s relentless in its simplicity, sexy and omniscient, godlike.

  * * *

  WE TRIED TO RECORD SOME new demos at Olympic Studios in Barnes, London, a fantastic place from which to draw inspiration, as everyone from the Rolling Stones to the Beatles, B.B. King to Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie to Led Zeppelin could all at some point be found laying down tracks there. We’d been stationed in the legendary studios for some time now working toward what was to have been the third Generation X album with the original lineup. It was May 1979, and things were beginning to come apart at the seams. Blow as we might on the faint embers, the original flame seemed to have burned out. Derwood had already threatened more than once that he was going to leave, and we were struggling to find a direction. We were all a bit on edge, and the sense was that this dream was beginning to come to a close.

  After going out on a bender one night, meeting a girl, and ending up back at her flat, I woke up with a never-again hangover. First to arrive at the studio that morning, I started to play my guitar to see if I could come up with anything, or at the very least take my mind off the hangover. At some point, I remembered how a few weeks earlier, while pla
ying in Tokyo on a promotional tour, we had gone to a couple of discos, where the kids were still in Saturday Night Fever mode, dancing with their own reflections in the mirror, and I remarked to Tony, “Hey, they’re dancing with themselves.” He said, “That could be a song title!”

  Going on that memory, I worked out a bit of a chorus over E-A-B, four to the bar repeating, and I began to wonder if a verse wouldn’t work over that same chord sequence. When Tony arrived, I showed him what I had, and we started to work on some lyrics, detailing a night on any club floor in the world, where a lonely dancer fills the mirror with his or her own sensual movements.

  ON THE FLOORS OF TOKYO / DOWN IN LONDON TOWNS A GO, GO / WITH THE RECORD SELECTION / AND THE MIRROR’S REFLECTION / I’M DANCING WITH MYSELF.

  —“DANCING WITH MYSELF”

  There was magic in the air. We sat on the back fire escape, and I leaned against the iron rails and played the same driving E-A-B chord sequence on my unplugged Epiphone guitar, singing da daaa da da da da da. In moments like this the muse would grab me by the balls, and I’d feel the teenage thrill, amazed at my great luck of plucking a tune out of thin air.

  Tom Waits has said that every song has a distinct identity by which it’s born into the world, and each song needs to be taken down on its own terms. There are songs that you have to sneak up on, like you’re hunting for a rare bird. And there are songs that need to be bullied into existence; they need a shakedown. And then there are songs that come fully intact, like a dream sucked through a straw. “Dancing with Myself” was the latter, and Tony and I got caught up in the frantic buzz of its sorcery.

  That day the words and arrangement just flowed out of us both, and we scribbled them down as fast as we could, pencil to paper scrap. I know the difference between something I thought of and something I was given. My hangover melted away, and all was right in the world for those moments—the words seemed like they were already hanging there, ready to be gloved from the ether. We couldn’t help but laugh, giddy at the symmetry and the fit of the words and melody.

  It’s incredibly difficult to sit down to write a simple song about a simple idea with words that the listener will somehow feel they know upon first hearing. If it were easy, we’d do it every day.

  We made the song all about the longing to find a partner in this life: “If I looked all over the world / And there’s every type of girl / But their empty eyes seem to pass me by / And leave me dancing with myself.”

  And then, we made it a little more inclusive: “If I had the chance / I’d ask one to dance.”

  When the band arrived, we tried out this new song. I asked Mark to play a sort of reverse “twist” beat to try to get a momentum thing going, with the same repeating chords and beat all the way through. For an interlude, we chugged on B to E and, for a guitar break, we just picked out the individual notes of the chords and then went back to the verse/chorus. We recorded a version, and there seemed to be something there. What I wanted to do was put some of the punk energy back into our music, but keep it constant and sexual by making it great to dance to. You could pogo or slam dance to punk, but it wasn’t primarily for fucking, like this would be.

  What we had at this point was nothing more than a rough demo, but this was something altogether new; “Dancing with Myself” was a different kind of idea for us, and quite exciting. It was the song that would change everything.

  * * *

  IN THE MIDDLE OF EVERYTHING that was going on, manager Stuart Joseph’s divisive machinations were making frictions in the band grow worse. In an effort to alleviate the tension, we made the decision to get rid of him. This would not be easy, and we’d end up walking through rock ’n’ roll fire. Stuart responded with a lawsuit and secured a high court injunction to stop us from playing and recording under the name Generation X. Until it was all sorted out legally, we were in a bit of a limbo, so we went out and played several gigs as Wild Youth.

  Chrysalis couldn’t be seen overtly helping us, but they did anyway. We needed a new manager, and one of the people Tony mentioned to Chrysalis as a possibility was “whoever works with Kiss.” I think he said it almost as a joke, but coincidentally one of the Chrysalis owners did actually know the manager in question, Bill Aucoin, and contacted him.

  Bill came from New York to see one of our clandestine Wild Youth gigs. He seemed wild but cool, and he did give the last glimmer of hope to the slowly dying Generation X by saying he would manage us. At first we hardly knew him, but he soon set up a plan with the record company that would provide us with a weekly wage until the court action was over. Unfortunately, the court case stretched on for over six months, which seemed an interminable amount of time.

  Surely, things should have been on the upswing. We had a powerful new manager, the record company was with us, and we thought we had time to iron out any problems. Nonetheless, the songwriting issues with Derwood and Mark meant that nothing would be resolved. Over the next few months, Tony and I drifted apart from our two other bandmates. With the lawsuit still hanging over our heads, Derwood and Mark decided to leave the group to start their own band, Empire. The different needs of the individuals, questions about who should be writing the songs, and what they would sound like had all made reconciliation difficult.

  Looking back, we should’ve let Derwood in on the songwriting: he is such a great guitarist. Doing so might well have solved the temporary disagreements in the band, but I am afraid hindsight is 20/20.

  Questions about songwriters weren’t the only problem we had within the band, and soon I was about to add a substance into the mix that would outdo any problem we’d had to date and isolate me in a world of womblike ignorance.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  AND I GUESS THAT I JUST DON’T KNOW

  London

  LIKE THOSE TOKYO DANCERS IN love with their own vaporous images, I entered my own twilight world, where no one could see my thoughts and expressions—only I was privy to those. The deep inner sanctuary I had found kept me from feeling reality’s sting. The shroud of death came close and blew on me, but with a warm, comforting breath. I was alive, but in a far-off trance. The shadow forms that populated this world didn’t bother me. I was oblivious. I had a lover, a brown, dark substance you know by its names: Mr. Brown, H, horse, skag, smack, or Henry. I had fallen deeply in love, and nothing was quite so easy. Just let go, deeper, deeper, deeper, deeper, relax, all the way down. . . .

  My new drug addiction meant I would be in a state where I couldn’t function 100 percent in any environment other than a drug space. With drugs, I could have life on my terms. I was a junkie, and this was the honeymoon period. With the 24/7 rock ’n’ roll lifestyle, heroin was an easy way to fly. Cocooned within a tomblike silence, I could slip far away.

  The first time I did heroin was at the house of Thin Lizzy’s Phil Lynott after a night at the Blitz. He laid out a line of what I thought was coke, but ten minutes later, I was sick. He laughed and told me it was smack. We then snorted heroin and coke all night long, chatting about music while alternately throwing up into a wastepaper basket, our rapid-fire conversation punctuated by the sound of vomiting. I didn’t touch the stuff again for weeks, but it wouldn’t be long before heroin and I reencountered each other.

  One night, Tony and I decided to see a show by a dance group, Hot Gossip, who had a regular slot on the weekly Kenny Everett Video Show, where they danced to a set number, accompanying any band that was on the show. David Mallet was the show’s director. Everett had been on the radio for years, playing music and doing humorous skits with a wacky brand of humor that he had taken to TV in 1979. The show was a huge hit, and Hot Gossip were all the rage. They wore up-to-the-moment styles of clothing and were very brazen. That night, I was struck by one of the female dancers with long, teased-up, crazy red hair.

  I immediately fell for this thin, shapely, long-legged, crazy-haired redhead dancer, the “Stony-Eyed Medusa.” We met after the show, and my attraction to her grew. Her name was Perri Lister. We went t
o another club, where she danced with one of her mates, sexily and suggestively and with abandon. The formfitting matching patent leather outfits they wore showed off their glistening bodies as they twisted and flowed and dipped through the night. I was smitten, but was she?

  I tried dancing with her, but I’m terrible at one-on-one moves, so I got embarrassed. We momentarily lost contact at the club, but then the stony-green-eyed girl pinched me on the bum, and when I looked round, she smiled at me. She’s great, I thought to myself, a female version of me, or even wilder. I was soon to discover I’d met my match.

  Perri had grown up being tutored in the theater. Before Hot Gossip, she attended the renowned Italia Conti Academy of Theatre Arts in London, the world’s oldest theater training school. Perri’s mum and dad had both been in the theater—her father, Bert, worked as a personal assistant for Noël Coward for a time, while Perri’s mum appeared in Coward’s plays. They lived on Victoria Street in London. It was fascinating to sit with Bert and hear his tales of London in the ’30s and ’40s.

  Soon, Perri and I were head over heels in love in a way I’d never been before. We started to spend all our time together. The dancers were paid fairly well; they worked hard and partied hard, too. One of their friends was a chap who worked for a Persian prince and had access to great weed, coke, and smack. I hadn’t been doing a lot of drugs during our initial years in Generation X, as we had no money, except for the occasional English spliff with hash and tobacco. I started to get offered exotic drugs that had been used by many of the bands I admired. Perri and I had fallen in love, and heroin is the ultimate relationship drug, so the two went hand in hand. I was hooked on both lovers.

  At some point, Tony’s anxiety worsened. Before one show, he almost couldn’t go onstage. He told us his doctor told him to avoid more pressure than necessary. He also said his doctor prescribed Valium and told him to exercise, run, and meditate.