by Billy Idol
Tony turned to jogging regularly to combat further attacks, and we began to grow further apart, even though we lived in the same house. He loved rock ’n’ roll heroin chic, but not when it was close up. Tony saw through the glamour of drugs, while it blinded me. Despite the rifts between us, we began working on some new songs and looking for replacements for Derwood and Mark. We hired ex-Clash drummer Terry Chimes to play so we could rehearse and entered the studio to begin working on new songs, changing our name to Gen X as a way of telling people it was some form of continuation from Generation X, with similar core members, for instance, but at the same time updated or renewed. Shortening the name to four letters meant it could be that much larger on posters, bags, album jackets, or twelve-inch-record covers.
Drugs did prompt some ideas for new material. A newspaper article referred to Valium takers in Britain as the “happy people.” So we wrote a dubbed-out deep-bass song of that same name. I wrote the lyrics and music for a song called “Poison,” about being on smack and the state of mind that came with it. Even though I was diving headlong down a slippery path, something inside me was telling me it was dangerous and wrong. It was weighing heavily on me. With the glare of the stage lights dimmed, we turned to the question of what to do with the rest of our lives.
WHY DID YOU CHANGE YOUR NAME / IN A SEARCH FOR FAME / NOW ALL THE LIGHTS HAVE GONE / WHAT IS YOUR POISON?
—“POISON”
By the time 1980 rolled around, I was looking for inspiration in the ennui. I wrote all the lyrics and music for “Untouchables,” about my school days and growing up in the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle, dreaming of a world beyond the regular nine-to-five existence. But the song also dealt with how people’s dreams can be crushed by disappointment, forcing them to give up and accept the norm. For me, fortunately, dreams had set me free. These songs would be a turning point for me in spotlighting my own voice and showing I had something to say, lyrically as well as musically.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
YOU BETTER HANG ON TO YOURSELF
London
CHRYSALIS ALMOST DIDN’T LET US make a third album. I had to persuade Doug D’Arcy of my belief in “Dancing with Myself” and its possibilities, even the chance it might just launch my solo career. My persistence paid off, and the label finally relented. I told Bill Aucoin I felt we needed a producer who could do both rock ’n’ roll and groove-driven dance music, so he got in touch with Giorgio Moroder, the disco pioneer whom he knew from his Kiss days when they and Moroder client Donna Summer were both on Casablanca Records. Giorgio passed. It was the height of the disco era, and he was the king of the genre: perhaps our music was outside his comfort zone. Nevertheless, Giorgio recommended Keith Forsey, a young producer/songwriter who had written with Moroder and worked at his studio in Germany.
Keith had met Giorgio Moroder when he was hired to play drums on some of the songs Giorgio was producing. Giorgio encouraged him to write lyrics and songs, which he did, before following Moroder to L.A., where he worked with Donna Summer. Forsey wrote “Hot Stuff” for the disco diva, named after a pizza they had delivered to the studio when they were writing. Three years later, when Giorgio went on to compose the music for Flashdance, Keith wrote the lyrics for Irene Cara’s “What a Feeling,” winning an Oscar for it.
Up until then, Keith’s main success had been as a songwriter. He had something to prove as a producer in his own right, and so did we. He wasn’t a “name” producer, but we were a band that was trying to reinvent itself, and we needed a fresh start and a fresh perspective.
It was a hot spring day in 1980 when I first met Keith, and he arrived to our meeting togged out in a SEX T-shirt and leather pants. I loved that he was trying to be on the same page as us, even if in a humorous way (especially in a humorous way). Tony didn’t seem so hot on Keith initially, but we carried on and gave the plan the chance it needed to work. And when he picked “Dancing with Myself” as the song he wanted to work on first, I knew he was our guy, so we hired him to begin work on the album.
We set up in George Martin’s Air Studios on Oxford Street, London’s busiest shopping street. Right away, Keith really started to home in on the relationship of sound between the kick, snare, and hi-hat, the motor we would ride on, if you will. He was hands-on as a producer. Being a drummer, he could have played the parts he was asking for, but I could see he wanted the performance from us. He certainly pulled a great one out of the “Chimer” (Terry Chimes) on “Dancing.”
Next, Tony laid down his bass with Terry and I was on guide vocal. Once we had that, we brought in Rich Kids guitarist Steve New. Here’s the scene: Steve on his back, lying on the studio floor, off his face, working his guitar, surrounded by a screaming blockade of Marshall and Fender amplifiers, bottles of methadone lined up on the mixing desk. But still, he produced magic, the way mercurial geniuses do, adding that indefinable sound to the lead guitars that helps make the record what it is. Keith was freaking out, not used to dealing with such scenes of madness. And when the tape ran out, New, completely unaware, played on. We got what we needed—genius requires only one take, you just have to be lucky enough to capture it.
Then we asked Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols to come in and lay down his guitar “wall of sound.” He filled four tracks playing slightly different rhythms, and they somehow melded together terrifically. Jonesy has a muscular sound, and over all the years I’ve played with him, he always gets that sound no matter what guitar or amp he’s on. It’s all him; it’s in his fingers!
Danny Kustow from Tom Robinson Band came in and added a different flavor of rhythm and did a few really exciting takes. Keith and I spent a while on my vocal doing three different takes, and then Keith would pull the best lines from each and construct a performance that was better than any one single take. Then I would do three more takes and he would switch different lines from each, seeing if they beat what we already had on the main master he was compiling.
The next day, Keith started to mix. He spent two days doing it, and finally felt he had what he was looking for. He and I stepped into the main studio, put on the big speakers, and cranked the volume to see what it would sound like live in a club. I was knocked out! Somehow he had sonically and rhythmically made everything work. The song was unstoppable in terms of holding the groove all the way through. Here was our new musical direction, loud and proud!
Tony has an enduring vision of listening to the playback and realizing Jonesy had somehow managed to climb out a window of the studio’s soundproof glass and onto the narrow window ledge, inches from plummeting to his death. He gestured to the shoppers six floors below, silently mouthing the words to the song’s chorus through the glass as he windmilled his Les Paul, legs defiantly apart. He said afterward, “I was trying it out. You know . . . Dancing with Myself.” And having a fucking hell of a time, evidently!
We also asked Magazine’s John McGeoch, who went on to join the Banshees and later PiL, to play guitar on the album, adding some of his own ideas to my figures. I played my Epiphone guitar through an HH amp on songs like “Poison,” “Happy People,” and “Ugly Rash,” the B-side to “Dancing with Myself.”
At the same time, in the lyrics to songs like “Dancing with Myself” and “Heavens Inside,” the street-romantic-with-a-bittersweet-undertone side of Billy Idol was beginning to emerge. With his new band PiL, Johnny Rotten was tackling the big issues with songs like “Religion,” while the Clash had politicized their lyrics from the start. I was intrigued with the very large subject of our human emotions, like the need for love. That subject would later come to define my writing style. While other acts were addressing larger social problems, I was focusing on the more personal.
HE’S IN LOVE WITH HIS LONELY LIFE / TO THE PICKUP GIRLS / HE’S A SWITCHBLADE KNIFE / HE DON’T WANT NOTHING / BUT HE TAKES IT ALRIGHT.
—“HEAVENS INSIDE”
I was also beginning to write and perform autobiographical songs about the paucity of spirituality within myself and the revoluti
on I was caught up in. Despite the drugs that were increasingly becoming part of my life, or perhaps because of them, I was starting to examine my own feelings of emptiness that had led me to seek comfort in heroin. Until I met Perri, I’d really been starting to feel like a lone wolf. I was questioning my desire to be a rock star and was concerned with the possibility of becoming someone—if I wasn’t careful—who would lose his soul in the process. These were not gang chants but increasingly personal observations. I had begun to carve out my own lyrical niche.
I had learned a great deal from Tony—we still wrote songs like “Stars Look Down,” “Revenge,” and “Oh Mother” for the new album together—but I was increasingly beginning to find my own voice.
Recording with Keith Forsey was exciting for me, though Tony didn’t really get on too well with him. They would bicker all the time, and I could see the two of them might not want to continue together after the record was finished. I thought Keith was doing a great job. It was the best-sounding album we’d made so far. He didn’t let events rattle him, and he could shake himself from an unhappy to a happy mood easily.
When we finished the album, I was the only one to seek him out at his hotel on his last night in the UK. I had dinner with him and his wife, Karen. I told him I liked how he worked and hoped we might do more, if I was ever given the chance to make another record. After all, my future was certainly up in the air at that moment. Keith had really tried to make my concept for the record work, and I appreciated that a great deal. Most important, we had a finished version of “Dancing with Myself” in the can. Would it be my bridge to the future?
During the recording of the album, Perri and I had been on a nonstop, twenty-four-hour drug-and-sex binge without sleep. We made love in bed all day and night, high on heroin, grass, and hash. With that particular cocktail, as orgasm boiled over, we would pop an amyl nitrate (commonly known as poppers) and send our bodies to the sweet spot that intensifies the growing explosion of chemistry between two lovers entwined like vines, curling together, disappearing into each other . . . writhing, sighing, and groaning, soaring into heaven, only to slowly burn out and return to earth, spent but somehow wanting more.
Heroin is a dangerous and addictive drug. If you take it enough, it returns you to the place that is as comfortable and all-encompassing as your mother’s womb. After three days, you’re hooked. When you come off, you’re debilitated, to the point where you feel like your skeleton is trying to get out of your body; you’re dying for more. And unless you want to go on feeling bad, you need a continuous supply. If you take enough to not get sick, you can maintain a semi-regular lifestyle. Thanks to Bill Aucoin’s renegotiation with Chrysalis, I now had enough money to fund my habits . . . and he, unbeknownst to me at the time, had enough to fund his.
The Stony-Eyed Medusa and I lived in a twilight world of drugs, sex, and rock ’n’ roll friends. We roamed the London night in a small tools minivan I bought from my dad, dubbed “Power Tool the People.” The slow-burning nights spun into a web that trapped me in its embrace until unconsciousness delivered me back to a moment of enforced sleep. Waking up on different floors and beds, I was surrounded by the ubiquitous reggae music, which we always played while we were “block up,” a phrase we used for getting stoned. There had to be guardian angels looking silently through the hash fumes just above our heads. Why else would I still be here today, alive and well, to tell the story?
On one occasion, Perri and I took acid and went to see Apocalypse Now, then made love all night to George Faith’s Lee “Scratch” Perry–produced album, To Be a Lover. It was amazing I was able to get out of bed long enough to record our album, but I was.
I continued going to Perri’s gigs, where I ran into David Mallet, the director who shot Generation X’s ’77 Marquee performance. This meeting would prove fortuitous for the future.
Living twenty-four hours every day with Perri back then was quite the experience. We had a connection that was deeper than any I had ever known. It was a great trip for me to have a counterpart with whom I had so many interests in common, including fashion, music, movies, and the like. Perri had become my constant companion throughout this life of love, lust, and insanity. Only later did I realize that I had not paused to consider that my intense love affair with her, the heroin, hash, and other drugs were unraveling the constraints of my punk past and helping to further widen the gulf between me and Tony James.
The last nail in the coffin for Tony and me was the relative lack of success of our final album together, Kiss Me Deadly. The album was released in early 1981, and “Dancing with Myself” came out as a single in the UK, only reaching number 60 on the British charts. I suppose our new direction was mystifying a lot of people, as the album was of quite a different nature than Valley of the Dolls.
England moves quickly through different fashions and musical styles, and it occurred to me that the long break between the second and third albums meant that some of our fans might have moved on.
The record company started to say to me, “Well, you’ve done it here. It might be a good idea to go somewhere else, such as the USA and try again?” At this point, Tony and I had been on different pages for a while, so this time I seriously considered moving on from our partnership. Bill Aucoin agreed, and it seemed that he, too, wanted to concentrate on me as a solo artist, which I had begun to see as a good way to start afresh. I had worked with Tony for five years and had learned a lot from our collaboration, but maybe I had to gamble on myself once again. I had always dreamt about being in a group, but I now saw how fragile group harmony could be. If Tony and I were each in a different headspace and Gen X was fizzling, the only thing to do was to forge ahead and go solo.
Following the disastrous critical lashing we got for Valley of the Dolls, the terribly unproductive time spent writing in the country for a third album, and Kiss Me Deadly’s lack of success, my musical tastes continued to evolve. Perri being in a dance group made me think more about making music that was good for choreographed moves in a club. Dance and music represented an interesting opportunity, a new sense of place. I was listening to more techno and groups like Kraftwerk. I liked Joy Division, and noticed a small number of bands, like PiL, Simple Minds, Human League, Daniel Miller’s Soft Cell, and Cowboys International, were all finding ways to go forward with a post-punk hybrid, often incorporating other forms of music. The steady drum patterns were kept simple and direct, without too many Keith Moon roller-coaster fills or time changes. I thought it reflected the influence of disco, like Giorgio Moroder’s work with Donna Summer, that was being heard everywhere on the New York club scene. I began to think the way forward was to combine dance music with rock ’n’ roll, keeping the punk energy but streamlining the music so that the groove was consistent throughout the song, without too many fills that distracted from the central idea.
I didn’t really know what the others truly thought about this, although Tony seemed to grasp the idea when we wrote “Dancing with Myself” to test this new concept. I got really excited about the idea, as I felt it might help us to survive the now-collapsing first wave of punk and move into the future. If we didn’t take this new direction, I honestly wasn’t interested in continuing. I had to follow what was in my heart.
We didn’t believe in a future with punk, which colored my actions as well as the band’s. Punk rock had become a parody of itself. What we’d stood for in the beginning was already over. If there was “no future,” what we decided to do now really counted. There was no time for fussing and fighting, my friend.
I had to write and sing my own lyrics if I was going to survive and thrive. I had to put myself in a position where I didn’t have Tony to rely on, or I’d never have done it. He was a really good songwriter, much better than I was, but it was sink-or-swim time. Being hooked on heroin during that period made me more isolated from Tony and the rest of the band. It also filled me with the confidence that I could do anything I wanted.
I had begun to see the light. That
light was my chance to go to New York. That light was also the love I felt for Perri, for rock ’n’ roll, and for the possibilities of my own life, for forging onward and being unbounded by the pull of gravity.
I did have a sense of apprehension that leaving England would hurt my friends and family. But then, I thought it couldn’t be any worse than all the other separations I had endured during my life. The traveling salesman goes where the work is. It could be lonely at first, I could fail, but nothing could be as lonely as being a has-been in the UK. I had to pursue my dreams. “Dream, baby, dream,” Alan Vega sang. He was in New York, and now I would be there too.
Leaving Perri was another matter altogether, but I decided I should test the waters alone, because it was all so uncertain, and I convinced myself that heroin would dull my pain. I loved her more than my life, but not more than the possibilities the future held, if pressed. “Let the thing be pressed.” I felt that our love would not fade and that we would find a way to reunite after I had settled in New York and had taken a few steps toward establishing a new career in America. I might suffer some personal discomfort at first, but a new stomping ground could make that easier to absorb and allow me to find myself musically and lyrically without feeling pressured. And so I was off to the city that never sleeps to seek my destiny.
PART II
NEW YORK CITY
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
A ROCK ’N’ ROLL CONQUISTADOR INVADES AMERICA AND BURNS HIS BOATS UPON ARRIVAL
New York City
WITH MY GRETSCH COUNTRY GENTLEMAN guitar in one hand, a suitcase in the other, the trunk with my pink Elvis ’50s-style jacket and effects on my back, I made my return to the wildest city in the world.
