by Billy Idol
There are eight million stories in the naked city, I remembered as I ventured into the customs area at JFK, which had been Idlewild Airport when I flew back to England as a six-year-old. Now, here I was nearly twenty years later, in the spring of ’81, striking out into the unknown with no certainty of success, just like every other immigrant has done over the centuries. Most of the Irish side of my own family had arrived here just twenty years before, settling in and around the bowels of the city.
The New York sky was deep and dark, its tall skyscrapers reaching shockingly into the ozone, touching hitherto unknown heights, thanks to the hard bedrock at the island’s core. I was an Englishman now, but my memories of New York as a child gave me a leg up over other transplanted Brits. Surely this city might welcome yet another stranger in a strange land, one more explorer doing his damndest to act unafraid in the face of his exceedingly uncertain future.
The storm clouds that hovered above the skyscrapers cleared on the day I arrived to reveal a blue sky that was out of sight except for the sliver directly above one’s head. The heavens blazed my coming to America that first night with shooting stars and a strange halo effect that might well have been the man in the moon laughing at my audacity.
I first tried to become acclimated to this gigantic metropolis’s sights and sounds, which were, to say the least, a trip. In comparison, London was a quaint village! That first night I arrived, Brendan Bourke, an A&R exec from Chrysalis, took me to a hotel. It had a small kettle and cup so I could make something to drink. Alone now, I went to the corner deli for some coffee and milk. Well, the corner deli was huge and didn’t have one type of milk, like in England, but vitamin A, A and D, E, skim, and what seemed like twenty-five other types of milk! So I thought I’d try the coffee, but the aisle with the coffee held just as many choices. So I tried the bread aisle—Jesus wept!
The speed I inhaled that next brisk March morning stung in my nostrils. This was my own personal preparation for going out into the strangeness of New York City, with its hustle and bustle and pimps and whores of all kinds. The delis on every corner, the cars, trucks, and yellow cabs on the gridlocked streets, the junkies/drunks lying in their own excretions on the sidewalks, ignored by passersby. The police didn’t even bother kids who looked like me, because they had real criminals to chase after.
The sky glowed orange with pollution, and the stench of sewage colored the senses, the sheer volume of people giving one the feeling of how easily a person could be swallowed up and forgotten. I liked the twenty-four-hour nonstop feeling the city had, and decided to be one with it. The pain in my nostrils retreated as I ventured out into the chilly air, the speed giving me an otherworldly look at the town I would embrace as home. New York, with its different complexions, accents, and customs, was a huge melting pot, and I was ready to melt with it, mind-melding to become less of a stranger with each passing moment.
On every corner, large boom boxes blared out rap music, the new soul. Kids were holding break-dance competitions with each other instead of fighting. It reminded me of how we created punk as a way out of our depression. Their spoken-word raps addressed everything from their own disenchantment with Reaganomics to sexual boasting to the dangers of drugs. My arrival in New York had coincided with the birth of this new art form. The whirling and swirling dance moves reflected the energy on the streets, as kids twisted their rubberized bodies, going from doing the robot to spinning on the cardboard-covered pavement.
Although I knew that rap music had its roots in the reggae toasters and dance-hall music of the early ’70s, it was not until the early ’80s, after the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” and Kurtis Blow’s “The Breaks,” that the movement exploded, just as I got to town. This new soul power invigorated me, but I wasn’t ready to create my own music. Not yet, anyway. The move had taken up all my time and energy.
With the aid of Brendan Bourke, I found a small room to live in on Seventy-First Street by the Hudson River. The apartment was completely empty except for a small mattress that lay on the bare boards of the floor, a tiny black-and-white TV that Brendan lent me, and a radio permanently tuned to New York’s only country station.
I had an early opportunity to begin to familiarize myself with American media thanks to that tiny TV. I was shocked when one day soon after my arrival, the news was filled with reports that President Reagan had been shot. While the TV commentators were discussing the shooting, the screen showed a picture of Reagan with a sniper sight on him.
Once I was moved in, I needed bedding for the mattress. After visiting what to me was an enormous store, I got a set of sheets folded up in some brown paper wrapping. The streets looked empty, and the sky darkened as I made my way back to the apartment. Suddenly it started to pour, and I was drowned like a rat in a matter of minutes. I took shelter in an empty restaurant. I walked away from the door and sat down at a distance. Suddenly a man and his daughter came in. I was bedraggled, hair down, completely soaked, but the man and daughter came right up to me and said, “You’re Billy Idol, aren’t you?” They were from England, on holiday, but in my soaked state I wouldn’t have even recognized myself. This was the first autograph that I gave after coming to live in New York, and it gave me some confidence as I began to plot my next career move.
Confident or not, I knew New York City was a place that can chew you up and spit you out as easily as a bullfrog catches a fly with its long, unfurled tongue, digesting it quickly before shitting out the unwanted part. Would I end up so callously disposed of? It was definitely a possibility. Just because I had a couple of hits in England didn’t mean the teeming masses of America would see anything in me. Given what happened on these shores to the Sex Pistols, the likelihood of this English punk being embraced stateside seemed pretty remote. I’d thought Johnny Rotten and company would blaze a trail, but they’d come back in tatters. Nobody else had really made a dent, though the Clash were still trying.
Despite being aware of this ominous history, I felt I had a strong team around me. Chrysalis Records had found some success with Blondie in the U.S. and seemed to know their business. My manager, Bill Aucoin, had achieved massive success with Kiss, so I was with people who had a track record.
Bill Aucoin was a true maverick, a wild man of rock ’n’ roll. He was a force of nature, and he became my mentor. When he got excited about an artist, he loved the selling part of the job. He could step into a meeting and take a room full of people with no interest in me and turn them around. He’d tell label executives what they needed to do by giving them a new vision. Then he would tell them how to use their standing in the industry to contribute to or even change popular culture in a positive way. He had them eating out of his hand. Then he would explain how I played into this vision. It was all going to be a guaranteed success, and fun to boot! He would become more animated until they were infected by his wild enthusiasm. “You can’t be afraid,” he’d tell them. “You’ve got to step up. Billy is the real deal.” By the time he was finished, they were true believers, lit up like Christmas trees and promising Bill anything. The man’s sales pitch was an incredible performance in and of itself, and I would have to go some distance to beat his energy in the boardroom with my own actions onstage. The execs in the room ended up raving too. That was Bill Aucoin—from zero to a hundred miles per hour in the span of a pitch meeting.
At the time, Bill was a slender man in his midthirties, about my height. His upper lip was adorned with a mustache, and he usually wore an amused look, especially when he was enthused about a subject. He would tell me Jim Morrison wasn’t afraid to be himself. He told me about seeing the Doors in New York in the ’60s when Jim let a member of the audience give him a blow job on stage. This was a defining and liberating moment in Bill’s life, encouraging him to accept the fact he was gay and realizing he had to be true to his own inner being. Bill loved this wild bravado in an artist, and he would often talk to me about the kind of energy and feelings an audience would respond to. “Billy, you’v
e gotta be wild and crazy,” he would tell me, and I’ve never forgotten those words. I was already committed to being true to myself, but now I was feeling liberated as well. I was pushing a boundary both physical and mental, where the emotions were channeled to reach a positive, uplifting experience for the audience and for me. I knew what he meant, and I saw the truth in his words.
The next day, I jumped on a bus that took me near the Fifty-Seventh Street offices of Chrysalis Records, not far from where I was headed, Bill Aucoin’s office. The stares of the people on the bus were quite amusing. I don’t think even blasé New Yorkers were used to seeing somebody dressed in English-style punk-rock clothes, let alone someone clad as I was, in skintight leather pants and a ripped T-shirt that revealed my chest and body, along with a New Romantic tasseled cape slung around my shoulders over a leather jacket, bondage boots, and spiked, bleached-white hair. As I walked along Fifty-Seventh Street, the black guys on the corners would go, “Silky, baby,” or “Where’s the party?” or “Punk rock don’t stop,” which happened to be a key line in Blondie’s “Rapture” but would also later give me the idea for the title of the EP I would record early the next year. These new greetings and sayings, and all the different accents, seemed very fresh to me.
Walking into Aucoin’s office, I tried to act as normal as I could. The fact is, I had arrived in New York suffering from serious heroin withdrawal. I had taken so much before I left, I had a bad skin reaction. Scabs covered my face, and I had an extreme case of constipation. Bill was a bit shocked at how I looked, which was something, because he was a hard guy to shock.
I did have a three-week supply of DF 118s, a heroin substitute (like methadone) that was used for getting over the initial cold-turkey reaction. The DFs kept me functioning, and some booze quelled most of the clammy sweats and general discomfort. I took speed to counteract how sick I felt and to keep up with New York’s quick pace.
I looked around Aucoin’s giant office, which had Kiss doll puppets hanging from the walls, and met Bill’s secretary, who suggested an enema. Bill’s second-in-command was a guy named Ric Aliberte, who suggested that I brush my hair down like Rick Springfield, pointing out how well he was doing with his clean-cut image and hit Working Class Dog album. “I am not turning into David Cassidy,” I said. I was sticking with the look I had. I wasn’t starting all over to deny my style, but to make it stick. Punk was my roots, and I would celebrate those roots for the rest of my so-called career, I told myself. It was weird but fun to be challenged on my beliefs. Maybe I was being naïve, but I was confident that I knew what was right for me, and I wasn’t going to let anybody else make decisions like that when it came to my career.
This attitude was further cemented in my mind when later that week I saw Bo Diddley playing at Tracks, a small club on the Upper East Side. Despite feeling like crap, I spent the evening enjoying one of the greats of early rock ’n’ roll. Jesus, he was still playing that red, box-shaped guitar from the ’50s with its built-in sound effects, which doubly empowered me to not change my own image. America would have to accept my style instead of that poodle-head look all the U.S. mainstream bands of the early ’80s had back then.
Bill Aucoin kept telling me I should try out a guitarist named Steve Stevens, who was leaving a band, the Fine Malibus. I met Steve in Aucoin’s office, and we had a heartfelt discussion about rock ’n’ roll stardom, the meaning of punk, and what I wanted to do with my music. My idea was to incorporate the energy and spirit of punk into many different musical settings. Steve responded well, and said he’d help me put together a band. For the moment, we decided to take it one step at a time and see where it all would lead.
I now had a lead on an exciting new collaborator, but I was still feeling relatively unsure about which musical direction to focus on next. This would change after one particular night that summer. On the evening in question, I was missing Perri terribly. I decided to head out to the club Hurrah on West Sixty-Second Street to take my mind off her and drown my sorrows. I entered the club and stood by the crowded bar. The place was jammed with people listening to a DJ, several deep at the bar. It was hard to get a space. I was finally able to order a screwdriver and, once served, hung back with my drink to check out the not-so-bad-looking birds hanging around. The energy in the place was palpable, but nothing special.
Suddenly, the DJ played “Dancing with Myself”! I watched in amazement as the previously crowded bar area emptied and people literally threw themselves over tables, chairs, and couches to get to the dance floor. As the song continued, I was practically the only one left at the now-empty bar.
Jesus! That’s it! I realized. I’d had the answer all the time. That dance beat we put into “Dancing” was right, and this place was going nuts for it. I left the club excited and confident. If I could just find something else with “beat-y” drums for Keith Forsey to produce . . .
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
MAKING MONY MONY: A LEFT-COAST FUSION OF PUNK AND DISCO
From Bromley to New York City to Los Angeles
IN 1970, THE BACK OF THE charity shop near Bromley South held many wonders.
“Do you want to fuck?” I asked. And she said yes! I’d never had sex, so I was a bit nervous as she took me by the hand.
She must have sensed the situation. “You’re a virgin aren’t you?” she half asked, half declared. “No, I’ve done it before,” I lied as we walked up the hill for a tumble in Church House Gardens. We went behind some bushes and she lay down. I got on top and got hard but was having a bit of trouble getting it in her, it being my first time. She rolled me over and said, “Oh, let me do it,” and she stuck my dick inside her and really shagged me.
As we went at it, “Mony Mony” by Tommy James and the Shondells was playing on someone’s transistor radio nearby. . . .
THAT SONG HAS ALWAYS HAD special significance to me. I love its repetitive, we would say now machinated, groove. It really grabs me. From the first time I heard it, I liked Tommy James’s voice, and always thought maybe I could get away with it too.
Eleven years after that tumble in Bromley, as I walked along the New York streets on the way to meet one of the Chrysalis Records promotion guys at his office, the traffic and movement of people became background noise for my own thoughts. When I arrived, I asked him about recording a cover song. I started out by asking a dummy question, wondering about “Shout,” though what I really had in mind was doing a version of “Mony Mony” that would keep them dancing on the floors of the late-night New York clubs I had been frequenting. I wanted to be sure that he was not giving me lip service regarding “Shout,” so I knew my strategy had worked when he was lukewarm to the idea but then got excited when I mentioned “Mony Mony” as another possibility.
I called Keith and told him about my idea to record “Mony Mony,” which he seemed to like. He told me that if I came out to L.A., he could round up some musicians. He registered just the right level of enthusiasm I needed to hear. I told Aucoin and the record label, and they agreed that putting out a four-track EP, to be called Don’t Stop, might be the way to stimulate the market. For me, it was a way to get out of the freezing East Coast winter.
After a couple of months I moved to a Jones Street apartment, which I shared with a girl I dubbed Fish, a junkie college student I met at a late-night club who had an upper room to let. She had a huge, nasty-looking scar on her arm where she had been injecting herself. One Sunday, she took me down to the Lower East Side around Avenue A or B, and we scored some dope called Toilet. I had heard that they didn’t “beat” couples, so by going together, we were pretty much left alone. Another time we went to score with a black guy, who took a .38 snub nose out of a drawer and placed it in the back of his waistband before we left. That’s the way it was. You went up to a hole in a door or wall and traded some money for some little white bags. We’d return to the apartment, divvy up the dope, and shoot up. Just shows how soon one can acclimate to the junkie life if you feel sick enough. I joined Fish “in
the womb,” where we slumbered like junkie babes in the woods, deep inner dreams playing in our subconsciouses as the din of New York traffic receded in our ears. Keith came to visit me at the apartment, and I played the beginning of what would be “Hot in the City” for him on my Gretsch Country Gentleman. “It’s hot here at night, lonely black and quiet on a hot summer night.” We had just been in the middle of a blazing summer and only the night brought any relief from the broiling sun and constant hum and drip of the air conditioners. Since we didn’t own one, I had a fan next to my mattress on the floor, but it didn’t help. I hate humidity.
I got the idea for “Hot in the City” from seeing Nick Gilder’s gold record of “Hot Child in the City” in Chrysalis’s UK offices and thinking, Why do you need the child? In fact, I hadn’t even heard the song, but I continued by writing about my new life in New York, walking the streets and taking the subway, staying up all night feeling young and free, stomping out a kind of history of my time there and trying to soak up the excitement of the club scene, the Mudd Club, Max’s, the Continental. The song was very simple, a midtempo ballad that wasn’t like anything we did in Gen X. I was searching for what would really be Billy Idol music. I lowered my voice to sing. It was the beginning of finding another way of singing for me, a deeper side. Armed with “Mony Mony” and “Hot in the City,” as well as a plan to rerecord “Untouchables,” I flew out to L.A. to begin work on the debut Billy Idol solo EP.
* * *
THE SUN SHONE BRIGHTLY THROUGH the palm trees at the side of the road as I made my way to Giorgio Moroder’s house in Beverly Hills, where Keith was living. Keith had started out as a drummer in a ’60s band, the Spectrum, best known for the end title theme for UK TV producer Gerry Anderson’s puppet show Captain Scarlet. By the early ’70s, he found his way to Germany, playing as a percussionist with Krautrock artists like Amon Düül, the acid-rock/jazz band that doubled as a cult with its own commune. He learned to speak German and became a much-in-demand session player.
