by Billy Idol
All went black, and then began wild dreams of a pleasure palace. As king, I had set it up with warm surrounds, waterfalls, greenery, and sexual delicacies, inside a dome peopled with lovers whose naked, open lovemaking was de rigueur. There, I smoked my pipe, anointed with the best oils, surveying the scene: a Chinese opium dream. A pure sleep of the gods overcame me. But soon the water sounds increased and streamed down onto my warm, naked body. A flood of water caressed by sin. Sin screamed at the water, “I don’t want this to end! Who dares destroy the king’s reverie?”
I was coming to, in a bath, in cold water. Why won’t they let me sleep? I wondered. All around me people were screaming, hitting me, ripping me from my dreams, from the abyss of the overdose I’d taken. Somebody came into the room, opened a blind, and saw that my lips had gone blue. I was dying. As they tried to save me I kept thinking, Let me sleep, let me dream. I don’t want to awake—I’m an emperor! But they took me to the roof and walked me around and around for hours to stop me from falling into death.
AS I CONTINUED MY DANCE on the edge, Idolmania was sweeping the world. After the UK, it was on to Europe, Australia, Japan, and New Zealand. The album and singles took off seemingly everywhere, thanks to MTV’s expanding international penetration. We received gold and platinum albums from many territories as the record became a global smash. Onward and onward in a blur we continued, the capitals of the world flying by—Sydney, London, Paris, Oslo, Frankfurt, Rome, Toronto, Washington, Dublin, Zurich, Tokyo. It was as if we were Time Lords from a Dr. Who TV pilot, mounting our time machine, the TARDIS, to enter a rock ’n’ roll dimension. I was on a roll. Any resistance we’d felt in 1982 fell away as more people started to dig what I was doing.
While in England I made a visit to my parents in Bromley, partly for my father’s sixtieth birthday, and also I hadn’t been home for ages. I wanted to give my platinum Rebel Yell disc to my dad as a present, as a way of saying, I fucking told you so. As I told Neil Tennant for Smash Hits, “There you are, Dad. A million Americans have bought my record. Five hundred thousand Canadians have bought my record. So many hundreds of thousands of people in Australia have bought my record. And you told me I was a fool. My dad, he might be sixty years old, but my choice in life is to tell him: I was right. I’ve done something more than you can ever do. Which is that I did what I wanted. And I did it with the weapons of rock and roll.”
I can see now I still had a really big chip on my shoulder about my dad’s view of my chosen profession and how I would never be successful or happy doing it. Today I can appreciate a bit more about where my parents’ generation was coming from, how all they had been through—the Depression, World War II, and post-war reconstruction—would limit one’s belief that they could step outside of their accepted lot in life. Now I understand, we could dream big only because of what they went through.
I dreamt audaciously big. I also went to visit Chrysalis’s London headquarters. Failing to see any sign of Rebel Yell on the wall upon entering the building, I proceeded to smash the office up as a sign of my disdain, leaving graffiti spray painted all over the walls. I’m sure the staff was appalled. I also trashed the record company apartment where I was staying. I felt they had sent me on this journey and, as far as I could see, I had returned with the goods they wanted, but there was no sign of respect for what I had accomplished, the goal I had set out to achieve.
I was the fool—jet lag and being hungover led to my manic and destructive behavior—but we were working our balls off with very little downtime, and I felt that it was crucial that everyone involved with selling the album got off their collective backsides and really worked it with a purpose or got out of the way.
Chrysalis boss Terry Ellis could see we needed a break, so he invited us to stay for a few days at his home on Tortola, one of the Virgin Islands, before we returned to the U.S. to continue the tour. This is where I first heard the remix of the next proposed single, “Flesh for Fantasy,” done by Gary Langan, who was one of the founders of Art of Noise, a band that seemed ahead of its time, with wild editing and off-the-wall sounds, which I liked. I had suggested him for the remix, but I was concerned because it would be the first remix done without me being present. I needn’t have worried, as it came out great, featuring Steve’s explosive guitar riff as a repeated flag entrance with a measured gap between each power chord. We started to use this remix as an intro in our stage show, and still do to this day. “Flesh” always seemed to be paired with Yes’s “Owner of a Lonely Heart” on U.S. radio rotations. Coincidentally, Gary also mixed that track.
The record company wanted a video for “Flesh for Fantasy,” and we sandwiched it into a three-day break between shows on the Silvercup Studio soundstage in Astoria, Queens, across the bridge from Manhattan. Perri had organized a dance troupe of her own, working out of a place called the Cat Club a few blocks east of Sheridan Square. It was a cool hang, giving us a place to go that was ours. It was tiny, with a small stage where a group could play or Perri’s dancers could showcase their routines.
The girls were already familiar with her choreography, so we decided to use them in the “Flesh” video to, no pun intended, flesh out some of the scenes, which were really just composed of me taking a glorified walk through some sets, which included a triangular-shaped tunnel and a futuristic cityscape.
We used a different director this time, an American named Howard Deutch, a John Hughes protégé who worked on the Apocalypse Now trailer and went on to direct such films as Pretty in Pink, The Great Outdoors, The Replacements, and My Best Friend’s Girl. The budget was relatively small, and Howard took a bit of convincing to take on a rock video of the style we were going for. This was the second time we used the husband-wife team of John Diaz and T’Boo Dalton as producers, as they had worked on the “Eyes” video. Perri and I became extremely close with John and T’Boo. John likes to say the “Flesh” video was the most difficult video he ever produced. Jeff Stein didn’t direct this one—Howie Deutch did—but Jeff is the reason it was so difficult to execute. Howie’s entire crew was working for Jeff on another video that went over deadline. He had to push our shoot back and charter a LearJet to fly the crew back. On the day he was supposed to light the set, the director of photography, Tony Mitchell, arrived at 4 p.m., totally wasted because he hadn’t slept in five days. Our first day ended up going thirty-six hours. The second day went about twenty-four hours. The final setup was a long dolly shot, and Tony told an incredulous John, “You gotta take over this shot. I’m blind.” He couldn’t see anymore. The pace of the last six days wrecked his vision.
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ONE ADVANTAGE TO HAVING A sizable female audience is if you are playing songs that are groove-oriented, it gets them in the pit of their stomachs and eventually gravitates to their loins. Then you are speaking a special language that most men will never get. My experience is that women can access their erogenous zones more easily when the music speaks this sensual tongue and they become relaxed. And needless to say, this was happening on the road on a nightly basis.
The quantity and quality of good-looking and sexy girls at the gigs was phenomenal. It made it nearly impossible to be faithful to anyone. It would be a lie to say anything else. Wherever we went, a whole different slew of women were available. If you weren’t a sex addict at the start of the tour, you soon would be. Shit, the mind boggles at the thought of it. Hotel after hotel, gig after gig, a million scantily clad chicks all hopped up on excitement. Many of them had drugs, a great combination. It was nonstop sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll music. You got a license to live fast and leave an incredible-looking corpse. After moonshine washed down with Mountain Dew, anything was possible.
In Rochester, New York, I was accused of “sexual deviancy,” so I attended the pretrial hearing in a Vivienne Westwood tartan plaid suit that featured penis-and-balls buttons that blended in so well you would have had to really look hard to see them. No one noticed, and I denied being a “sexual deviant,” but indeed that was
exactly what they had on their hands. In this case, I was trying to get a girl out of my hotel room by saying she could only stay if she made it with the other girl I’d let in, who just happened to be younger and better-looking. When she wouldn’t, and why not I don’t know, I told her to leave and ended up throwing her out of the room, which was a mistake. I should have called the road manager. Later I would have a security guard, but back then I was on my own. The girl’s case was thrown out, but the fact is, I should have known better.
Somewhere during this nonstop ten-month whirlwind, we paid a weeklong visit to Japan to do press, radio, and TV promotion. The Japanese record company worked our balls off from 9 a.m. until 11 p.m. every night during the week, with time off only to sleep. Suffering from jet lag and needing to have some fun in between the nonstop round of interviews, Steve and I, after the day’s last interview, would go straight to a place called Lexington Queen, which was populated with Japanese, American, and European models. We did not return to our hotel rooms until four in the morning.
Every morning we’d arrive a few minutes late, and the Japanese company reps would throw a fit, as they worked on a very strict timetable with no room for deviations, whatever the reason. One day I was dressed in a traditional samurai outfit for a photo shoot, but apart from that, I had no contact with any Japanese culture except for having sex with a couple of local models in the hours when we should have been sleeping. On our last day, we got back to the hotel at our usual early dawn hour after a dinner with people from the Japanese label who had finally let their hair down and gotten pretty sloshed. We decided to pack and get our stuff down to the lobby, so we would, for once, be on time and waiting for them. They turned out to be a few minutes late, and we really gave them hell, prompting them to apologize profusely, bowing over and over until we burst out laughing. It took a while for them to understand that we were joking and didn’t care that they were a few minutes late, but it fed our sense of humor to see them so mortified at fucking up their own schedule. After one more TV show on the way to the airport—they worked you until the last possible instant—it was sayonara, Japan.
A few months before the never-ending tour finally concluded, we released a fourth single, “Catch My Fall,” with a video directed by David Mallet from a concept we came up with together. We shot the clip in London with a remix of the track that Steve and I produced, the Rebel Yell album continued rolling with more exposure on MTV and regular play in the dance clubs.
One night, I happened to meet one of Prince’s lovely protégés, Vanity, a beautiful singer whose real name was Denise Katrina Matthews. I went to a screening of The Last Dragon, a martial arts movie she starred in, and that began a clandestine but short-lived affair. Her beauty was so undeniable, it was hard not to fall for her, which I did, forgetting for a moment about my relationship with Perri. Vanity’s beauty could force you to stretch the truth to live in a dream world where all was possible. She attended a number of shows on the tour, and I was very excited about her, but I truly cared about Perri. Time, distance, and constant temptations meant that in the end, I was playing a double game. Perhaps that was what I meant about being a double agent in “Eyes Without a Face.”
THE PLAN FOR THE FUTURE unfolds slowly, delicately, like a shot taken by a time-lapse camera of the gradual opening of a flower, each petal blooming to reveal its brilliance like a Technicolor yawn. The Lioness lazily licked her paws clean, enjoying her downtime as she slowly gazed far off into the distance across a wide savannah.
It was the ’80s, the midst of the Reagan go-go era, and plenty of people were living as if there was no tomorrow. Nothing succeeded like excess, so staying on a party edge was the norm. A haze of rock ’n’ roll splendor and increasingly hard drugs had blown the ’70s away.
I carried a copy of the Jim Morrison biography No One Here Gets Out Alive in my back pocket, in my search for a permanent derangement of the senses. I had added cocaine into the equation in a major way. I had snorted coke intermittently before, but it was way too expensive at the time and I didn’t really need a speedy high. But over the course of the Rebel Yell tour, I gradually started to use it more and more frequently. I was now earning some real bread, and I used coke to keep up with the pace of the tour, but also to stave off the body-wracking heroin withdrawal. And, of course, to just plain party.
Also by now, it was impossible to ignore the fact that women, in particular, would find me to be the subject of their attention wherever I went. Flying on a silver bird high in the sky, we were continuing the party in the first-class lounge, downing free booze and doing some blow in the toilet.
At 30,000 feet in the air, as I entered the lavatory, a sexy bird of a different kind took my arm and entered with me. I looked into her excited eyes and could see the score. I laid out two lines of blow on the top of the porcelain loo. The cool white gleam excited us and the pure flakes called out to us as I took a prerolled bill out of my pocket. “Ladies first.” She bent over to inhale the line, and her tight curvy bottom was exposed by her action. I rubbed up her long leg and then slowly placed my finger against her hole and worked her panties aside to rub her wet pussy. As I slowly penetrated her with my finger, she gasped when the force of the line buckled her senses. “While you’re down there, do the other one,” I said, and unzipped my fly. My hardening cock pushed its way out and I covered it in saliva, slowly working it inside her now-drenched vagina. The effect of the second line smashed into her senses as my dick reached deep into her cavity. Slowly, I thrust my hips and we started to move in a grinding rhythm, matching thrust for thrust. She moaned out loud and I responded with a low, animalistic grunt, letting loose a throaty growl as the sweat dropped from my forehead onto her naked back. Then our mouths opened and the noise we made was a wild “ahhhhhhh” as we both reached a simultaneous climax. I kissed her; she straightened herself up and slipped out of the door, back into the plane. I did a line and then, after waiting a second, I followed her.
I was having a great time. My career was riding an amazing wave of success and I was plowing through it seemingly unscathed despite my best efforts to destroy myself. Today I can see I was on a tightrope hovering between life and death, but at the time I didn’t care. I ignored the dangers. As I looked to move on to the next event in my music career, I would go down any road to find the muse. The perfect thing would have been to immediately follow up Rebel Yell, but Bill Aucoin had some other ideas that would take us into another world completely.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
KING DEATH: AN ABORTED FILM PROJECT SIGNALS THE END OF AN IDOL MAKER
Hollywood
I WAS ONCE AGAIN RIDING a giant bird, headed to L.A. with Bill Aucoin and producer John Diaz. Earlier that year, at the “Flesh for Fantasy” video shoot, John had introduced me to the Hollywood producer Joel Silver. Joel was a very in-demand producer who had recently produced 48 Hours and was fresh off the futuristic rock ’n’ roll fable Streets of Fire, with Willem Dafoe and Diane Lane. Joel had expressed excitement at the possibility of working with me on a new film, and we were off to L.A. to meet him and a series of Hollywood studio moguls to sell them on a concept—one that I had yet to come up with.
While enjoying the first-class privileges of free food and booze, bullshitting various ideas back and forth, I suddenly remembered a novel I’d read, King Death, by Nik Cohn, someone who had some current cachet in Hollywood for writing the short story that served as the basis for Saturday Night Fever. The story involved an assassin whose handler/manager would send him out on various assignments, which I thought might be some kind of allegory about Elvis and Colonel Tom Parker. Rod Steiger, whom I’d always liked, struck me as perfect to play this older father figure. I wasn’t sure how music would fit into it, but perhaps the central character could be a rock singer who doubled as a professional hit man.
Eddie, the book’s title character, is asked, “How does it feel to kill?” He answers, “But it isn’t killing. Death is a science, almost a vocation. I’d like to t
hink I’m a performer.” Indeed, Eddie’s mystical power allows his targets to avoid the fear of death. They are, instead, transported to another realm after getting shot. “Death is a completion,” Eddie says, finding fulfillment, satisfaction, and pride in each assignment he carries out. When a top TV entrepreneur named Carew chances to see Eddie in action, he takes him in as his protégé, and together they plan to bring his gift to America. After overcoming several obstacles, they literally ride to glory on the Deliverance Special, a train carrying King Death and his entourage across the U.S., until Eddie undergoes a disturbing change. “Part nightmare, part modern-day fairy tale, King Death is a shocking tale in which perversity, violence, and the contradictory morality and immorality of American culture are explored with striking power.” So reads the quote on the book’s inside jacket.
As we crossed the country at 30,000 feet, I talked myself into believing, with some plot twists, that this could be more than just another rock star vehicle, like Prince’s Purple Rain or Madonna’s Desperately Seeking Susan.
Aside from his managerial talents, Bill Aucoin had been a TV producer, and the story had a vague parallel to my own rock ’n’ roll career, with Bill sending me out on various assignments in my chosen vocation. Over the next few days, we proceeded to float our over-the-top idea to the Hollywood studio heads we met.
In Los Angeles, we met with Silver, and when I told him my idea, it shocked me that he immediately liked it. Shit, it was just a daft idea that I’d concocted on the plane ride over. The next day, I was feeling pretty rough from the excesses of the night before, but somehow I managed to straighten up. Joel picked Bill, John, and me up at the Bel Age in a stretch limo and we began to visit the major studios—names I knew from the credits of every movie I had ever seen. I pitched the idea to all of them pretty much as I had done with Joel. At each meeting, I spoke for thirty minutes or so, mostly flying by the seat of my pants, improvising wildly whenever I was asked about the plot or characters. Our first meeting was at 20th Century Fox and it went extremely well. Upon arriving at Universal for our next meeting, there was already a message waiting for Joel that Fox was prepared to offer a development deal. But the Universal pitch was completely over the top. The executives vowed not to let us leave their offices until we signed a guarantee with them, but we had another scheduled meeting, so we left, with Joel promising to call as soon as we reached our next appointment. John and I ended up taking the meeting while Joel spent almost the entire time negotiating a deal with Universal on a phone in another room.
