Dancing With Myself

by Billy Idol

  I wore a wig of long brown hair for my part as Cat, and it was amusing to me, as it reminded me of what I looked like in my teen years. I felt daft to be on crutches doing every scene, but I think Oliver liked having me there for a rock ’n’ roll ambiance, and for the steady flow of chicks.

  The Doors movie was not the only major film part I lost due to my accident. I was still a long way from fully recovering when I got a call to audition for James Cameron for the part of the Terminator 1000 in the sequel to the first Terminator movie. Of course, I was excited beyond belief, as I was told one of the scenes would have me throwing Arnold Schwarzenegger through a wall! I had dinner with James Cameron, and the following day I went to his offices in the valley, where he explained to me what he was thinking. His description of the movie and what my part would entail was pretty wild.

  His offices were next to Stan Winston’s special effects studio, and James gave me a guided tour. After meeting Stan and upon going round the different studio offices, I began noticing various drawings on the walls, where I was already depicted as the new Terminator! James personally shot a little screen test were he got me to say a few lines and then shoot a gun a few times. I believe it was the scene where the T-1000 is in his L.A. policeman guise, asking young John Connor’s foster parents some questions before returning to kill them both in the classic “Your foster parents are dead” scene. James seemed quite happy, but I couldn’t help wondering if he really would want someone as recognizable as myself for the role. I was all over MTV, entertainment television, magazines, newspapers, and the radio. But in the end, it was the state of my recovery from the accident that decided my fate in the film.

  Terminator 2 had scenes where the T-1000 had to run very fast, chasing Arnold, and my limp was still quite noticeable. Running in the film would be a difficulty, to say the least. Cameron pondered whether he could produce it all as a CGI effect, or with a double, but even walking really fast made my limp more pronounced. In the end, I knew he would need to move on to someone else. He eventually gave the role to Robert Patrick, a still relative-unknown at the time who had a brilliant cold veneer, devoid of feeling, which he was able to bring to the part. In retrospect, that probably would have been a little out of my acting range. I did receive a very nice letter from James Cameron, who told me he thought I could act and was very complimentary. It was great to have met him, and even to have been considered was fantastic. And it would later come in handy that I had met Stan Winston and his crew, as on my video for Cyberpunk’s “Shock to the System” I was able to enlist their help for the special effects.

  Other film-related opportunities seemed to elude me during this period. For years Keith Forsey had worked with Kathy Nelson, an executive who enlisted musical artists to come up with songs for movie sound tracks. She asked us if we could create a song for a racing sequence in the Tom Cruise film Days of Thunder, directed by Tony Scott. The producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer already had “Gimme Some Lovin’ ” in the scene as a placeholder. But it was quite difficult to come up with something that beat “Gimme Some Lovin’,” so they eventually just used that.

  Some months later, record producer Trevor Horn was working on the sound track to the same movie and was looking for someone to write lyrics and sing them over Hans Zimmer’s Days of Thunder theme music. I didn’t know Trevor at the time, but he contacted me and I agreed to give it a go. He came to my house and we put together a rough demo, with me singing over the theme. He was very enthusiastic and thought I would be perfect for the movie, so we proceeded to record it right then and there. It was fun working with Trevor. He is a rhythm player, a bass player originally, and a Brit with some of the same sensibilities as Keith. Like Keith, he has also produced and played on a vast number of records. Trevor, Don, Jerry, and Tom Cruise all liked what we’d recorded. But then it turned out that the movie was scheduled for release during the same time period as Charmed Life.

  Initially, the plan was for “Days of Thunder” to appear on both albums, but in the end the timing didn’t work, as we already had “Cradle of Love” in The Adventures of Ford Fairlane, which meant there was no way to avoid both singles coming out at the same time, and my record company was not going to agree to that. Ultimately, David Coverdale sang “Days of Thunder” for the sound track, but the experience of working with Trevor was a good one and opened a doorway for the future.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  HAVE A FUCK ON ME

  The Americas and Europe

  I NEEDED A VIDEO FOR “Cradle of Love,” which was to be the first single from the new album. I was out of the hospital, but I was unable to walk without the help of crutches. How the hell could I perform in a video? David Fincher had contacted Tony D. to let him know he would love to make a video with me. Tony explained to David that he would have to figure out a way to make it without having me dance around on crutches. The next day David called Tony and said he had a concept that would overcome my handicap. Boy, was I curious to find out what it was! David arrived at my house with Tony and his producer. It took him less than two minutes to describe his concept and I knew right away the guy was a fucking genius. He explained that I was to be inside a framed picture on a wall that comes to life. The frame prevented you from seeing me beneath my waist. In the video, an alluring Lolita-type young girl enters a geek’s apartment and attempts to seduce him while I watch and perform inside the art frame, visible only from the waist up. Rock the cradle of love! The video would go on to become a huge hit on MTV, helping the song reach number 2 on the singles chart. At the 1990 MTV Video Music Awards, the video was nominated for Best Male Video and Best Special Effects and won the award for Best Video from a Film. And it was the easiest video I ever made, thank you, David. Of course, the whole world today knows what a great director and producer David Fincher turned out to be. We would work together on another video, for the album’s second single, “L.A. Woman,” shot in downtown Los Angeles. In the video I was chasing—with the aid of a cane—an elusive image of a girl, who amazingly enough steals my keys and ends up in my bed. A true music video fantasy that was in actuality very close to my real life. MTV refused to play this video until a scene showing a Marilyn Monroe look-alike crucified on a telegraph pole was edited out.

  As summer approached, I knew that it would soon be time to commit to the Charmed Life tour that Tony D. had lined up. I was nervous but felt I would be ready to go, so I gave the green light. I had worked very hard to ready myself and had done everything my doctors had told me to do. The album was a huge success and I was keen to go on the road. I was healing well from the motorcycle accident, although I hit a serious bump in the road to recovery. Initially, the doctors put a cast on my leg for a month or so to see if it would heal without inserting a steel rod down through the center of the leg. Well, the top part of the break fused together and began to heal nicely, but despite the cast, the lower half of the leg and my foot were still free to move about. It looked like I was Mr. Fantastic from the Fantastic Four. As a result, in April, the doctors decided to insert the metal rod in my leg. They also put chips of bone taken from my hip around the rod, to help the lower half of my leg receive blood via the bone. This would make it possible to heal. Amazingly, it worked. By the early summer the doctors began to offer me encouragement that it would be possible for me to tour.

  With the doctors’ endorsement, the Charmed Life tour was booked and scheduled to begin in late August. But there were additional medical procedures to deal with first. The doctors took the metal rod out (my seventh operation!), a procedure that took a little while to heal from. Then, two weeks before the tour, my bone specialist decided the final measure would be to remove the remaining lower two screws that had been holding the rod in place. He told me it was a simple operation that could be done in his office. It turned out not to be so simple. He numbed the leg with a local anesthetic and made an incision near my ankle to take the two screws out, but unfortunately for me he had trouble locating them and was cutting
around my ankle searching for them, arguing with the nurse along the way about which screw was which and where it should be located. By the time they figured it all out, quite a lot of damage was done to the ankle, and it would still be healing when the tour started. Oh well, another stumbling block. A few Percocet pain pills, some bandages, and voilà! Idol was ready to tour.

  I started the tour using a cane to help me move about. I had a few different canes, including an Irish walking cane—a shillelagh—and a Chrome Hearts stick with a silver skull on top. I was a bit of a gimp moving about, but I know the audience enjoyed our big stage production featuring a woman’s hosed thighs being parted to create the space for the band and me. Above the stage we had a fist with RUDE DUDE tattooed on it, which rotated at the start of the show and extended its middle finger to flip the whole audience off. The crowd would inevitably laugh, clap, and go wild when this happened. The drum riser had skulls, and other Halloweenesque stage accoutrements dotted the stage. The entire stage set was documented in the “Prodigal Blues” video that was partly shot in front of a live audience in Florida.

  The tour began in Greater Sudbury, Ontario, Canada, on August 22. I had made a good recovery in the six months since the February crash. We played throughout the U.S. and Canada until the end of November, with Faith No More as our opening act. They were having lots of success, and it was exciting to give a really strong bill to the audience. We enjoyed having them on the tour and became quite friendly with them. As the North American tour drew to a close, my personal assistant and sometime bodyguard, Art Natoli, started to think of practical jokes he could play on them during the final U.S. show, which conveniently fell on Halloween, in Seattle. At the time, Faith No More had a video out for their song “Epic” that ended with a fish gasping for breath. Taking a prompt from the video, we placed a vat full of sardines above the stage in the rafters, out of sight of Faith No More and the colorfully dressed audience. After the band played the last note of their set and began taking their bows, the vat opened up, dropping the sardines on them. The weight of the fish pushed singer Mike Patton to the floor of the stage. He good-naturedly started to put fish down the front of his pants and the guys threw them about at each other. They probably thought that was all, but when they returned to their dressing room, they found it occupied by a lamb and two goats eating hay and what was left of their deli tray.

  They quickly found a way to repay me. During my show four naked men wearing only brown paper bags came out and danced round me, much to the surprise of the Seattle audience. Faith No More were really great guys to take it all so well. Thanks, lads!

  After the U.S. portion of the tour we headed to Europe and began there with a show in Helsinki, Finland. In Dublin, my mum came to the show with about fifty of my Irish relations. For the special occasion I wore my ERIN GO BRAGH emerald-green shirt with a gold inlaid Gaelic cross on the back.

  In Switzerland, a transvestite came to the backstage entrance and asked for “Billy.” Everyone was shocked, thinking I had gone out on the town the night before and somehow snagged myself a little something. But it turned out the transvestite was looking for a different Billy on my touring party.

  In Germany, a fight started after we left a club in Munich. Art, Keith Forsey, and my bodyguard, who had a black belt in karate, ended up in the fight with some locals over a cab we were all hailing at the same time. I hailed another taxi and got the hell out of there. Maybe I was learning a little, as later, when the police came to our hotel to arrest whoever was involved in the fight, I did not have to spend the night in a German police cell.

  The tour had gone extremely well. The band played great and the audience reaction was overwhelming in every country that we visited. Most importantly, I had behaved myself—relatively speaking. Compared to the drugs that had been consumed on previous Billy Idol tours, this one had been tame. But we were especially looking forward to returning to the UK. After a gig at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham, we excitedly drove down to London for two shows at Wembley Arena.

  Getting off the bus at the hotel in the theater district of London, we headed straight to the bar. There we were joined by the heavy metal band Anthrax, who sat against one of the walls watching everything we were doing. Over on the other side of the hotel bar was an old couple seated with two young men on either side of them, each looking resplendent in evening dress, obviously after a night at the theater. In the center of the bar we were drinking and having fun, happily celebrating the end of the tour, with only the two London shows to go. After a while, one of the young men came over to me and asked politely if I would meet the old couple and the other young man. I nearly declined but thought they looked harmless enough and that it would be nothing to say hello to his party. I went over and shook the other young man’s hand and greeted the older couple. As I turned to leave, without warning, the young man who had approached me unceremoniously full-on kissed me, tongue and all. I returned to our group in a state of shock and tried to tell Art what had just happened. But with the hubbub of the bar he didn’t hear me quite properly so I grabbed him and shouted in his face, “That guy just full-on French kissed me!” Pointing in the young man’s general direction, Art went right over to the wrong guy and started to try to tip him up or pull his pants off or something. I was saying, “No, that’s the wrong guy!”—pointing to the other young man. Art decided to leave it at that and we carried on drinking. But sometime later the young man who kissed me came across the bar and tried to talk to me. By now I was somewhat inebriated, and though I was making it perfectly clear I did not want to talk to him, he continued to try to engage me in conversation. This irritated me to the point where Bilvis reared his ugly head, and I took my glass in my hand and smashed it on the bar in disgust. Luckily for him (and me), he wasn’t cut, but the furor of people trying to separate us before things escalated any further became quite heated.

  On the walls of the hotel bar were autographed photos of famous actors and performers. We were particularly offended by an autographed photo of fifteen-minute pop sensation Milli Vanilli. Just one month earlier, they’d been stripped of their Best New Artist Grammy after admitting they hadn’t sung a single note on their debut album. And so, Art took the opportunity to rip their signed photo from the wall, throw it to the floor, and jump up and down on it. That did it. We were thrown out of the hotel, the first time on this tour—but we upgraded to a better hotel as a result.

  The next night was the first of two nights at Wembley Arena. We had Gene Loves Jezebel supporting us on this leg of the tour. I was in my dressing room putting on my gear and preparing for the show and I could hear their bass player flubbing his notes, but the rest of the band sounded good. Hmmm, strange, I thought. Thinking nothing of it I went back to getting ready, but then the guitar player started dropping a load of notes. What the fuck? I thought. Then I started to hear the drummer flubbing his fills, and then the bass player again. “What the hell’s going on out there?” I said to somebody within earshot who could see the stage. Art was standing at the front row of the audience, right in front of each band member in turn, looking up, as if something might fall on the band. It was our end-of-tour practical joke! Word of our final-night prank on Faith No More had obviously spread, and each member of Gene Loves Jezebel was trying to play his instrument while craning his neck to see into the dark of the rafters of the arena in case something was about to drop on his head.

  The Wembley gigs were excellent nights all around. They concluded with a large number of balloons falling from the ceiling onto the audience with condoms attached to them and the following words written on each one: HAVE A FUCK ON ME.

  And with that, the Charmed Life European tour came to an end.

  After Europe we had a short break, and in January ’91 we embarked on a short South American tour where we were guest stars supporting the great Joe Cocker in gigantic outdoor stadiums. We played three shows in Argentina and found the girls there to be very beautiful, tall, leggy, and blond. They
were also very willing, so the gigs were great. We played Punta del Este in Uruguay and finished the short tour leg by playing the first night of the Rock in Rio festival in Brazil, which also was held in a gigantic stadium attended by 250,000 people. In Rio, we supported INXS the first night, and when Robert Plant had to cancel his support slot before Guns N’ Roses the next day, we were asked by GNR and the promoter to take his place. This translated into playing in front of half a million people in two days!

  We hung out with GNR after the show and partied hard. All I remember now is Slash making what seemed like a million sweet vodka drinks, which we all dutifully drank. Cocaine was in abundance and as we weren’t leaving the next day, the partying went on until almost daybreak, when we decided to repair to the hotel before the sun came up. I’d been asleep for just over an hour when loud, crazed screaming awoke me. It was a shrieking chorus of young girls greeting New Kids on the Block, who were also playing the festival and had just arrived at the hotel. We’d known they were coming. Art had prepared for the moment, buying a NEW KIDS SUCK T-shirt in Virginia Beach, and he took this opportunity to show it off. He was out in his underpants with the T-shirt hanging over the railing in full view of the arriving band and screaming fans. Rolling Stone was covering the festival, and a photo of Art made it into the next edition of the magazine, standing there in his skivvies on the hotel balcony, showing off the shirt. Donnie Wahlberg saw Art getting photographed and later went to Art’s room with a few of his bodyguards. He threatened Art through his door and Art said he’d open the door and fight him if he sent all of his bodyguards away. Donnie left.