by Billy Idol
Looking back, I was still feeling somewhat insecure about putting out another album, and I relied too much on the opinions of others when some hard choices needed to be made. I sometimes felt that I had to allow Brian to dictate the arrangement since he’d cowritten and produced the demo, but I also felt it was unfair to Steve to have to play Brian’s guitar arrangements. Either way, I couldn’t win. I should have known better, since I had learned many years ago that compromise for the sake of compromise has negative repercussions when recording an album.
Sanctuary Records released Devil’s Playground on March 22, 2005. Unfortunately, the label was struggling financially at the time, and disintegrated not long after the album was released.
We plowed on regardless and toured with Brian as our drummer in 2005 and 2006, but the relationship between Brian and Steve continued to deteriorate until I knew I had to do something about it. After we worked with producer Josh Abraham on two new songs, “New Future Weapon” and “John Wayne,” for the greatest-hits package The Very Best of Billy Idol: Idolize Yourself, I made the decision to let Brian go. For his part, Brian was probably ready to move on, too, so everything was amicable. After this shift, the vibes in the band improved dramatically.
Soon after Tichy departed, Steve came to me with the idea that the live show would benefit from having a second guitarist. In fact, this is what you normally hear on our records: two interweaving guitar tracks. So at Steve’s suggestion, we brought in a second guitarist, Billy Morrison, who had previously played with the Cult. He has proved a perfect fit for many reasons, including his talent as a songwriter. In fact, six of the tracks on Kings & Queens of the Underground emerged from the Idol/Stevens/Morrison trifecta.
Billy is from New Eltham in South East London, not far from Bromley, where I lived with my parents when the punk explosion began. He is ten years younger than me but got into punk at a very young age. By hanging with Guy Jardine, another Bromley punk who I’ve known for years who was older than Billy, he managed to bunk into gigs for free, so he saw a number of the early punk bands, including Generation X. He was a big fan of Valley of the Dolls when it was released in 1979, so when he joined the band, we started to play some selections from that album live. Not only is Billy Morrison a good mate and a link to my days of punk in the UK, but he’s also become an integral part of the new Idol sound. And as if that is not enough, he has also been our battlefield reporter, taking fans for a ride around the world with his colorful Idol Live tour diary entries on BillyIdol.net, our official website.
Over the past few years the band has jelled into what is without question the finest band I have ever had. We have toured the U.S. and Europe several times over and have had the pleasure of visiting several countries that at one time were either behind the Iron Curtain or part of former Yugoslavia, including Russia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Slovenia, Hungary, and Macedonia. Who would have thought it? A punk from Bromley bringing joy to ten thousand screaming fans in Moscow. Too wild for the chemistry teacher from South East London who called me “Idle” to comprehend, I’m sure. And does my older music still hold up? Blimey, I think it does!
To think it was just two years ago in a tent in Munich that I saw one of the greatest moments of total audience participation ever, where the whole, and I mean the whole, audience had their fists in the air during the encore song “White Wedding”! The band was so overwhelmed they stopped playing, and no matter what I did the crowd wouldn’t stop cheering or shouting out in exultation. These are human moments of communication where for a short time we feel connected by the music, by the energy, and the sheer will to rock out. It is in these moments that I find validation of my life’s work.
These moments also encouraged me to contemplate another album. Steve and I continued to write together and we also brought in Billy Morrison to contribute to our writing sessions. I also wrote some songs with a wonderful young artist named George Lewis Jr., aka Twin Shadow. I couldn’t wait to get back in the studio again. When it came time to think about a producer for my new album, Tony D. reminded me of the time I had worked with Trevor Horn on the Days of Thunder sound track and how much I had enjoyed that experience. We contacted Trevor and sent him some demos of the new songs. He quickly responded that he thought they had a lot of potential, so I went to London to see him in May 2013. One of the first things he said to me was, “Why do you want me to produce your record? I do prog rock!” I said, “Bollocks, you’ve done everything—you can do it all!” And that he has, from Rod Stewart to Art of Noise, from Frankie Goes to Hollywood to Seal. Then, of course, there was Yes’s “Owner of a Lonely Heart,” which turned prog rock on its head with regular back-to-back airplay with “Flesh for Fantasy” back in 1983. After that, we were on!
Trevor’s studio in London, Sarm, was due to close for a remodel, but he agreed to keep it open so he could make one last album there. The studio is in a former church in Basing Street, just around the corner from Portobello Road where, in that white-hot summer of 1976, from a top-floor window, I witnessed young disenfranchised Jamaicans demonstrating before being subdued by battalions of blue-clad bobbies. Like their punk brothers, they also left their indelible mark in the history books on behalf of England’s youth.
Sarm Studios’ storied history goes back even further, to the days when it was the studio and headquarters for Chris Blackwell’s Island Records. Legends such as Bob Marley, Traffic, Free, and Cat Stevens were signed to Island Records and recorded there, as did many non-Island artists, including Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones. If those walls could talk.
Trevor worked from our demos but instead of relying on sampled or drum machine automation, he got Ash Soan to play live drums while he played bass. I put some guide vocals on Trevor’s tracks while I was visiting my parents and left him to it. He sent me the tracks he had worked on, and I was so impressed that I returned to London a few weeks later with Steve. We recorded five more tracks that we felt would work best if recorded live. These include “Love and Glory,” “Kings & Queens of the Underground,” “Hollywood Promises,” “Ghosts in My Guitar,” and “Postcards from the Past.” I redid some vocals and Steve put down his guitar tracks on the keyboard songs that Trevor had recorded while we were in L.A. Later Billy Morrison joined us. We worked on some string arrangements that Trevor was keen to put on “Kings & Queens,” “Eyes Wide Shut,” “One Breath Away,” “Nothing to Fear,” and “Love and Glory” and when they were finished they sounded like the new anthems we hoped they’d become.
Before we left, we discussed some overdubs that Trevor then added. These were basic sweetening overdubs using smatterings of keyboards played by Trevor’s Buggles partner, Geoff Downes, and also strings and backing vocals.
Working with Trevor was exhilarating. In some ways it wasn’t so different from working with Keith Forsey, as both are English and started out as primarily rhythm players, Keith on the drums and Trevor on the bass. But there the similarity ends. Trevor has his own style completely and it was this that he brought to the album.
Trevor sent me the mixes after I returned to L.A. I was very happy with what we’d produced, but I felt that I needed one or two more songs to complete the album. In 2013, I met Greg Kurstin, a prolific songwriter-producer, and we discussed writing together, but the timing did not work for either of us. While listening to Trevor’s mixes, it occurred to me that a song we’d put aside—“Save Me Now,” written with George Lewis—might be great with some revisions. I contacted Greg to see if he wanted to help me finish writing it. In the song, I’m calling out to a loved one to rescue me and restore in me faith in humanity that has been cruelly shattered. No one wants to do it alone, ladies!
Greg’s finishing touches made us both very excited about the song, so I asked him if he might also produce it. “Save Me Now” came together so well, we both felt we were onto something, and we decided to write another song with the help of Dan Nigro. With Greg once again producing, “Can’t Break Me Down” carries on the message of defian
ce to those who seek to beat us down in this world. With the two new songs wrapped, the album was complete.
In the entire album, I tried to stick to themes that affect us all in our daily lives, universal themes of love and loss. As the world continues to find new ways to tear itself apart, humans still love, hate, feel rejected, and yearn to be close to someone.
Give the future enough time and it will speak for itself. Now, with this new album and excellent iteration of my band, including Steve Stevens, Stephen McGrath, Billy Morrison, drummer Erik Eldenius, and keyboardist Paul Trudeau, the forest no longer seems impenetrable.
* * *
MY GREATEST INSPIRATION ON THIS album has been my family and the opportunities I’ve had to reflect on my life. It’s been great fun to watch Bonnie and Willem grow up, first as small children, then through their teen years, and now as adults. One thing’s for certain: the DNA doesn’t fall far from this tree! Whether I see them individually or together, relaxing at my house or sitting with them over dinner, it’s always a great time, as they are both terrifically bright, loving, and funny. They crack me up with their rapid-fire banter, fueled by youth and wonderment. Seeing them makes it easy to remember when I saw the world with the same curiosity all those years ago, wanting to drink up every last drop.
Ever since Bonnie was young she’s been a prankster, and she gets me every time. When she was in her late teens, I became anxious she might get a tattoo, as they were popping up on her friends’ arms, legs, and torsos. A friend of hers had just had two pistols tattooed on her stomach—Dad was worried! I know ink is truly forever, and that many times young people get a tattoo they later regret, so it was the one thing I told her I really didn’t want her doing. A few days later she came to me and showed off a tattoo on her arm, a massive anchor with the word Mother emblazoned upon it. I started to get worked up and I was about to go berserk, but she was proudly admiring this tattoo. Then, looking up at me so seriously, waiting for my reaction, she flashed that 100-watt smile. “It’s fake, Dad!” Bloody hell, she got me good and proper! I just had to laugh, as that’s exactly the sort of prank I might have played on my parents.
Though she no doubt has her playful side, Bonnie’s always been particularly serious about her education. Not long after starting at a new high school, Bonnie became noticeably unhappy about the quality of teaching she was receiving. One afternoon, I went to see her as school let out, and instead of that blinding smile, I was greeted with a face full of thunder, bottom lip pushed out, pissed-off and sulky with her situation—exactly how I used to look when I was teed off with my own circumstances! I wanted to laugh at recognizing myself in her, but I buried my laughter. I knew if I were in her shoes, I wouldn’t want to see my silly parent taking my predicament lightly.
“This school just isn’t the level of education I’m looking for,” she said, spitting the words through gritted teeth.
“All right love, I’ve made a mistake, we’ll sort it out immediately,” I said, backpedaling. I know full well that parents don’t always get everything right, and the best thing to do was simply fix it. Seeing her reaction to this situation made me realize just how alike we really are.
And yet, she’s her own woman, following her own star, set on a top-level education with a vision for her future. She once asked me what I thought she should do for a living, and I said, “Only you can truly know what that is. I can guess at what it is, or try to steer you in the right direction, but, in truth, only you know your dreams.” Well, she’s working hard at college right now to pursue those dreams; this Broad knows what she wants and goes the hell after it.
Willem is also incredibly motivated, particularly when it comes to music. He has his own band, FIM, they gig regularly and have put out a couple of self-produced albums. He also makes his own EDM and chill music as Willem Wolfe, and sometimes collaborates with other like-minded musicians via the Internet. We always chat about music, recently venturing into our first collaboration together, a song called “Airport Blues,” for which he wrote most of the music and lyrics. We’ve occasionally talked about a follow up to Cyberpunk—undoubtedly my most controversial album. “What do you think, Pops?” he’ll say. (He always calls me Pops instead of Dad. I’ve said that it makes me sound like I’m his grandfather, but that’s his way, so Pops I am!) I can’t wait to see what we dream up together in the future.
It’s a breath of fresh air for me to be with my children and share in their world, no matter whether they are going through good or bad times—as we all do. When I’m feeling a little lost, a little hazy, or a bit out of place, they anchor me. They are my clear reality when all else is fuddle.
I visit England each summer, primarily to see my family, my mum and dad, and my sister’s family. In recent years, I’ve spent the better part of those sunny English summer visits with my dad on the golf course. Funny, he taught me how to play when I was eleven, but I was always complete crap at it. But strolling through the putting green gave my dad and me so many pleasurable, cherished moments of bonding. I never thought I’d treasure those endless golf lessons as a child as much as I do today.
EPILOGUE
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
—WILLIAM BLAKE
WHEN I FIRST ARRIVED IN America with my parents in ’58, because I felt the change so deeply, I developed a limp in my right leg, as if it was slightly shorter than the other. The doctors could find nothing wrong; they told me it was psychosomatic, all in my head. But considering my motorcycle accident some thirty-odd years later, which in fact did shorten my right leg and return my limp, I believe it was a foreshadowing, a harbinger of what was to be.
As I got older, I began to feel a disenfranchisement from life, an eerie emptiness that grew inside me for a long time. I had the curse of feeling too much, dreaming too big, suffering slights too deeply. Moving around all the time had made me feel that my attachments in this life would be short and end quickly. I lived inside my brain, a soulful person squashed by belittlement, failure at school, failure in the eyes of my parents. I had demonstrated only mediocrity, and I felt the need to abandon their way of life with its fears and boldly go where no Broad had quite gone before.
A sixth sense drove me to follow my dreams, for anything else would lead to feelings of sickness or frustrated anger when I found obstacles in my path. From an early age, that fury was fueled by a fear of desolation. To be well meant I had to realize my chosen destiny. I was forced to leap and fly or accept the nightmare of knowing I would be ill from not doing so.
* * *
I AM HOPELESSLY DIVIDED BETWEEN the dark and the good, the rebel and the saint, the sexual maniac and the monk, the poet and the priest, the demagogue and the populist. I feel the pull of emotions when these characters appear in my actions. I can find justification for any of it, but inside, where it really matters, the fullness and the void struggle to assert dominance over each other. I feel pulled by tides of passion, anger, lust, corruption, madness, sin. . . . The corporeal body struggles until its death, the wind was sown, and the whirlwind followed.
With my dad an atheist and my mom a Catholic, I grew up with conflicting ideas that are wholly incompatible. One is a mystical philosophy, the other a cold, hard truth that there’s nothing spiritual anywhere. The two opposing creeds have battled inside me. One means life goes on after death and everything we do here counts; the other, that all is vanity and we are doomed to an eternal sleep from which none awake. The tide pulls me and its undertow submerges me. I drown and grasp for the foam; I’m turned topsy-turvy in the flood until the tide recedes. My bruised and battered psyche lives on. Sound becomes hollow as I crane my neck to see the next consequence my actions will bring.
But this ideological schism has enabled a birth of musical notes that fly on the wind, blaring in my mind. It has created me in its fashion, and my music is its manifestation. The peaks are so high, and the valleys so low, that it became easy to question my own sanity. Freedom is not free. Achieving that
state of grace can numb the mind and destroy it. What was it James Russell Lowell said about Jean-Jacques Rousseau? “Talent is that which is in a man’s power; genius is that in whose power a man is.” I may be talented—genius, of course, continues to elude me, but the very thought of exuding even a flash drives me on.
When I say genius, I’m talking about the small spark or flame of invention that burns in all of us, waiting to be fanned by our thoughts. Together we innovate, freeing our minds and propelling ourselves forward on our separate paths. Each of us has an ember we can blow on with our breath of mind and see the sparks glow red. I’m no genius and never will be, but with your help, I can run the galaxy of thought and plunder the hidden secrets of the universe. And that’s what you have done for me by helping me touch my artistic side, creating a tongue of fire above your head. I speak in tongues. I lengthen my horizon. I see new worlds.
THIS DREAM OF LIFE BEGAN with my first friends, my mum and my dad. As I work to get down the final pages of this book, my family is going through a crisis. My dad’s health started to deteriorate in the spring of ’13. He began losing weight and knew inside that something was very wrong, as he had no appetite whatsoever. Nothing tasted good, and he began to talk gravely during a summer holiday to Portugal, where I joined my parents with Willem and Bonnie Blue, my sister, my niece Naomi, and my nephews Matthew and Mark.
Dad started to say to Mum within my earshot that this was probably the last holiday we would all take together. A lump was growing on his shoulder and we were all concerned, but I was in denial, as my dad has always been so healthy, playing golf in his late eighties through two hip operations and a near-fatal MRSA infection. But he knew what all the signs meant. Upon our return from the holiday, a battery of tests confirmed that it was cancer. Over the course of the following year it gradually spread from his bones, to his lungs, to everywhere, really.
