Billy Idol Wanted More, More, More Anthems

Inspiration can strike when you least expect it, but being at a debauched birthday party for one of the Rolling Stones will likely help expedite the process. That’s where Billy Idol found himself in the early ’80s, still buzzing from the release of his namesake debut album yet eagerly searching for something that could be warped into his next hit. He chatted with fellow revelers, had a drink or five, enjoyed the Upper West Side excess. Then his eyes locked in on what would become his future.

“At one point, Ronnie Wood, Mick Jagger, and Keith Richards were standing in front of me, all drinking this great big bowl of a brown dark bottle. It had a cavalry officer on it in a Confederate outfit and the text said, ‘How is it called Rebel Yell?’” Idol recalled. “I was trying to write songs for myself, so I said to them, ‘Did you guys have this made for the party?’ They responded, ‘No, no. It’s a real Southern-style Tennessee bourbon.’ I went, ‘Would you be thinking of using it as a title? I mean, ‘Street Fighting Man,’ ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash,’ and ‘Rebel Yell’ all have a similar feel to them.’ They looked at each other and went, ‘I don’t think we would.’” Idol knew, at that moment, he could reverse engineer those two words into greatness. “As soon as I got home,” he added, “I started writing the song.”

Despite only peaking at No. 46 on the Billboard charts, “Rebel Yell” evolved into Idol’s defining hit and helped certify his status as one of the decade’s most prevailing hard-rockers. It also confirmed his strategy for kicking off a new album cycle. “I tended to want to come out with an uptempo lead single,” Idol, who will re-release a deluxe Rebel Yell on April 26, explained. “Because why wouldn’t I want that attention right away?”

I was resettling from London and going through my first summer in New York where it’s super humid. You know how you’ve been rained on all day by all the air conditioning? I was literally hot in the city but also I felt sexually alive. I was sexually hot. I remember one night I was walking down some stairs and thought of a hit single Nick Gilder had a couple of years earlier, “Hot Child in the City.” There’s no refraction on his song. I thought, “Why’d you need the child? You could do a song ‘Hot in the City’ because not only is it fucking blazing hot, I’m hot.”

It was all the New York nightlife that inspired me. There were so many clubs compared to London. I remember one night there were lots of people going from club to club, and the cab drivers were racing each other. Our guy was going up on the pavement. You wouldn’t get a London taxi driver doing so. It was a little crazy. New York was bankrupt at that time and there was a feeling that anything went. Police didn’t seem to care about anything. It was almost like a postapocalyptic world. So now I’m thinking about this kind of postapocalyptic New York where you’re young and hot. Don’t be afraid of the world we’ve made and the world we’re making. A lot of the people from the ’60s and ’70s were already saying the ’80s sucked. I was 25 years old. So we were kind of going, “Fuck you, this is our time — we’re hot in the city. You old people can fuck off.”

I put out an EP the year prior, which had “Mony Mony” and “Dancing With Myself” on it. I actually recorded “Hot in the City” for the EP, but one of my producers at the time said, “It’s too good for the EP. We’re going to save it and make it the first single for the album.” He sussed it out.

When I put “White Wedding” out after, they wouldn’t initially play it on the radio because, they said, “A punk-rock image doesn’t sell advertising.” But college radio went with it and people started to phone up the record stations after the music video came out. Pretty soon, it all fell away because they realized there was an audience out there. But that’s what we were coming up against with “Hot in the City” — a little bit of blowback against the new music.

I knew about the American Civil War, but I wasn’t going to make it anything to do with the American Civil War. I was thinking about my girlfriend. She was a dancer, so I made it about the sexual cry of love; this orgasmic cry of love and how great women were. That’s what I was singing about because I was so in love with her. I just wanted to lionize our relationship.

“Rebel Yell” is a total anthem. I believe you should come with something exciting to kick the album off, and then you can come with something like “Eyes Without a Face” as the second. Also, we really weren’t sure what the other singles were after “Rebel Yell.” I remember calling my manager, who took “Eyes Without a Face” to a DJ in one of the big markets. I wish I knew what his name was. But this man told my manager, “‘Eyes Without a Face’ should be the next single.”

It wasn’t really a big hit but it still made a decent dent in the States and set up the album. It also gave me time to grow exponentially. I started off in clubs again, but once “Eyes Without a Face” did really well on MTV, more and more people started to discover the album and how good it was. Then I reached theaters and arenas. When “Rebel Yell” came out in England, eventually it was a big hit. It came from curious people covering what Billy Idol was doing. England knew me as Generation X but started to discover my solo career and what I’d done by coming to America. I had this whole new thing they could discover. Whereas if I’d stayed there, that might never have happened. They realized I wasn’t just popping up a ball or something. I had the goods.

I broke up with Perri Lister, whom I had written “Rebel Yell” about. I was a bit blue about it and missed her. So I was starting to look for songs that spoke about that, and I was writing things like “Sweet Sixteen,” which is about losing this naïve love you had. I wanted to sing songs about this love relationship going wrong. I was sad. I had a reggae album by George Faith that Lee “Scratch” Perry had produced, where “To Be a Lover” was on it. I just knew it as a reggae song. As far as I knew, that was the original. I liked it a lot and thought, I could take this song and speed it up like a rockabilly song. That’s what I started to play on my guitar, I sped it up three times, and put more of a piano boogie in.

When I came to look into who wrote the song — because I thought it was this reggae guy — I found out William Bell did the original. When I listened to that, it was even slower than the reggae version. Later on when the single came out and it had done really well, I was at a party in Los Angeles. I was just standing there, and this long-haired chap came up to me and I realized, “Oh, man, it’s Steve Cropper.” He used to be in Booker T. & the M.G.’s. He played on the original William Bell song as a session musician. He told me he loved what I did with “To Be a Lover.” That was pretty amazing.

It was a little bit of a weird move to come with a cover for your first song for a new album, but there was a great reaction to it in the studio, so it encouraged me to go with “To Be a Lover.” The whole album had touches of vulnerability. I was singing about this relationship going wrong. There’s a number of songs on the album that are a bit like that, even “Fatal Charm” and “Beyond Belief.” Because, really, I was Billy Idol; I was fucking everything that moved. But I was in love with Perri. That’s what I wanted to think about.

You have to do what you feel is right. Maybe I knew, in a way, what I should have done. What happened was I was going to do a follow-up album soon after Rebel Yell, but I nearly made a movie out of a book I liked: King Death, by Nik Cohn. It all went wrong and the movie never got made. So, by the time I was doing Whiplash Smile, it was a couple of years later and I was in a whole different frame of mind. There was no way I could directly follow up Rebel Yell with something similar.

At first, the album did throw people a little bit for a loop because I think they were expecting Rebel Yell: Part Two. “To Be a Lover” is nothing like “Rebel Yell” as a song. It wasn’t a rock-and-roll anthem. Yeah, it’s uptempo and rocking, but it’s about a sincere love relationship. I know the album shocked people in that way, but I was going to do what I believed in. I was just following my muse and this is where it was leading me. I grew up in a time period where a lot of the music was very eclectic. Musicians didn’t follow one style. Lou Reed follows his muse. David Bowie follows his muse. Sex Pistols follows their muse. Clash follows their muse. Billy Idol is following his muse.

The first verse is about Jerry Lee Lewis marrying his 13-year-old cousin — he’s literally knocking the cradle. “It burned like a ball on fire when the rebel took a little child bride.” Personally, “Cradle of Love” was all about sexual innuendo. Everything was like that in the ’80s, because AIDS hadn’t quite hit the heterosexual community. It wasn’t until 1992 when Magic Johnson went public with his HIV diagnosis that it really shut everything down. We were still living that kind of ’60s and ’70s free-love thing in the late ’80s. “’Cause love starts my rollin’ train / You can’t stop it / It ain’t in vain.” Then it was all condoms and everything. I was still singing about something sexual just for fun, really. I was into T. Rex, and it has a little bit of a Marc Bolan flavor to it. It wasn’t about anything heavy.

We produced four versions of “Cradle of Love” until we finally got the right one. I definitely wanted to open up Charmed Life with an anthem. I remember after a third version thinking I nailed it, and my producer was like, “Nope, not quite there, Billy, it needs to be more anthemic.” We all worked really hard making it a lead, hit single from the start.

You know what I remember the most? MC Hammer kept us from No. 1. We were right beneath it for ages. Nobody could touch “U Can’t Touch This.” I wish it would have broken through.

The Cyberpunk album was going to be the soundtrack to a movie called Lawnmower Man 2, which was about an internet drug transmitted through the computer — like a virus that would get in your brain and turn you into a zombie. I worked with the chap who directed the original Lawnmower Man, and he wrote the script for a sequel, but the production company didn’t want to turn it into a franchise. So I was left with an album that was going to be a soundtrack. Even though it wasn’t a soundtrack anymore, I still had this odd mix of songs about “the Mindfire.” That’s where the “Heroin” cover came in. It fits in with Cyberpunk because it’s part of “the Mindfire” being an internet virus. It’s a dance version of “Heroin,” which was pretty crazy for me. It was a lot of fun because I was melding rock and roll with rave music. I didn’t know if that should really happen, but I knew it was going to be challenging the impossible. It’s not only just the Velvet Underground. I threw in some Patti Smith lyrics, which made it sound even heavier: “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine.”

I wasn’t necessarily trying to have a massive hit single. I was hoping the album was going to be the soundtrack and not anything to do with “Billy Idol going for another hit.” So it wasn’t comparable to “Cradle of Love,” where we were actively trying to have a hit. I wasn’t thinking about that at all. I was just trying to do something I liked.

My manager had an early version of Pro Tools. It was new recording equipment that you could have and use in your home. I knew this was going to mean everybody could record DIY music in whatever space they had. It was going to be the future. What set me free was the home-recording abilities. I recorded “Heroin” and Cyberpunk in a room in my house. I didn’t do it in a studio. We recorded the drums and everything on the machine. Cyber was the tech world, but the punk side of it was DIY. We were presaging what was going to happen in the 2000s and today. People make a lot of music in their homes now, then maybe go into a studio to do finishing touches. Some people don’t ever go to the studio. So it was really to do with the future of music, the DIY, and what was going to happen. That’s what I was getting interested in. I paid no attention to its commercial performance.

It’s a companion piece to “Rebel Yell” in some ways. Except it was me having the orgasm and a woman making me scream. It almost rocks harder than “Rebel Yell” in a way. But yeah, it’s about me orgasming. Simple as that.

It’s a kick-ass number and it’s a kick-ass song, and, like I had done in the past, I usually like to start off the albums with something that’s uptempo. Since this was a bit of a reintroduction to me, I wanted people to know I wasn’t stopping. Maybe I took a break for a bit, but the basic thing I’m doing is carrying on and I’m going to go all day and all night. That was the message I wanted to get out there and “Scream” fit.

It was weird being in a new millennium. At the time, I wanted to reignite what I was doing and give myself new stuff to play. I went back on the road and started playing live again when this album was being made. What was most important to me was looking to reintroduce myself to my audience, show them that I was still rocking hard and that I was going to carry on hook or by crook. I was looking at the continuation and not the charts.

This is a personal one. People think you’re going to fold, you’re going to give in, you’re going to cool away and die. I’m not going to give up on that sort of thing as a musician. “You wanna rain on my survival story? You’re crazy, baby, ’cause I never had a doubt”: That’s what it’s saying. I mean, it’s a survival story for me. That’s what I had been feeling about my life. I survived what I was doing to myself in the ’80s and ’70s, being a bit of a drug addict. I was fully out of that by the time I wrote “Can’t Break Me Down.”

This was written deliberately to be the lead single.

It made me realize that I wanted to do more releases and didn’t want to wait ten or so years in between them. I’ve got a bit more of a flow going on now, which is kind of incredible at this age. I’ve got this killer album coming out later this year, and I know it’s really good. But I also know that I spent ten years in between albums and that’s a long time. I did two EPs in between Devil’s Playground and Kings & Queens of the Underground, just because I wanted to put more music out, enjoy it, and correct the long waits in the time frame. I remember thinking, I have to do the same promotion for an EP as an album, so fuck this, I might as well do a bloody album now. I’m revitalized and I’m stronger and better than ever in lots of ways. Who could have thought that at 68 years old I would be saying that?

“Hot in the City” still performed better: It peaked at No. 23 compared to “White Wedding” at No. 36.

“Eyes Without a Face” also performed better as a follow-up single compared to “White Wedding”: It peaked at No. 4.

Some people forget “Dancing With Myself” wasn’t originally an Idol solo song but one with his band Generation X. Idol re-recorded and reclaimed it for himself in 1981.

Which was written and recorded in 1968.

The album was Idol’s least popular in the U.S. out of his entire discography, only reaching No. 48.