The Hidden Truth Of Billy Idol

At the beginning of the 1980s, Billy Idol brought punk rock into the mainstream. Sporting the archetypal punk appearance of a studded leather jacket, spiky and bleached hair, and a semi-permanent sneer, Idol smoothed out the rough, dangerous, and audacious side of punk music but still maintained a rebellious edge. He got punk onto the radio, and more importantly, onto MTV, which made him a household name. Idol ultimately showed comfort and skill with all kinds of rock styles, from fist-pumping anthems like "Dancing With Myself," "Rebel Yell," and "Hot in the City," to moody and atmospheric ballads like "Flesh for Fantasy" and "Eyes Without a Face," to the arena rock of "White Wedding" and "Cradle of Love."

Idol evolved, hung around, and kept snarling and singing, and he became the living embodiment of a rock star. As of 2025, he's up for induction into the historically controversial Rock and Roll hall of Fame. If you want the never boring, totally rock n' roll story of the rise, reign, and almost-fall of Billy Idol, here it is, and a whole lot more, more, more.

When various bands helped invent punk rock in the 1970s, it was customary for those iconic rockers to use stage names, generally something funny or nihilistic. When he got heavily into the punk band the Sex Pistols (featuring "Johnny Rotten" and "Sid Vicious"), British student William Broad started calling himself "Billy Idle." He took ownership of a nasty remark written by a former instructor. "A chemistry teacher wrote in capital letters, 'WILLIAM IS IDLE' on a third-form report which I'll always remember because my dad went crazy," Idol told "Soundcheck."

Broad, or rather Idle, continued to bill himself in such a manner for a few years until he remembered the existence of a very prominent person with a similar name. "Eric Idle from Monty Python spelled it that way," he explained, recalling how he simply reworked the word from "Idle" to "Idol." "It's a hell of a lot of fun, and I've had a hell of a lot of fun with it," Idol said.

The first band that the man who would eventually be known as Billy Idol loved: the Beatles, when he was 6 years old. In his early 20s, punk broke in the U.K., and Idol so adored the Sex Pistols that he joined its raucous, active fan club known as the Bromley Contingent, which followed the band around the country attending its concerts. Idol met the two founding members of alternative rock band Siouxsie and the Banshees in the Bromley Contingent, but none of these musicians would fully copy the look and sound of the first wave of punk bands. "We were saying the opposite to the Clash and the Pistols. They were singing, 'No Elvis, Beatles, or the Rolling Stones,' but we were honest about what we liked," Idol told The Telegraph about his first successful band, Generation X. "The truth was, we were all building our music on the Beatles and the Stones."

While marketed as punks, Generation X was palatable enough to mainstream audiences to warrant an appearance on British television's "Top of the Pops." In 1979, Generation X hit No. 11 on the U.K. pop chart with "King Rocker." Wishing to avoid political themes entirely in their music, Idol and bandmate Tony James wrote the song as a debate about who was better, Elvis Presley or the Beatles. By the end of the year, Generation X had splintered, and Idol began thinking about a solo career.

About 20 years after the first British Invasion made stars out of U.K. bands like the Beatles and The Who in the United States, the "second British invasion" launched the stateside careers of numerous acts in the 1980s. Nearly all of them had a compelling visual element to their act, which coalesced perfectly with the rise of the all-music-video cable channel MTV. Duran Duran, Culture Club, and Billy Idol all enjoyed a boost from their music videos entering heavy rotation. MTV came along at just the right time for Idol, who ironically couldn't get much media attention at the outset of his solo career because of his punk rock-coded image that would later help him sell a lot of records.

Neither of Idol's first U.S.-released 45s, "Dancing with Myself" and a cover of the '60s hit "Mony Mony," fared well with record buyers or at radio. The sleeves of Idol's works depicted a snarling, scowling, bleached-haired Idol, suggesting that the music inside would be off-putting, non-commercial punk and not the hooky pop-rock it really was. Idol's label, Chrysalis, issued the singer's follow-up single, "Hot in the City," in 1982 with a simple, stock shot of a city scene. Downplaying Idol's image worked — curious programmers and consumers took a chance, and the single made it to No. 23 on the pop chart, establishing Idol in the U.S.

Many popular rock songs are way darker than you think, but there's no barely secret meaning of "Dancing with Myself," the first single by Billy Idol. It's only a rumor that the song is about doing something far more intimate by one's lonesome than grooving. Around 1980, Idol and collaborator Tony James were hanging out at a disco in Japan where they noticed a strange phenomenon. "They weren't dancing with each other, they were dancing with their own reflections. And I said to Tony James, 'Hey Tony, they're dancing with myself,'" Idol recalled on X, formerly known as Twitter. James suggested the duo write a song with that title, and they did. "It really was about you dancing in the night, thinking well, until I have someone else to dance to, I'm gonna dance to my own reflection," Idol explained.

In 1987, Idol went to No. 1 on the American pop chart for the first and only time with a live-recorded cover of the 1968 Tommy James and the Shondells hit "Mony Mony." A party classic in the making, a fad quickly spread around the country in which listeners shouted a very profane chant to fill the spaces between Idol's lyrics. "I heard that it started out in those frat houses, back in the '80s," Idol divulged to A Journal of Musical Things. "It graduated to discos and then it went on from there. And then it graduated to our live shows."

Just after 8 a.m. on February 6, 1990, Billy Idol took his Harley-Davidson motorcycle for a spin near his Los Angeles home. He hadn't slept at all, and he was likely still significantly intoxicated from the alcohol and drugs consumed throughout the previous night. Idol, neglecting to wear a helmet, rode into morning rush hour traffic, and after allegedly ignoring a stop sign, he ran his motorcycle into a moving car.

The motorist wasn't injured, but Idol was. Conscious after the accident, he was unable to move one of his legs, as it had been flattened and looked as if it had almost been detached from the rest of his body. Rushed to a local hospital, Idol required an emergency seven-hour surgery to treat the broken leg as well as a fracture of his forearm. His recovery, both physical and mental, tooks months. "It was a wake-up call. I didn't know if I was going to lose my leg. I didn't know if I'd ever perform again — or make music again," Idol told Record Collector magazine (via UDiscoverMusic).

On more than one occasion, injury and physical harm factored into the production of Billy Idol's music videos. The dramatic clip for the gloomy 1984 song "Eyes Without a Face" was produced over a period of 48 hours straight, after which Idol flew to a concert in Arizona. After not sleeping and having his hard contact lenses in for 36 hours, he took a nap in a grassy spot outside the arena and was awakened by a police officer who thought Idol was an unhoused person. Idol found himself in intense pain, sensitive to light, and leaking fluid from his eyes. Sent to an emergency room, Idol learned his contacts had temporarily fused to his eyeballs and damaged his corneas; he had to cancel the concert and keep bandages over his eyes for two days.

In 1990, Idol was seriously injured in a motorcycle accident just before he was scheduled to film the video for "Cradle of Love." Since Idol couldn't move around much because of his badly broken leg, director David Fincher had to completely rethink the video's concept, opting to film Idol only from the waist up. The clip featured Idol — or the top half of him, at least — as a series of moving paintings in an apartment.

After dominating the 1980s as a rock star, Billy Idol headed into the 1990s ready to be an actor. The Hollywood side hustle didn't quite work out. In "The Doors," Oliver Stone's biopic of the '60s band of the same name, Idol portrayed Cat, a hard-drinking companion of singer Jim Morrison. Cat was intended to be a much more significant character in "The Doors," but Idol's recuperation limited his availability. "I was going to have a big part in 'The Doors' movie in 1991, but because of the motorcycle accident, I couldn't do it," Idol told People. That vehicular mishap, and the necessary recovery period, also cost Idol a role as the evil, time-traveling T-1000 android in 1991's biggest blockbuster, "Terminator 2: Judgment Day." "I loved [director] Jim Cameron. I just know he would have got the performance out of me," Idol said to The Guardian. "It might have opened a lot more doors, and it's such a shame."

Toward the end of the decade, Idol passed on the chance to play Spike, a vampire who favored an Idol-esque look of bleached hair and leather clothes, on TV's "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." "I wanted to do it because I believed I could learn to act by doing it," Idol said. "But my manager didn't want me to do television. So I didn't." The character, as portrayed by James Marsters, included a tribute to Idol — Buffy points out that Idol lifted his look from Spike.

In 1984, Billy Idol released his top-selling album to date, "Rebel Yell," named after one of the LP's hit singles. Idol had adopted the word "rebel" as part of his persona, because it can mean something similar to "punk." He got the idea from a bourbon he saw three members of the Rolling Stones knocking back at a party. "They were all drinking this great big bottle," Idol told Forbes. "Then I saw it on the label: a Confederate cavalry officer with a plume in his head riding away. And I could see this stuff's called 'Rebel Yell.' I was just going, 'Wow.' As soon as I saw that, I kind of went, 'That's a great title.'"

Adopting the 19th century Southern notion of a rebel a bit more, Idol began wearing the Confederate flag on his clothing. That all stopped in 1990. While Idol was hospitalized after a motorcycle accident, a Black man cleaned him up, saw the flag on his clothes, and informed Idol that it was widely employed as a symbol of racism and hatred as it stood for the pro-slavery South. "I realized it symbolizes oppression to certain Americans," Idol explained on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Throughout his heyday, Billy Idol consumed a lot of drugs. Idol was a heroin user in the mid-1980s, and by the end of the decade it took him two years to record "Charmed Life" because of all the distractions. "Two years of never-ending booze, broads, and bikes, plus a steady diet of pot, cocaine, ecstasy, smack, opium, quaaludes, and reds," he wrote in "Dancing With Myself." "I passed out in so many clubs and woke up in the hospital so many times; there were incidents of returning to consciousness to find I was lying on my back, looking at some uniformly drab, gray hospital ceiling." In August 1994, Idol was admitted to a hospital in Burbank, California, after his personal assistant discovered the singer unresponsive at his home. He was initially listed in critical condition, but he recovered from a nearly fatal overdose of drugs.

In 1989, Billy Idol took his substance use to such an extreme level that the military reportedly had to get involved. Idol checked into the penthouse suite of The Oriental, a luxurious upscale hotel in Bangkok, Thailand. And then he stayed for three weeks, refusing to leave and keeping up an endless party fueled by alcohol and drugs. When Idol wouldn't vacate, hotel management brought in a contingent of the Thai army, which forced the rock star off the premises. The Oriental incurred an estimated $250,000 in property damages by Idol's hands.

Sometimes musicians can become huge stars when they switch genres, and with that in mind, Billy Idol attempted to reinvent his sound. His brand of punk-laced pop-rock was passé by 1993, which made it seem like a good time to try something new. Idol made "Cyberpunk," a sci-fi-themed concept album that also attempted to foretell the coming future of digital culture by embracing cutting-edge recording and marketing methods. Idol oversaw production of "Cyberpunk" by recording it in his home studio on a Macintosh computer and utilized a lot of samples, synthesizers, and electronic tools when not many mainstream musicians were doing such things. "It was a little bit ahead of its time," Idol told The Guardian. "I think I was the first artist to have his internet address on the album cover."

The general public summarily rejected the reinvented Billy Idol. The "Cyberpunk" album and its singles "Heroin" and "Shock to the System" sold poorly. The experience left Idol so embarrassed that he didn't record another album for 12 years.

By the mid-1980s, Billy Idol was one of the most popular and recognizable rock stars of the era. He was so highly regarded that he started getting offers to record songs written by other people, and for high-profile projects. The filmmakers behind the 1985 teen dramedy "The Breakfast Club" wanted to use a synth-rock theme song written by Keith Forsey called "Don't You (Forget About Me)." Forsey, who had worked with Idol in the past, asked the singer to perform it for the soundtrack, but he passed. It landed in the hands of British rock band Simple Minds, which took it to No. 1 on the pop chart.

Decades later, Idol had such a proven track record as a hitmaker that major acts clamored to cut songs that he'd written. He wrote "Into the Night" with Black Sabbath's Tony Iommi for the latter's first solo album in 2000, and 20 years later, he contributed "Bad Decisions" to the Strokes' album "The New Abnormal" and worked with Miley Cyrus on her tune "Night Crawling."

Nearly 50 years into his career, Billy Idol can still find things to do that neither he nor anyone else has ever attempted or accomplished. In April 2023, for example, Idol became the first musician to ever stage a live concert at the Hoover Dam. The show took place in the midst of a North American tour, and Idol was joined by other punk-inspired musicians, including Tony Kanal of No Doubt, Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols, and Alison Mosshart of the Kills, as he sang a set list of his greatest hits from the Hoover Dam Bypass outside Las Vegas, overlooking the Colorado River's Black Canyon.

The Idol concert was an exclusive event. Only 250 tickets were sold, and they cost between $749 and $2,249 each. Idol was persuaded to make history with the stunt because it was for a good cause. Organizers wanted to raise awareness of rapidly normalizing drought conditions in the American Southwest. It would be catastrophic if Lake Mead were to dry up forever, and the Hoover Dam towers over that reservoir, where the water level has in recent years dropped annually by 20 feet.