Few stars embraced rock ‘n’ roll’s life-threatening extremities as enthusiastically as Billy Idol. But the Middlesex-born rocker tells me he has found something to replace hard drugs and alcohol in his life – his grandchildren. “I have two granddaughters and two grandsons, all under six,” Billy beams. “Watching them so young, so excited to be alive, it makes you feel reborn. Love of your family, my daughter, and sons, maybe that’s what it’s all about. I’ve given up drugs and been paid back with love.”
Billy, 69, continues, “Grandkids accept you for how you are. They’ve seen granddad on stage but they don’t know your backstory.” And what a story it is. William Broad found a degree of fame with his punk band, Generation X, before achieving solo superstardom in the 80s when he conquered America with hits like Eyes Without A Face, Rebel Yell, and White Wedding. These MTV-friendly new wave rock anthems, combined with Billy’s striking image – spiky peroxide hair, snarling curled lip, and biker leathers – made him a pin-up for a generation hungry for rebels. “I’ve been very lucky,” he says. “If punk hadn’t happened, would I have become a professional musician? Possibly not. It opened a door. Watching the Sex Pistols, guys like us, our age, getting better every week and writing gigantic anthems for our generation – Pretty Vacant, Anarchy In The UK – it was so exciting. I saw the door open and I walked through.”
Billy has been making a biographical documentary since 2019 but filming was interrupted by Covid. “The delays helped,” he says. “It’s not bad to live with something and gradually improve it. I’d been going to places like the Roxy in Neal Street, Covent Garden where Generation X started, and I thought why not sing about these different aspects of your life?” Billy told his late parents he was leaving university to form a punk band when he was 20. “I frightened them to death, these people I loved. My dad didn’t know what punk was. He had a little business and was upset that I didn’t want to follow in his footsteps. But I could never have done a 9-5 job. It would have been a nightmare. I wanted to do something I loved.”
Bill and Joan Broad’s worst fears were almost realised in 1990 when Billy – still high from a night in the recording studio – ran a Los Angeles stop sign on his Harley Davidson motorbike and collided with a car. The horrific accident left his right leg “a bloody mangled stump”. Surgeons at Cedars-Sinai Medical Centre took seven hours to save it, inserting a steel rod between his ankle and his knee. But the outcome could have been far worse – he hadn’t been wearing a crash helmet when he hit the concrete. Confined to bed for six months, Billy, then a heroin addict, realised his lifestyle would destroy him. “I knew I had to change, you can’t stay like that for ever. Bad things were starting to happen. Like that accident. I knew I had to put it in my rear-view mirror. You had to get away from that or it was going to kill you, or put you in prison, or leave you brain dead.”
Billy’s rip-roaring new album, Dream Into It, covers his life story in nine songs, from incredible highs to reckless lows. He waxes lyrical about the energy and excitement of the early London punk scene, based around the Roxy, formerly cheesy gay club Shaggarama’s. “It was ground zero for punk, a tiny place, the capacity was 250 but we had about 1000 in on the night we supported The Clash and The Heartbreakers.” On the album’s second track, 77, Billy and Avril Lavigne sing about the promise of those early punk years, along with the brooding, ever-present prospect of violence. “The 70s weren’t so different from today in America,” he reflects. “People were very divided and polarised. In England we had youth cults fighting one another. Punks fighting skinheads and Teddy Boys… I was thinking about a girlfriend I had, Wendy May, who looked incredible in a bin-liner – we looked like two vampires out at night. One Saturday we were at Charing Cross tube station and a bunch of Teds came through the ticket barrier. Me and the other guys legged it, but Wendy stayed behind and fought the one Teddy girl – and beat her up.
“Of course, we had shows where people were throwing pint glasses at us too. That was part of it. We were trying to find our way, and the audiences were victims of that.”
It was a far cry from the future that the Broads had in mind for their eldest child. Billy was born in Stanmore to his English salesman father and his Cork-born Irish mother. They emigrated to New York state when he was two, returning four years later with his baby sister Jane. The family lived in Sussex before finally settling in Bromley, southeast London, in 1971. Young Broad was bright but found school dull. When a teacher wrote ‘Billy is idle’ in one of his work books, it proved inspirational. He attended Ravensbourne grammar school and then Orpington College before beginning a course in English and Philosophy in September 1975, just weeks before the Sex Pistols played their first gig. Punk’s anarchic lure proved irresistible to Billy and his pals in the Bromley Contingent who followed the Pistols – including Susan Ballion and Steven Bailey, aka Siouxsie Sioux and Steve Severin of the future Siouxsie & The Banshees. Billy and bassist Tony James briefly joined Chelsea but soon quit to form Generation X with Derwood Andrews on guitar and John Towe on drums, playing their first gig in December 1976. His stage name, Idol, was a play on his schoolteacher’s comment. The rock press dubbed him ‘Iggy Bowie’. “Fair enough,” he says. “I was an amalgam of my heroes.” Few denied his onstage charisma.
Chrysalis signed Gen X in July 1977. Their biggest hit, 1979’s King Rocker, peaked at No.11. “It was fantastic fun – when we were all going in the same direction,” he says. “It was only when we started not to go in the same direction that I started to think about a solo career.”
Billy took a gamble and relocated to New York where Kiss’s manager Bill Aucoin landed him a solo deal and put him in touch with guitarist Steve Stevens, his collaborator to this day. “I could never have imagined I’d have that sort of success in America. It was incredible.” Idol’s popularity is enduring. Seven of his albums have each had more than a billion streams on Spotify. As Billy’s platinum hits erupted, so did his hell-raising. In his autobiography, Dancing With Myself, he recalls being strapped to a hospital bed, medically sedated and escorted to Bangkok airport by four armed soldiers, after running up thousands in damages in Thailand. “I did smash up hotels and I probably hurt myself but I always remained a believer in the rock’n’roll revolution I was part of,” he says. Punk, for Billy was a direct descendent of his childhood favourites – Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Little Richard, and Gene Vincent, rock’n’rollers who passed the baton to The Beatles, The Stones, The Who and then the Sex Pistols. He sang with Steve Jones and Paul Cook, plus Gen X’s Tony James in the 2018 punk supergroup Generation Sex. “It’s fantastic that Jonesy, Cookie and Glen Matlock are still playing,” says Billy. “It’s a shame Johnny’s not with them. That would be the ultimate. But they love playing with Frank Carter. They sound terrific and it’s great that Jonesy’s enjoying himself.”
His new album is partly for his grandchildren – “to tell them my story, directly”. As well as Lavigne, his guests include Joan Jett, a friend since 1978 and who is opening for him on the US leg of his tour, and Alison Mosshart, all adding a powerful female perspectives to the album’s narrative. Billy, who relaxes by listening to the old roots reggae he couldn’t afford to buy in the 70s, still loves touring and mixing new songs with old classics. “I’m really excited about coming to England and playing Wembley,” he says. “I get to see my sister, and old friends I haven’t seen for a while.” Idol says his only ambition is to make more albums. “I went to see Elton John, he walked over his albums and they were never ending. There must have been fifty or sixty of them. So I have loads more to do to catch up. I like the albums I’ve made. Rebel Yell was the super breakthrough album. That really established me in America.”
He was recently nominated for the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame, but ever humble says, “They should induct the New York Dolls before me”. He goes on, “I enjoyed Ozzy Osbourne’s solo induction last year – I ran into Roger Daltrey in the lift, met Dua Lipa, and then bumped into Dr Dre and Method Man who said, ‘How old is Billy Idol? 103?’.” Billy laughs. “That was a fun night.” His set for England will be one hour forty. “I can’t wait to play these new songs – I deliberately haven’t played them live yet so they’ll sound fresh. We’ll be playing them for the first time, and we’re going to kick off with Still Dancing because that says it all.”
*Billy headlines Wembley Arena on June 24 and plays the Forever Now Festival at Milton Keynes on June 22. His new album, Dream Into It, is out now.