It’s a good week to be Billy Idol. Not only is his acclaimed documentary, Billy Idol Should Be Dead, finally getting a theatrical release, but he was also just nominated for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame’s Class of 2026. And unlike like his grumpy punk peers the Sex Pistols, who boycotted their 2006 Hall ceremony, Idol is genuinely excited about the honor.
“I was part of Ozzy Osbourne’s induction [in 2024], and I really enjoyed it. It was a great night,” the punk icon says, flashing his famous lip-curled smile. “There was like, Dionne Warwick sitting over there, and then Dua Lipa over there. You’ve got this vast expanse of people who’ve been in music for a very long time or are just starting out, and I’m somewhere in the middle So, it’d be fantastic [to be inducted].”
Idol was shortlisted for the Rock Hall in 2025 and passed over, but this year — following the release of both Billy Idol Should Be Dead and Dream Into It, his first full-length album in over a decade — his chances are looking much brighter. The film in particular makes a compelling case for his 50-year legacy, demonstrating how he was at the forefront of two key cultural movements on both sides of the pond: the first wave of punk in 1970s Britain (initially as a member of a tabloid-famous gang of Pistols fans called the Bromley Contingent, then as the frontman of pioneering punk group Generation X), and what became known as pop’s “Second British Invasion” in America in the 1980s.
“We wanted our own look, our own music,” Idol says of both eras. “It’s like, what was our generation going to do? We saw what the people in the ‘60s did, so what’s our reply? That’s a big part of what we thought punk was about.” As punk morphed into new wave, Idol once again optimistically looked the future. “We were on a mission, really. People like me, Madonna, Prince, we were on a mission to make the ‘80s great. We kept being told by the people from the ‘60s and ‘70s: ‘The ‘80s suck!’ That’s what we were being told. So, we were like, ‘No. We’re gonna f***ing show you!’”
Idol had recently teamed with frequent Giorgio Moroder collaborator Keith Forsey and KISS manager Bill Aucoin, and “was already thinking about where I could take the energy of what I’d done in punk,” when he fatefully moved to New York in 1981 — the same year that MTV debuted. Upon his arrival, he amusingly wrangled with another member of his management team over his Anglocentric fashion sense. “He tried showing me Rick Springfield’s Working Class Dog imagery, saying, ‘This is what goes over in America,’” Idol laughs. [Fun fact: Springfield's “Jessie’s Girl was No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 the week MTV debuted.] “But I said, ‘I’m not brushing my hair down and becoming David Cassidy for anyone! This is really me, and this is what I love. I don’t think I’m going to change a thing.’”
Idol later famously threatened to give his stolen Rebel Yell master tapes to his heroin dealer if his U.S. record label didn’t let him use the album cover photo he wanted, so when it came to his persona and brand, he clearly never compromised. “Something I always felt David Bowie or Lou Reed or Iggy Pop would tell you is, ‘Find out who you are, and be it,’” he explains. And of course, Idol was right — as were Bowie, Reed, Pop, and perhaps especially Aucoin.
“Bill had tipped me off to this 24-hour TV music channel that was coming, and he said, ‘You’re going to be perfect for it.’ And I was really lucky,” Idol recalls of the timing. “Because when I came to America, I had no idea what was going to happen. When I thought about the music that was on top of the [U.S.] charts then, there were a lot of pop-rock bands doing these very high-harmony songs — REO Speedwagon and people like that. How could I fit into that? But I had to restart my career. I couldn’t stay in England. If I’d stay in England, I would’ve just ended up propping up a bar, because everything goes through England really fast and you’re considered ‘over’ pretty quickly. So, I had to do it.”
And so, while other punks dismissed making music videos as “selling out,” Idol fully committed to the medium (so much so that he literally nearly blinded himself when his contact lenses became fused to his corneas during the three-day shoot for “Eyes Without a Face”). He signed up as the peroxided posterboy for the cable network’s early “I Want My MTV!” campaign, and eventually became an MTV pioneer — enlisting Texas Chainsaw Massacre filmmaker Tobe Hooper to direct his first big clip, “Dancing With Myself,” and creating all of his video concepts.
“For me, video was the extension of the music. The initial wave of punk was over, so it seemed like a natural thing to me,” Idol recalls. “I liked putting imagery with my songs, and it was all coming from me. Like with ‘White Wedding,’ the graveyard set and everything, I’d seen a Boris Karloff film from the ‘30s where he was playing a priest or something, on this kind of blackened altar with all these white crosses behind him, and I just thought, ‘Let’s do that! Let’s do it in color!’ I was just enjoying it.”
Looking back on the launch of his solo career, Idol admits, “I didn’t know if I was going to go mega. I had no idea if people were going to connect to my music, until I went to a pub on the west side [of New York] in 1981, after I’d been in America a couple of months. I found a load of people dancing to ‘Dancing With Myself,’ and I started to realize, ‘Ohhh, it’s this big dance song on this new wave dance chart!’ And I went, ‘Man, this answers a load of questions. I don’t have to change a lot of stuff. I don’t have to find this ‘new Billy Idol.’ I just have to be the Billy I’ve always been, really.’ And that’s what I’ve been doing ever since.”
One of Idol’s most iconic videos, shot at the height of his solo stardom, was the David Fincher-directed, VMA-winning “Cradle of Love.” But Fincher had to film Idol from the waist up (and turn Idol into a pop-art painting) because the rocker had nearly lost his leg in a serious motorcycle accident three months earlier and was still unable to walk at the time. This was just one of his several near-death experiences chronicled in the aptly titled Billy Idol Should Be Dead, but it was the one that finally scared him straight. “I was lucky. I only have minimal kind of problems. I’m not too bad. But when you hit the concrete, it leaves its mark — psychological scars and physical scars. I think the accident gave me both,” Idol muses.
Idol says was “a bit of a drug addict” at the time of the 1990 accident, which inspired his 2021 comeback single “Bitter Taste.” But after he was hospitalized for a month and underwent seven surgeries, the crash turned out to be just the wake-up call he needed. “I had to really think about my future, where I was going,” he explains. “It was a bit of a watershed time for me. I had to change my life, had to think about things. I mean, I was kind of destroying myself, really. And I had young children as well at that time. I was thinking, ‘What am I saying to them by continuing to be a drug addict and nearly having an accident that seriously hurt me and possibly could have killed me?’ … I needed to get ahold of myself. I was going to kill myself, or I was going to go crazy, or be locked up forever. The motorcycle accident was a good sign of: ‘You’ve got to stop.’”
We won’t know until April if Idol will make it into this year’s Rock & Roll Hall of Fame class, but regardless, he never stopped believing in the power of music, and his legacy as one of rock ‘n’ roll ’s true survivors is well-established. “I never worried about [accolades] too much, because I was making the music I wanted to make, and it was all really about that,” he insists. “But if I did get in, I would get the chance to say thank you to the fans. Because that’s who’s really kept me here.”
This story originally ran on Gold Derby. Watch Billy Idol’s interview with composer J. Ralph about his documentary’s theme song, “Dying to Live,” below:
