Billy Idol may be known for his tougher-than-red-leather image and menacing punk-rock sneer, but when he first watched the animated end-credits of his new documentary, Billy Idol Should Be Dead, accompanied by his string-laden and unexpectedly sensitive ballad “Dying to Live,” he started weeping.
“I did, actually,” the 70-year-old rock rebel sheepishly admits to Gold Derby, speaking via Zoom alongside one of the movie theme’s writers, three-time Oscar nominee J. Ralph (Chasing Ice, Racing Extinction, Jim: The James Foley Story). “It had an emotional buildup, showing everything that had happened. … It got me. Watching my life in a three-and-a-half-minute montage made me feel everything that the documentary had been showing you. And the fact that it made me feel like that, I thought, ‘Well, it’s going to make other people feel like that.’”
Ralph, who co-wrote “Dying to Live” with Idol, Idol’s longtime guitarist Steve Stevens, Tommy English, and Joe Janiak, isn’t surprised by the rocker’s intense reaction. “I think he’s a profound artist, and an incredible lyricist and incredible singer,” Ralph states. “I think people often focus on the ‘showman’ and the persona and the ‘rock star,’ but he’s incredibly sensitive and poignant. You can’t be that big and that ubiquitous and that enduring without having a real sincerity, you know what I mean?”
Billy Idol Should Be Dead, as its eyebrow-raising title indicates, details the new wave legend’s many harrowing near-death experiences, including several drug overdoses; a battle with heroin addiction (“Boy George said an interesting thing about how you feel when you’re coming off heroin, that it’s like a skeleton is trying to get out of your body, and that’s exactly what it’s like,” says Idol); and a motorcycle accident that nearly cost him his leg and finally scared him straight.
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“I had young children at that time, and I thought, ‘What am I saying to them by continuing being a drug addict and nearly having an accident that seriously hurt me and possibly could have killed me?’” Idol recalls of that “watershed” moment. “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.”
It’s a wonder that Idol even made it to age 70 (unlike many of his less fortunate peers), and that he not only survived but thrived — releasing his first full-length album in more than a decade and receiving his first Rock & Roll Hall of Fame nomination in 2025, after nearly a half-century in show business. Idol credits his unflagging passion for music, dating back to his ‘70s London adolescence when he was following the Sex Pistols around Europe and founding his own groundbreaking punk group, Generation X, for keeping him going.
“I just really cared about the sort of music revolution we were growing up alongside. … That’s the kind of ‘door’ I’m singing about,” says Idol of those early punk days, referring to the “Dying to Live” line, “The door was open, calling/They said I was foolish/I had to walk through.” Idol elaborates: “We [punks] didn’t really think there was much of a chance of really doing something like this, of having an artistic life. It looked like that wasn’t really on the cards, because in England they were telling you there was no future. In our case, we decided, ‘Well, if there’s no future, let’s do the thing we love!’ And I think starting from that premise, that’s what’s given me the ability to still be here today. Because I’m actually doing something I really love and care about, and that I really believe in. That gave me a future. That gave me something to hope for. … And I think, maybe, that has kept me alive.”
Idol went on to become the most successful artist to emerge from the first-wave U.K. punk movement. Generation X were one of the first punk bands to appear on Britain’s massive chart show Top of the Pops, and Idol’s heartthrob potential was even more evident when Generation X appeared on ‘70s pop star Marc Bolan’s variety series and a seemingly threatened Bolan jokingly introduced them with: “They have a lead singer named Billy Idol who’s supposed to be as pretty as me. Let’s see, now!”
“Well, Marc’s definitely prettier than me. I’m handsome,” Idol chuckles. That 1977 Marc show appearance almost seemed like a torch-passing moment of sorts (eerily, it was taped just weeks before Bolan died at age 29 in a car crash). But it was when Idol went solo a few years later, moving to America just in time for the launch of MTV and linking up with KISS manager Bill Aucoin, Giorgio Moroder-associated producer Keith Forsey, and rock guitarist Stevens, that he completely went mainstream — eventually selling 40 million records.
Unfortunately, pop-crossover success coincided with a drastic diminishing of Idol’s punk cred. “[Sex Pistols guitarist] Steve Jones says it in the documentary: People didn’t always take me as seriously as I wanted to be taken, and that had a lot to do with the way I looked,” notes Idol. “I mean, I was the ‘male Debbie Harry,’ in a way.” But Ralph points out that Idol “created a genre unto himself; it became a reference point of sound,” which wasn’t as easy as Idol made it seem. “Some of the contemporaries of Billy were focused on negative,” Ralph explains. “What Billy did was he created monstrous success out of positivity. And that’s very hard to do; it’s actually harder than just doing minor-sounding, dark stuff.”
As Idol’s star rose in the ‘80s, he struggled to separate his offstage life as William Broad from the larger-than-life “Billy Idol” persona MTV had created, and that was one of the reasons why he increasingly turned to drugs to cope. “I had a lot to find out about myself. One of the things David Bowie or Lou Reed or Iggy Pop would tell you is, ‘Find out who you are, and be it.’ And for a while, I didn’t know exactly who ‘Billy Idol’ was,” Idol recalls. Eventually, he realized that his distinctively gravelly voice was meant for much more than just punk-rock — that it was perfectly suited for softer songs like “Eyes Without a Face,” “Sweet Sixteen,” and eventually “Dying to Love.” His voice was also, as he cheekily notes, tailor-made for “music you’d want to have sex to.”
“I found out what I could do with my voice. I could go into different dimensions. I suppose people would call them ‘eras ‘today,” quips Idol. “The way I sing was different to other punk-rockers. It enabled me to do ballads and stuff. It just enabled me to go into places that I think some other people couldn’t go, or didn’t want to go. I wasn’t frightened of embracing certain sides of feelings and emotions, while maybe some other people in punk were sort of denying that. … They were all about the revolution, and in some ways they’d kind of shut themselves off by making themselves a little narrow with their viewpoint. … Like, Johnny Rotten would say, ‘I’m in love with myself, my beautiful self,’ but we were starting to go beyond that in the ‘80s. I’d fallen in love with my girlfriend [Hot Gossip dancer Perri Lister, with whom Idol later had a son], and I wanted to sing about that.”
Idol continued to push himself artistically, with varying degrees of commercial and critical success. “I wasn’t frightened to use synthesizers,” he points out, referring to 1993’s largely misunderstood but very ahead-of-its-time Cyberpunk album (which surprisingly gets a lot of screentime in Billy Idol Should Be Dead, with Fall Out Boy’s Patrick Stump, of all people, passionately defending the record). “And then I wasn’t frightened to do something like [“Dying to Live”] with [Ralph], trying a string quartet.”
“Billy didn’t run from that. The risk of that was so exciting to him,” says Ralph of the “Dying to Live” recording session. “I mean, if you fail doing this, there’s nothing to hide behind. It’s acoustic instruments. The lyrics are right out in front. His vocal is mixed at least 50 percent of the volume of the track, of the density. If the lyrics suck, if the voice sucks, it’s blatantly obvious. So, the risk of that is immense, in terms of putting something out there like that. You need to be confident in what you’re saying and how you’re singing. And he was up for it. And, I think, to me, it’s a landmark recording.”
If “Dying to Live” were to receive a Best Original Song Oscar nomination, it would be a major moment in Idol’s cinematic career — which, aside from an adorable cameo in The Wedding Singer and “some talk every now and again” about a Billy Idol biopic (comedian Matt Rife wants to portray him), never took off like he’d hoped. In the mid-‘80s, Idol was working with producer Joel Silver on a film adaptation of Nik Cohn’s novel King Death, but the project fell apart due to tensions between Silver and Aucoin; in the early ‘90s, his role in Oliver Stone’s The Doors was greatly reduced when he was sidelined by his motorcycle accident; and that same accident caused him to miss out on being cast as T-1000 in James Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Additionally, his Cyberpunk album was originally intended to be the soundtrack to Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace, before those plans also fell through.
Idol already knows if he were to win an Academy Award — or finally get the respect that once eluded him and get inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, which he thinks “would be fantastic” — he would “probably be up there for about half an hour” at the podium thanking people, including Stevens, Aucoin, his former Generation X bandmate Tony James, and “the fans, because that’s who’s really kept me here.” Idol doesn’t seem to have his hopes pinned on Oscar recognition, but after his long career, he still believes anything is possible.
“What a nut!” Idol chuckles, when asked what his big stock-taking takeaway was after viewing Billy Idol Should Be Dead. “But you have to be, really. You have to be a little crazy. That’s the thing I said to my dad: ‘I was crazy to think I could do it.’ There’s an element of that, because when you start out [in music], you have no idea whether you can really, really pull it off. You’re just going for it. And you find out along the way whether you can really do it or not.”
This interview originally ran on Gold Derby. Watch Billy Idol and J. Ralph’s full conversation in the video at the top of this article.
