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:

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.

@rileyidol billy idol should be dead trailer!#billyidol #billyidolshouldbedead #80smusic ♬ original sound – riley

“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.