Dancing with Myself

by Billy Idol

Overview

A Rolling Stone Top 10 Best Music Books of the Year

“That’s what I’m talking about...Of all these memoirs, Dancing With Myself was the only one that stimulated my envy—made me want to be Billy Idol for five minutes....He’s a genuine romantic, writing in a kind of overheated journalese about his London punk rock roots...and then falling head over heels for America.” —James Parker, The New York Times Book Review

In this highly original memoir—following Billy Idol from his childhood in England to his rise to fame at the height of the punk-pop revolution—the iconic superstar tells the real story behind the sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll that he is so fabulously famous for, in his own utterly indelible voice.

An early architect of punk rock’s sound, style, and fury, whose lip-curling sneer and fist-pumping persona vaulted him into pop’s mainstream as one of MTV’s first megastars, Billy Idol remains, to this day, a true rock ‘n’ roll icon.

Now, in his New York Times bestselling autobiography, Dancing with Myself, Idol delivers an electric, “refreshingly honest” (Daily News, New York) account of his journey to fame—from his early days as front man of the pioneering UK punk band Generation X to the decadent life atop the dance-rock kingdom he ruled—delivered with the same in-your-face attitude and fire his fans have embraced for decades. Beyond adding his uniquely qualified perspective to the story of the evolution of rock, Idol is a brash, lively chronicler of his own career.

A survivor’s tale at its heart, this sometimes chilling and always riveting account of one man’s creative drive joining forces with unbridled human desire is unmistakably literary in its character and brave in its sheer willingness to tell. With it, Billy Idol is destined to emerge as one of the great writers among his musical peers.

“I am hopelessly divided between the dark and the good, the rebel and the saint, the sex maniac and the monk, the poet and the priest, the demagogue and the populist. Pen to paper, I’ve put it all down, every bit from the heart. I’m going on out a limb here, so watch my back.” —Billy Idol

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781451628517
Publisher:	Touchstone
Publication date:	09/29/2015
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	169,168
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Born William Michael Albert Broad, Billy Idol is a multiplatinum recording artist and two-time Grammy nominee. Known for successfully merging his signature punk attitude with an appealing blend of pop hooks, dance beats, and gritty metallic crunch, Idol created some of rock’s most indelible anthems, including “Rebel Yell,” “White Wedding,” and “Cradle of Love.” Idol’s latest release, his first studio album in nearly a decade, is titled Kings & Queens of the Underground. He lives in Los Angeles.

Read an Excerpt

Dancing with Myself

PROLOGUE

 
THEY SAY IF YOU HEAR THE BANG, YOU’RE STILL ALIVE
 
By the morning of February 6, 1990, I’d been living on a fine edge for more than a decade, always courting disaster to experience the biggest high. I’d been living the deranged life. I felt so nihilistic, yet why hadn’t I just tuned in and dropped out? Instead, I followed Jim Morrison’s credo, the credo of Coleridge and, at one point, Wordsworth, the credo of self-discovery through self-destruction I so willfully subscribed to until this moment:

Live every day as if it’s your last, and one day you’re sure to be right.

On this fateful morning, I’m standing wide-awake at dawn in the living room of my house in Hollywood Hills, overlooking the Los Angeles basin that falls and stretches away toward the high-rising pillars of downtown. I haven’t slept, still buzzing from the night’s booze and illicit substances lingering in my bloodstream, staring at the view of the city beginning its early morning grumblings. Daylight unfolds and casts shadows within the elevation, as if God is slowly revealing his colors for the day from his paint box, the hues of brown and green of earth and foliage offset by the bleached white of the protruding rocks that hold my home in place on the hillside.

Standing at my window, I hear sirens blaring in the distance. Someone wasn’t so lucky, I think as I tune in to the rumble of cars ferrying tired and impatient commuters on the 101 freeway that winds through the Cahuenga Pass, the sound of a world slowly getting back in motion. The constant moan of the freeway echoes that of my tired and played-out soul.

Just the night before, after almost two years of work, we put the aptly titled album Charmed Life to bed. I’m feeling some pressure, home early from the de rigueur studio party. I say that as if we threw one party to celebrate the completion of the album, but the truth is that the party went on for two years. Two years of never-ending booze, broads, and bikes, plus a steady diet of pot, cocaine, ecstasy, smack, opium, quaaludes, and reds. 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, cursing myself and thinking that I was next in line to die outside an L.A. nightclub or on some cold stone floor, surrounded by strangers and paparazzi.

I’ve been taking GHB, a steroid, to help relieve symptoms of the fatigue that has been plaguing me and preventing me from working out and keeping my body in some semblance of good shape. If you take too much GHB, which I’m prone to do, it’s like putting yourself in a temporary coma for three hours; to observers, it appears as if you are gone from this world.

When we began recording in 1988, we promised each other we’d be cool and focused, and not wholly indulge in drugs and debauchery. But as weeks stretched into months, Fridays often finished early with “drop-time”—the moment we all took ecstasy. And then Friday soon became Thursday and so on, until all rules were taboo. We somehow managed to make music through the constant haze. It seemed like every few days I was recovering from yet another wild binge, and it took three days to feel “normal” again. The album proved to be slow going and the only way to feel any kind of relief from the pressure was to get blotto, avoid all human feelings, and reach back into the darkness once again. Somewhere in that darkness, I told myself, there was a secret of the universe or some hidden creative message to be found.
 
We’d invite girls to come to the studio to listen to the music. Mixing business with pleasure seemed the best way to see if the new songs worked. We’d be snorting lines of cocaine, and then the girls would start dancing. Before long, they’d end up having sex with one or more of us on the studio floor. Once the party was in full swing, we walked around naked but for our biker boots and scarves. Boots and Scarves became the running theme.

The girls loved it and got in on the act. It helped that we recruited them at the local strip bars; they felt comfortable naked. We had full-on orgies in those studios we inhabited for months. It was like a glorified sex club. We were all about instant gratification, lords of the fix.

I’d like to think this was all in the name of song-searching: the sex and drugs amped up the music, the songs arriving in the midst of chaos, cigarettes stubbed out into plates of food, the bathroom floor covered with vomit, sweaty sex going on all over the studio as we tried out our guitar riffs and mixes. The sound of our mixes, turned up loud, drowned out the background noise of sucking  and  fucking.  Songs must be written. The ideas must flow. The flow must go to one’s most base desires. Without constraint.

Now that it’s all said and done, I feel exhausted and shattered. The keyed-up feeling that prevents me from sleeping is the result of the care and concern I put into making a record that will decide the course of my future. That’s the sort of pressure I put on myself every time. Then there’s the fact that the production costs have been astronomical; the need to keep the bandwagon rolling has drained my spirit and sapped my will.

Months later, Charmed Life will go on to sell more than a million copies. The “Cradle of Love” single and video, directed by David Fincher, will both become massive hits. But I don’t know this when I retreat to my home alone at  2  a.m.,  intending  to  get  some  rest after wrapping recording. The breakup of my relationship with my girlfriend, Perri, the mother of my son, Willem, has left me bereft, but finishing the album has been my only priority. “If the thing is pressed . . . Lee will surrender,” Lincoln telegraphed Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox in 1865. And then: “Let the thing be pressed.” That’s a rock ’n’ roll attitude. The difficult has to be faced straight-on and the result forged out of sweat and tears. That’s where I take my inspiration.
 
The wide-screen version of the last few years’ tumultuous events plays in my subconscious and cannot be ignored. What can I do to keep away these blues that rack my thoughts and creep into my bones? It’s a fine day, warming up, the sun burning off the morning smog. Still, I feel uneasy, dissatisfied in the pit of my stomach. With the album now finished, I’ll have to take stock of life and contemplate the emptiness without Perri and Willem.

The bike will blow away these post-album blues, I think. As I open the garage door, the chrome of my 1984 Harley-Davidson Wide Glide gleams with expectation, beckoning me.

The L.A. traffic is thick and the warmth of the sun is fresh on my face, its glow spreading over my bare head. California has yet to pass legislation making the wearing of helmets compulsory, and I’ve always liked the feel of the wind in my hair. My bike clears its throat with a deep, purring growl. The gleaming black tank and chrome fixtures flash in the sharp, sacrosanct daylight. I’ve opted for all denim to match the blue-sky high.

Table of Contents

Prologue: They Say If You Hear the Bang, You're Still Alive 1

Part I London

1 I Let Out My First Rebel Yell 9

2 England Swings Like a Pendulum Do 16

3 Rock 'N' Roll High School: Long Hair, Flares, and Hash Tobacco Cigarettes 28

4 Sucking in the '70s 39

5 And Then There Was Punk 50

6 In a Revolution, One Year Equals Five 55

7 Generation X Marks the Spot: William Broad Becomes Billy Idol 60

8 A Night at the Roxy 70

9 Punk Comes of Age When the Two Sevens Clash 78

10 Youth Youth Youth: Break On Through to the Other Side 85

11 White Light, White Heat, White Riots 88

12 Not Selling Out, But Buying In 92

13 Bands Across the Ocean 102

14 Ready Steady Go 108

15 And I Guess that I Just Don't Know 120

16 You Better Hang On to Yourself 124

Part II New York City

17 A Rock 'N' Roll Conquistador Invades America and Burns His Boats Upon Arrival 135

18 Making Mony Mony: A Left-Coast Fusion of Punk and Disco 142

19 If You Can Make It Here 149

20 Hot in the City: The Making of Solo Billy Idol 153

21 Hollywood Daze and Tequila Nights 160

22 I Want My MTV: Video Thrills the Radio Star 170

23 Rebel Yell with a Cause 177

24 A Change in Pace of Fantasy and Taste 184

25 Everybody Must Get Rolling Stoned 189

26 The Roar of the Lion and a Nonstop Global Orgy 196

27 Just a Perfect Day 202

28 King Death: An Aborted Film Project Signals the End of an Idol Maker 210

29 Top of the World, Ma 214

30 Return to Splendour 224

31 The Luck of the Irish 232

Part III Los Angeles

32 We Need a Miracle Joy, We Need a Rock and Roll Boy 239

33 La Vie Enchanté 245

34 City of Night 249

35 Trouble with the Sweet Stuff 253

36 Drunken, Stupid, & Naked 257

37 I Bear a Charmed Life, Which Must Not Yield 262

38 Hollywood Promises 269

39 Have a Fuck on Me 274

40 The Madam and the Preacher 281

41 Mind Fire 287

42 Bitter Pill 293

43 My Road Is Long, It Lingers On 298

Epilogue 307

Acknowledgments 313

Index 315

Editorial Reviews

“[Idol] proves he's more than a punk sneer and spikyhairdo in this extremely candid autobiography about his personal andprofessional relationships. Who knew he was this deep and self-analytical? Idolleaves you wanting ... ‘More! More! More!’”

Newsday - David. J. Criblez

Dancing with Myself, like the man himself, is all over the place—now chatty…now caliginous, now encrusted with sub-Jim Morrisonian lyricism…I never expected to like Billy Idol, and after reading his book, oddly, I do. He's a genuine romantic…Dancing With Myself…stimulated my envy—made me want to be Billy Idol for five minutes.

The New York Times Book Review - James Parker

Billy Idol was among British punk’s first wave, beginning with Generation X in the late seventies, and going on to become one of the first punk acts to succeed in the video medium in the eighties. To many, he defined the look, style, and snarl of punk, and he’s not afraid to claim the mantle. He narrates his memoir in his unmistakable Cockney accent, which befits the more lurid tales of excess as well as the poignant sincerity lurking beneath the narrative. His voice, thick as London fog, is so integral to the book itself that, in many ways, it sets a new standard of authenticity for for any would-be autobiographer. And authenticity, of course—as opposed to solid musical chops—is what defines punk. J.S.H. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine

DECEMBER 2015 - AudioFile