Song Roulette
A Vulture series in which artists share the stories and strategy behind their lead singles.
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He chatted with fellow revelers, had a drink or five, enjoyed the Upper West Side excess.
Then his eyes locked in on what would become his future.
They responded, No, no.
Its a real Southern-style Tennessee bourbon.
I went, Would you be thinking of using it as a title?
They looked at each other and went, I dont think we would.
Idol knew, at that moment, he could reverse engineer those two words into greatness.
As soon as I got home, he added, I started writing the song.
Despite only peaking at No.
It also confirmed his strategy for kicking off a new album cycle.
Because why wouldnt I want that attention right away?
HotintheCity,BillyIdol(1982)
.The Song
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I was resettling from London and going through my first summer in New York where its super humid.
You know how youve been rained on all day by all the air conditioning?
I was literally hot in the city but also I felt sexually alive.
I was sexually hot.
Theres no refraction on his song.
I thought, Whyd you need the child?
It was all the New York nightlife that inspired me.
There were so many clubs compared to London.
Our guy was going up on the pavement.
You wouldnt get a London taxi driver doing so.
It was a little crazy.
New York was bankrupt at that time and there was a feeling that anything went.
Police didnt seem to care about anything.
It was almost like a postapocalyptic world.
So now Im thinking about this kind of postapocalyptic New York where youre young and hot.
Dont be afraid of the world weve made and the world were making.
A lot of the people from the 60s and 70s were already saying the 80s sucked.
I was 25 years old.
So we were kind of going, Fuck you, this is our time were hot in the city.
You old people can fuck off.
Were going to save it and make it the first single for the album.
He sussed it out.
Pretty soon, it all fell away because they realized there was an audience out there.
I was thinking about my girlfriend.
Thats what I was singing about because I was so in love with her.
I just wanted to lionize our relationship.
Rebel Yell is a total anthem.
Also, we really werent sure what the other singles were after Rebel Yell.
I wish I knew what his name was.
But this man told my manager, Eyes Without a Face should be the next single.
It also gave me time to grow exponentially.
Then I reached theaters and arenas.
When Rebel Yell came out in England, eventually it was a big hit.
It came from curious people covering what Billy Idol was doing.
England knew me asGeneration Xbut started to discover my solo career and what Id done by coming to America.
I had this whole new thing they could discover.
Whereas if Id stayed there, that might never have happened.
They realized I wasnt just popping up a ball or something.
I had the goods.
I was a bit blue about it and missed her.
I wanted to sing songs about this love relationship going wrong.
I just knew it as a reggae song.
As far as I knew, that was the original.
When I listened to that, it was even slower than the reggae version.
He used to be in Booker T. & the M.G.s.
He played on the original William Bell song as a session musician.
He told me he loved what I did with To Be a Lover.
That was pretty amazing.
The whole album had touches of vulnerability.
I was singing about this relationship going wrong.
Because, really, I was Billy Idol; I was fucking everything that moved.
But I was in love with Perri.
Thats what I wanted to think about.
You have to do what you feel is right.
Maybe I knew, in a way, what I should have done.
It all went wrong and the movie never got made.
There was no way I could directly follow upRebel Yellwith something similar.
To Be a Lover is nothing like Rebel Yell as a song.
It wasnt a rock-and-roll anthem.
Yeah, its uptempo and rocking, but its about a sincere love relationship.
I was just following my muse and this is where it was leading me.
I grew up in a time period where a lot of the music was very eclectic.
Musicians didnt follow one style.
Lou Reed follows his muse.
David Bowie follows his muse.
Sex Pistols follows their muse.
Clash follows their muse.
Billy Idol is following his muse.
It burned like a ball on fire when the rebel took a little child bride.
Personally, Cradle of Love was all about sexual innuendo.
Everything was like that in the 80s, because AIDS hadnt quite hit the heterosexual community.
It wasnt until 1992 when Magic Johnson went public with his HIV diagnosis that it really shut everything down.
We were still living that kind of 60s and 70s free-love thing in the late 80s.
Cause love starts my rollin train / You cant stop it / It aint in vain.
Then it was all condoms and everything.
I was still singing about something sexual just for fun, really.
I was into T. Rex, and it has a little bit of a Marc Bolan flavor to it.
It wasnt about anything heavy.
We produced four versions of Cradle of Love until we finally got the right one.
We all worked really hard making it a lead, hit single from the start.
You know what I remember the most?
MC Hammer kept us from No.
We were right beneath it for ages.
Nobody could touch U Cant Touch This.
I wish it would have broken through.
So I was left with an album that was going to be a soundtrack.
Even though it wasnt a soundtrack anymore, I still had this odd mix of songs about the Mindfire.
Thats where the Heroin cover came in.
It fits in withCyberpunkbecause its part of the Mindfire being an internet virus.
Its a dance version of Heroin, which was pretty crazy for me.
It was a lot of fun because I was melding rock and roll with rave music.
Its not only just the Velvet Underground.
I wasnt necessarily trying to have a massive hit single.
So it wasnt comparable to Cradle of Love, where we were actively trying to have a hit.
I wasnt thinking about that at all.
I was just trying to do something I liked.
My manager had an early version of Pro Tools.
It was new recording equipment that you could have and use in your home.
I knew this was going to mean everybody could record DIY music in whatever space they had.
It was going to be the future.
What set me free was the home-recording abilities.
I recorded Heroin andCyberpunkin a room in my house.
I didnt do it in a studio.
We recorded the drums and everything on the machine.
Cyber was the tech world, but the punk side of it was DIY.
We were presaging what was going to happen in the 2000s and today.
Some people dont ever go to the studio.
Thats what I was getting interested in.
I paidno attentionto its commercial performance.
Scream,DevilsPlayground(2005)
Its a companion piece to Rebel Yell in some ways.
Except it wasmehaving the orgasm and a woman makingmescream.
It almost rocks harder than Rebel Yell in a way.
But yeah, its about me orgasming.
Since this was a bit of a reintroduction to me, I wanted people to know I wasnt stopping.
That was the message I wanted to get out there and Scream fit.
It was weird being in a new millennium.
At the time, I wanted to reignite what I was doing and give myself new stuff to play.
I went back on the road and started playing live again when this album was being made.
I was looking at the continuation and not the charts.
CantBreakMeDown,Kings&QueensoftheUnderground(2014)
This is a personal one.
Im not going to give up on that sort of thing as a musician.
You wanna rain on my survival story?
Youre crazy, baby, cause I never had a doubt: Thats what its saying.
I mean, its a survival story for me.
Thats what I had been feeling about my life.
I was fully out of that by the time I wrote Cant Break Me Down.
This was written deliberately to be the lead single.
Ive got this killer album coming out later this year, and I know its really good.
But I also know that I spent ten years in between albums and thats a long time.
Who could have thought that at 68 years old I would be saying that?
