PRESS

Vicki Anderson for Stuff.co.nz, New Zealand, 20 March 2015
Spiky peroxide-blonde- haired Billy Idol repeats the word “masturbatory” three times with a sneer.

The leather-clad rocker who led an MTV-fuelled generation is telling me about a disco in Tokyo, Japan, he visited in the late 1970s, when dance clubs were still in the passionate embrace of disco’s Saturday Night Fever.

“We went to this dance club and these kids were all dressed up like John Travolta and dancing with themselves,” Idol says chattily.

“They weren’t dancing together, they were dancing to their own reflections. It was like a masturbatory kind of thing to do. If I haven’t got a partner I can fixate on myself, dance with myself.”

The experience led to the hit 80s hit song Dancing with Myself, which is also the title of his recently released autobiography. He challenged himself to write the book, he says, as his way of evoking something of a punk rock ethic.

“In the days of punk rock we believed in trying to do things yourself. I wondered if I could

“Idol looked, moved and delivered like a man decades shy of his vintage, and it’s an example his well-oiled band obviously holds themselves to.”–Grant McCulloch, The Western Australian

Billy was recently profiled in a fantastic piece by Andy Hermann for LA Weekly.

Excerpt:
From the living room of his house, high up in the Hollywood Hills, Billy Idol gazes out across the Los Angeles Basin, remembering when the city was on fire.

“Even in the daytime, you could see the smoke,” he says, describing his bird’s-eye view of the Rodney King riots in April 1992. “And ash was raining out of the sky.”

At the time of the riots, Idol was one of the biggest stars in rock. But privately, his life had been unraveling for some time. In 1989, he separated from his girlfriend of 10 years, dancer-choreographer Perri Lister, a split that sent him plunging deeper into drug abuse. A gruesome motorcycle accident in the heart of Hollywood the following year nearly cost him his leg.

After limping through an international tour with a cane, he was back at home, struggling to stay sober as he toiled on the most ambitious album of his career, Cyberpunk, with neither of his most trusted collaborators, guitarist Steve Stevens and producer Keith Forsey, to guide him.

In the fires of the riots, Idol saw a parallel to his own life. “I’d been polluting myself with drugs. So it wasn’t so different for me to start seeing the world as polluting itself.”

It would take years, but Idol finally detoxed. Now he stands as an improbable survivor not only of drug abuse and motorcycle accidents but