Again, the maturity is noteworthy, although this track seems so much slighter than the lyrically sophisticated “Bitter Taste”. It’s hard to imagine Idol expressing this sentiment 40 years ago during his decadent days. The song is Idol’s attempt at the chaste, pump-the-brakes-on-this-relationship trope, a trope perhaps made most famous in Jermaine Stewart’s “We Don’t Have to Take Our Clothes Off”. Idol slows things down on “Baby Put Your Clothes Back On” too, once again striving for maturity. His ’80s schtick could sometimes approach parody and camp, but on this single he’s dead serious: “If I cut myself open, baby, you could read all my scars” is a far cry from “Eyes without a face, got no human race.” Idol’s maturity on “Bitter Taste” is remarkable. Idol pulls off the same kind of transition, from fiction to non-fiction, from macabre to memoir.
BILLY IDOL MUSIC VIDEO FULL
Within a body of work chock full of horrific imagery, his recounting of the accident is among the most harrowing stories King ever told. While on a walk, King was struck by a van and critically injured. In his non-fiction volume On Writing, Stephen King offers a similar, and similarly haunting first-person account of an accident and near-death experience. Should have left me way back by the roadside.” The song is part death wish, part existential meditation, and part articulation of survivor’s guilt. The chorus repeats the lines, “Hello, goodbye. The song meditates on life, death, and fate, as Idol seemingly wonders why he survived the accident. But then the lyrics kick in, and Idol’s gothic side enters the foreground. The EP’s first single, “Bitter Taste”, starts off sounding like a rootsy Chris Isaak ballad, with acoustic guitar and piano high in the mix. His new four-song EP, The Roadside, is the result of that burst of creativity. During the pandemic, Idol got introspective and began thinking – and writing – about the motorcycle accident as a pivotal life event. Novelty act? Nope, just a guy who like Duran Duran and Prince understood both the artistic and commercial potential of what in the 1970s was still music on the margins.Īfter a near-fatal motorcycle crash in 1990, Idol spent the subsequent decades making a few more hits (the underrated “Cradle of Love”) and a few cameos (Adam Sandler’s The Wedding Singer) and intermittently taking on a cyberpunk persona. And Idol perpetually curled his lip into sneer that was funny, bad ass, and memorable. In one iconic Billy Idol video, a bride puts on a wedding ring made of barbed wire and gets a nasty nick. The songs were catchy and perfectly comfortable in rotation alongside Michael Jackson and the Go-Gos, but the lyrics and accompanying visuals were vaguely gothic. He used synthesizers liberally, but always alongside the power chords and glam licks of his long-time guitarist Steve Stevens. Having played in first-wave punk bands just a few years prior, Idol credibly wore his rebel bona fides on his studded leather sleeve. Meanwhile, Joan Jett, Adam Ant, and Billy Idol were following a similar formula, chewing up the sounds and fashions of first-generation punk rock and spitting out something ready for the Top 40.įor all their gloss, Idol’s big hits (“White Wedding”, “Rebel Yell”, and “Dancing with Myself”) were iconoclastic and weird. Prince essentially did the same thing with funk, gifting us a glossier, sexier version of P-Funk and Rick James. During MTV’s salad days, synth bands like Duran Duran and the Human League presented an accessible, poppy version of Kraftwerk and Berlin-era David Bowie and found massive commercial success.
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