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On the big cream couch of The Drew Barrymore Show, the proprietor’s rescue mutt, Douglas, nuzzling between them, host and guest are reliving the bad old days. Or trying to.
On a screen above Drew Barrymore and Billy Idol is a photograph of the pair with their arms around each other at New York’s Limelight club in 1986. The actor turned TV chat show host has an angel’s halo fixed above her head, the punk rock veteran a smiley version of his trademark lip-curl-cum-sneer fixed on his face.
“That is where I see us when I think of you in my mind,” says Barrymore to Idol, as the pair crane their necks at the flashback snap and the studio audience whoops. “Back in the old club days. What the hell do you remember from those days?”
“Not very much!” replies Idol in a gravelly, remarkably well-spoken chuckle that recalls a retired squire from the shires. Albeit one with the same hair and wearing much the same clobber as in that four-decade-old pic: spiky bleach-blond thatch, leather jacket, chunky silver necklaces and a shirt open below the nipples, the better to showboat a chest that’s as smooth, hairless and caramel-coloured as the English punk-rocker’s now 69-year-old face.
To be fair, the old pals’ spotty memories are understandable. Barrymore was only 11 at the time of the pic – and, as she later revealed, already had a drink problem, with drug addiction looming fast on the horizon before she was even a teen. Idol, not unfeasibly, was in his own altered state.
“Drew’s mother used to bring her there when she was eight or something,” Idol tells me from his green room in Manhattan’s CBS Broadcast Center immediately following the chat show’s taping. “So we used to hang out there. I responded to her on an equal level,” he adds of his adolescent friend (Idol was 30). “I didn’t play down or speak down to her. I think she liked that.”
Who was the bad influence on who?
“I think we were a good influence on each other,” he demurs of an actor with whom he would later share screen time, playing himself in 1998’s Eighties-set romcom The Wedding Singer (“I played a rock’n’roll cupid”). “Because I treated her as an equal.” Likely, too, as someone who could relate – kind of – to what he was experiencing.
Barrymore was a child star from the age of seven, courtesy of her generationally defining role in Steven Spielberg’s ET, released four years earlier. By 1986, Idol, too, was a bona fide Stateside phenom, albeit of a very different stripe. He had upped sticks to the US in March 1981 after the collapse of his punk combo Generation X, B-list peers of the Sex Pistols and The Clash. Within a couple of years, the London scene’s prettiest punk was a megastar in America.
That was thanks to the chart success of “White Wedding”, “Dancing with Myself” and “Rebel Yell”, FM radio anthems made with Idol’s regular producer partner and fellow Londoner Keith Forsey. And thanks to a sexy, cartoonishly bad-boy roguishness that made this outrider of the Eighties British Invasion catnip for the recently launched MTV.
Forty-odd years later, both elements – the fist-punching tunes and the nipple-flashing swagger – are impressively present and correct on this grandfather of four’s new album. The nostalgic but defiantly two-fingered Dream Into It is a rollicking nine-song set that features throatily tonsil-to-tonsil collaborations with Joan Jett, Avril Lavigne and Alison Mosshart of The Kills.
Idol’s first album in 11 years is a record that celebrates his Seventies and Eighties excesses – the highs, the lows, the near-fatal motorbike crash (seven operations and a steel rod to repair his shattered right leg) and that time he legged it from rehab for crack cocaine addiction before Forsey could get him out the door. “I said, ‘Let’s just do a hit first.’ And while Keith went off to get someone, I ran away, heh heh!” In the pop-punk ramalam “77”, he enlists sk8r girl Lavigne, born in Canada in 1984, to hymn the thrills of battling skinheads on Chelsea’s King’s Road in the heady summer of 1977: “You gotta swing first and you better not miss! They show their teeth, we kick them in!”
As may already be apparent, Idol enjoyed the fruits of his embrace by mainstream America. When Barrymore asked whether, back then, he ever stopped being “Billy Idol”, he replied in the negative: “I was 24/7 like this.” Or, as he says to me now, his conversational pace slowly revving up after the TV interview: “Well, yeah, the Eighties was really a seminal period.”
That’s putting it decorously. In summer 1984, Neil Tennant interviewed the leather-clad rock’n’roller, whom Smash Hits lovingly lampooned as Sir Billiam of Idol. The Pet Shop Boy wrote of a character whose “behaviour can be unpredictable, to say the least. After a recent concert in Canada, he serenaded a crowd of fans with an impromptu version of ‘Rebel Yell’, standing naked on his hotel room window ledge… Asked live on Countdown, the Australian equivalent of Top of the Pops, what he’d been doing since his arrival in Australia, he replied: ‘Having sex.’”
Then, a sweary, “threatening” appearance on Radio 1’s singles review show Round Table led to Idol’s expulsion from the studio mid-broadcast. “But the BBC still invited him to wander on to Top of the Pops the next week,” reported Tennant. “‘Billy Idol — what are you doing here?’ asked [DJ and presenter] Steve Wright. And Billy paused for a second, as though he’d been wondering much the same himself. Then he remembered. ‘I’ve come here,’ he declared, clenching his fist, ‘to ROCK AND ROLL!’”
“Heh heh heh!” Idol replies, laughing like Dick Dastardly’s Muttley, when I read that to him. Does that article feel like a fair portrait of the artist in the summer of 1984?
“Well, we were super-living it, really,” is his PR-friendly reply. Then he mentions “Still Dancing”, the album’s autobiographical closer. It’s a picaresque that takes in the man born William Broad’s mid-Seventies homeless squat days, near-weekly fights with teddy boys in Brixton, a penchant for smashing up hotel rooms and, in sum, all-round, what-you-got punk defiance. “I was really committed to what I was doing. You had to fight for your right to be there.” The d***-waving and on-air argy-bargy that Tennant reported, then, were simply a demonstration “of how much I, ah, cared about what I was doing”.
He recalls that period with slightly more punch in “Too Much Fun”. It’s a Killers-esque mea culpa of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll: “I kissed a girl and smoked some H… Half a line turned into five… Fell off stage but didn’t die…” he sings. In raunchy trip-down-mammary-lane “Gimme the Weight”, he rues the days when he “loved a thousand girls, it only made things worse”.
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Writing those songs was a useful way of processing the ups and downs: his “fatal charm”, the relationships and addictions, “the crazy, different events… But it was quite a different time, the Eighties,” Idol continues, warming up. “Even though Aids was on the horizon, it hadn’t affected the heterosexual people yet. It was still the free love, free sex world. A lot of modern fears hadn’t happened yet. So it was quite an unhinged time.”
“By ’92 it all closed down once Magic Johnson got Aids,” he says of the American basketballer’s November 1991 announcement that he had tested positive for HIV. “People realised how serious it was. Everything changed overnight, almost. So we were living those last days of this liberating time, where people felt that they could have sex at the drop of a hat.”
Idol doesn’t think that means musicians now are, necessarily, boring compared to him and his high-on-life Eighties peers. “It’s just that it’s a different world. People have to think about the diseases and the STDs. We thought that they got rid of [all that]. In the Fifties, they cured syphilis, they cured gonorrhoea. But herpes was happening in the Seventies – I caught herpes. I went to some clinic and they gave me some pills, but they didn’t actually tell me what it was.”
The singer is also, perhaps surprisingly, sympathetic to the pressures facing a younger generation of artists who don’t hesitate to cancel tours to protect their mental health. For the man who, between 1984 and 1985, performed some 130 American gigs in 10 months as his career took off, that wasn’t an option. But, he says with a shrug, “it didn’t hurt us”. Nonetheless, “I can see with social media, this landscape has completely changed in lots of ways. There were only a few [media] outlets in the Eighties – compared to today, [that’s] minuscule. [Now] there’s a million because of the internet. He thinks that inevitably puts pressure onto millennials and Gen Z. “For us, it was just a lot of shows. The modern people, it’s a lot of social media. It’s quite different. And that can affect mental health.”
Accordingly, this is one Baby Boomer – a tribal follower who readily fought with rival youth cults just for the right to wear what he liked – who won’t be heard complaining that millennials are snowflakes.
“Not really. My children are millennials, and they’re having babies – they’ve given me my grandchildren. They seem hardworking, and they care about what they do. I don’t see that at all.” Here, certainly, Billy Idol isn’t “living 24/7” the performative “Billy Idol” that young Drew Barrymore knew and loved.
Why should I be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame? Because I’m f***ing incredible!
Still, once a punk, always a punk. This year, Idol is up for induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. He’s one of 14 candidates, half of whom will make it through after public voting ends later this month. I ask for his pitch to undecided voters – why should he be inducted?
“Because I’m just f***ing incredible!” he shouts, before going on to clarify. ‘It’s pretty amazing that I went from something like punk rock in England to mainstream success in the States. I was not only involved in punk, I became a big part of the ’80s New Wave. And then I carried on making the music, living the rock’n’roll life. I’ve also gone beyond what people expect, with things like cyberpunk,” he says of his 1993 album of that name. “I didn’t stay in my lane. I took chances. Even coming to America, I had no idea I was going to do really well. And the risks I took worked. All of that shows an enterprising spirit – a spirit of rock’n’roll.”
Vote Idol! But what of the other class of 2025 nominees – does he think Oasis deserve to be in there?
“Of course. I’m a Liam and Noel fan. I played before Oasis in Italy a few years ago. I’m excited for their comeback. I’m looking forward to seeing them.”
Joy Division and New Order? “Definitely deserve to be in it.”
Cyndi Lauper? “She’s a great singer, and she’s written some great songs. So she deserves to be in.”
Mariah Carey? Idol pauses and smiles. “I don’t quite get [this].” But he mentions last month’s iHeartRadio Music Awards in Los Angeles, at which he and Carey both appeared. “They were all bowing down to her as the queen. So maybe there’s an aspect of that. I know sometimes they’re just trying to draw people to the [Hall of Fame] TV show. But she obviously had millions and millions of hits. And she went through a lot with Tommy Mottola, I would have thought,” he says of Carey’s tempestuous marriage to the music industry executive (Mottola wrote in his own memoir that it was “absolutely wrong and inappropriate” for him to become involved with a 19-year-old Carey). “She might have had a bit of a rock’n’roll experience there.”
At the time of our interview, Idol is four weeks out from the start of an arena-scale tour that includes a stop at Wembley in June and stretches towards the end of the year. He admits his midriff is “a little sludgier, but it’s not too bad for my age”. A long-time proponent of a meat-free diet, he’s getting extra gig-fit through exercise and temperance, the former becoming a habit when he moved to LA in 1987. “Working out became a big part of my life. And it helped me get over drug addiction. Caring about your body, eventually that took precedence over the drug addiction. It helped me develop a sense of discipline so I could put the drugs in the rearview mirror.”
Does he allow himself a little drink now and then?
“I’ve actually just stopped drinking. I used to have a glass of wine at a restaurant. I’m just watching out for my liver these days – unfortunately! I’d love to be piling them back! Then again, you put on weight, that’s all that happens with alcohol these days. You just get puffy.” Plus, the hangovers are a killer. “I started getting a really bad headache if I have more than two glasses of wine.” Still, old habits die hard for Mr Too Much Fun. “I still take marijuana and stuff like that, so I’m not completely sober.”
Caring about your body, eventually that took precedence over the drug addiction
Also in need of some tactical nipping and tucking is that iconic barnet. Again, Idol counts himself pretty lucky. “It’s just about holding on! I just hope I can make it to the finish line. They can make the little bit of hair I’ve got look like a lot! As my hairdresser said: ‘As long as you’ve a little bit of hair, I can work with it.’ With a lot of pomade and dry shampoo, they can do miracles.”
Sir Billiam of Idol will be hoping his signature ’do hangs on until at least 30 November, when he turns 70. There are no big birthday plans currently as he’ll still be on tour, somewhere in the southern hemisphere. But nor will he be going quietly into that good night. “We’ll probably have some wingding South American party.”
Is he looking forward to being 70?
“Errrr… I dunno!” says Idol. “You don’t see yourself ageing. But this one, I might have to celebrate. I’ll be on the road with a load of people I’m enjoying playing with. So we’ll make it fun. It’ll be killer. SEVENTY HERE WE COME!” he shouts, loud enough to frighten Douglas the pooch back on Barrymore’s sofa. Anything else to declare?
“I tell you what: at the moment, I’m the sexy sexagenarian. Then I’m gonna be the sexy septuagenarian, ha ha!”
‘Dream Into It’ (Dark Horse Records) is released on 25 April. Tour tickets available here
