Billy Idol is tough enough to have survived 50 years in the music business despite all the drink and drugs, but he’s also sensitive enough to burst into tears when first watching a new documentary about his life and career.
‘The closing minutes include a montage of my life and I found it very moving,’ says Billy, who has no beef with the film’s controversial title, Billy Idol Should Be Dead.
‘It’s true, I should be dead with everything I did to myself earlier in my life.’
A mixture of archive footage, animated re-creations of key moments in his life and interviews with now 70-year-old Billy, as well as his family and musicians such as former Sex Pistol Steve Jones, Miley Cyrus, Nile Rodgers and Pete Townshend, the show explores a career that saw the former punk rocker and singer with Generation X become an early star of MTV, sell more than ten million records and storm the charts around the world with hits such as White Wedding and Rebel Yell.
It also reveals how he discovered he had a secret second son after his daughter Bonnie took a DNA test, but much of the film focuses on his excessive taste for drink and drugs and several brushes with death.
Celebrating his breakthrough in America in the early 80s with friends at a party in London, Billy overdosed on heroin.
Speaking in documentary Billy Idol Should Be Dead, the rock singer opened up about discovering he has a secret second son
The star was born as William Broad – and took his stage name from a surprising source of inspiration related to school
‘I turned blue and was basically dying,’ he recounts.
‘Friends put me in an ice-cold bath, and then walked me around the roof of the building where we’d been taking the heroin – somehow I survived.’
He was still living the high life on heroin a few years later when he travelled to Bangkok with his personal assistant Art.
‘Our taxi driver brought us this vial of white powder, you only needed to take a pin prick of it to feel as high as a kite,’ he recalls.
Taking rather more than that, Billy wrecked three hotel rooms causing more than £56,000 worth of damage, was threatened with jail, hospitalised via a private ambulance and at one point collapsed and became wedged in the doors of a hotel lift, just as Mel Gibson and his family were about to step inside.
The experience, says Billy, was a turning point. ‘After that I put heroin behind me – the whole thing had been too horrible.’
The film offers an explanation as to why this middle-class boy born William Broad from Bromley in Kent (Billy Idol was inspired by a school report that said, ‘William is idle’), who neither smoked nor drank before entering the music business, should have embraced the rock’n’roll lifestyle so wholeheartedly.
‘He needed the booze and the drugs to deal with the pressure of his career,’ says Brendan Bourke, who looked after him on behalf of Chrysalis Records when Billy first moved to New York in 1981.
‘He was really William Broad, he was only Billy Idol when he was coked up.’
The man himself agrees. ‘My partner Perri once said to me, “Why do you have to be Mr Rock’n’Roll 24 hours a day?” and I told her, “That’s what being Billy Idol involves.”’
Billy dedicates the documentary to his mother Joan, who died aged 92 in 2020, and to his father William, who died aged 90 in 2014
Former Hot Gossip dancer Perri Lister features prominently in the documentary, revealing that Billy’s drug-fuelled trip to Bangkok followed a bust-up between them caused by an almost comical blunder by the singer.
‘We had eight telephones in our house in LA and he chose to use the one in the nursery, close to where our baby son Willem was sleeping with the baby monitor just beside him, to make a secret phone call to a woman who I subsequently discovered was pregnant with his child,’ says Perri.
‘I heard everything and we had the most almighty row about it!’
Perri and Billy are no longer together but Billy is close to Willem, now 37, and to his daughter Bonnie, 36, the result of that secret relationship revealed on the baby monitor.
Bonnie discovered she had a half-brother, a New Yorker called Brant, the result of a brief relationship Billy enjoyed during his Rebel Yell tour in 1985, when she received a DNA test kit from her husband as a Christmas present in 2023.
It provided her with a list of people she was genetically matched with, one of whom was Brant, who just happened to be looking for his birth father at the same time.
Billy says he made the documentary in part for his children and four grandchildren. ‘It was a chance to view the landscape of my life and to explain myself a little bit to those around me – maybe even to myself.’
He dedicates the documentary to his mother Joan, who died aged 92 in 2020, and to his father William, who died aged 90 in 2014.
The only time Billy cries during the documentary, rather than while watching it, is when he recalls one of his last meetings with his dad.
‘We hadn’t always got on but we made up,’ he recalls.
‘We spoke about my career on this occasion, and I said, “I was crazy to think I could do it”, to be a success in the music business.
‘I knew that’s what Dad needed to hear, rather than me bragging about what I’d done and how many records I’d sold.
‘Watching the documentary I was thinking, “What a nut!” because you do have to be a little crazy to succeed in music. When you start out you have no idea whether you can pull it off or not. I’m relieved I did… and lived to tell the tale.’
Billy Idol Should Be Dead airs Thursday, 26 March, Sky Arts and will be available to stream on NOW.
