Back on the scene

It’s been 15 years since Billy Idol last released an album, but to listen to his new CD, Devil’s Playground, it sounds as if Idol is picking up right where he left off. By all rights, it’s surprising to even see Idol — Billy, Belly or otherwise — back on the scene, considering how his career went south in the 1990s.

Billy Idol

In 1990 — on the day he had finished work on his soon-to-be-released album Charmed Life — he was seriously injured in a motorcycle accident in Los Angeles. It took five surgeries to repair Idol’s mangled leg.

Idol recovered from those injuries, but an ill-fated flirtation with electronic music on his 2003 CD Cyberpunk seriously injured his music career. Cyberpunk was a dismal commercial failure, and after his record label was bought out by Capitol Records, Idol, who began his career in 1976 fronting the punk band Generation X, found himself stuck on a label that he felt didn’t understand him or his musical ambitions.

It’s not as though Idol was giving Capitol much to work with, though.

After Cyberpunk’s failure, Idol’s long-running drug and drinking habit spiraled out of control. In 1994, he suffered two overdoses, the second of which nearly proved fatal.

The second brush with death shook Idol enough that he began to deal with his drug problem. He said that as a father of a young son (Wolf, now 16) and daughter (Bonnie Blue, now 15), he knew he had to get his act together.

“They didn’t need to see Billy ‘Bleeping’ Idol. They needed to see William Broad, their dad really,” Idol said, referring to himself by his real name. “Also, too, I had to start dealing with parents and teachers and headmistresses and headmasters.

“I started to re-employ my mind about how I can continue to be Billy Idol instead of the other way around, give in,” he said. “That’s kind of what you’re seeing the results of now, is the results of someone who got himself together. I still drink. I still smoke pot. But I don’t need to get wasted. That’s my theory today. Don’t go out of your way to get wasted.”

Still, it wasn’t until the latter half of the 1990s that Idol started to show signs of creative life again. A key first step was reuniting with guitarist Steve Stevens, who had been his co-writer and right hand man through the 1987 album Whiplash Smile.

In 1999, Idol — now completely off of hard drugs — assembled a band to begin playing shows again, and gradually a few songs that would eventually land on Devil’s Playground started to surface.

“We had written a certain kind of song. We’d written the ‘Summer Running,’ the ‘Rat Race,’ ‘Romeo’s Waiting,’ ‘Plastic Jesus,’” Idol said, referring to some of the poppier material on Devil’s Playground. “That’s what me and Steve had done. We’d gotten this kind of side of the album. But I was looking for the kind of, almost like a punk side of it, the fiery side of it. And what happened is my drummer, Brian Tichy, had a little room where he had his drums set up. And once we had the real drums back playing as we wrote, it really helped me to come back to life as a songwriter. And so we started writing in November 2003 and by March we had 20 songs, half of which are on this album.”

Idol said he feels he is back in prime form, and rocking with his accustomed vigor.

“I think we’ve done a lot to put into place the energy you would imagine that Billy Idol would have,” he said. “The same energy that was there in the ’70s when I played with Generation X, the same energy is there on this album.

“The thing is we’ve got the energy back. The energy’s there, and that’s what makes the thing seem like it’s not so different is because the energy source, or whatever you call it, is just as strong, if not stronger, blimey, than it was in the heyday.”