His new documentary, which premiered at NYC’s Tribeca Festival on Tuesday night, is called “Billy Idol Should Be Dead.”
And the snarling punk-rocker indeed suffered a near-fatal heroin overdose in 1984 after becoming an early MTV sensation with hits such as “Dancing with Myself,” “White Wedding” and “Rebel Yell.”
“There was a moment there where, you know, I’d done what I set out to do,” Idol recalls of conquering the US after moving to New York in 1981. “I was coming back to England … in triumph, and I nearly ruined it.
“We flew to London where we met a load of our pals that we knew,” he continues in the doc. “They had some of the strongest heroin, Persian brown I think it was. Everybody did a line or so, and they all nodded out, except for me and this mate of mine. We kind of went, ‘Well, that’s funny.’ So we did a few more lines.”
But the overdose nearly turned deadly for him.
“I was basically dying. I was turning blue,” he recalls. “So they put me in an ice cold bath, and I remember them walking me around on the top of the building, you know, on the roof.”
Indeed, the artist born William Broad had been seduced by heroin as the ‘80s rock god known as Billy Idol.
“That’s what was going on. The scene had embraced hard drugs really,” he reflects. “A number of people were on it. [So] you know, you’re wide open for it.”
“A lot of the people we loved were all heroin addicts,” adds Idol. “Lou Reed wrote the song ‘Heroin.’ The New York Dolls were all heroin addicts practically. So we weren’t thinking how dangerous it was. In fact, you’re thinking quite the opposite. Maybe this could unleash something.”
But, at 69, Idol has survived his severe drug addiction and lived to tell the tale. And he’s still going strong, taking off his shirt to reveal a ripped torso after finishing a five-song set with longtime guitarist Steve Stevens — including “Dancing with Myself,” “White Wedding,” “Eyes Without a Face” and “Rebel Yell,” plus new song “People I Love” — following his doc’s premiere.
Here are five more of the biggest revelations from “Billy Idol Should Be Dead.”
Idol’s breakout 1981 US hit, which was originally recorded with his band Generation X, was inspired from a night out on the club scene in Japan.
“We were standing having a drink, and we were watching this kid dancing with his reflection in the mirror of walls in this club,” recalls Gen X bassist Tony James, who co-wrote the song with Idol. “And Billy went, ‘Wow, look at that kid. Look, he’s like dancing with his reflection.’ And I went, ‘Yeah, dancing with myself.’ I’m like, ‘Billy, that’s gonna be a great name for a song.’ ”
True enough, Idol came up with the beginnings of a tune to go with that title.
“Literally, in the space of like two minutes, we wrote all the lyrics, just the two of us,” says James, “and by the afternoon, we’d recorded the demo.”
Idol, who once even lived next door to his drug dealer, hid out at the Park Meridien hotel in Midtown Manhattan while trying get off heroin.
“And it’s only when I really tried to give up heroin that I did start to smoke crack,” he says. “And, yeah, it was a nightmare. I mean, it’s horrible because I was seeing and hearing things. Like, people in the next room talking about me or above me.”
Shortly after that, friends convinced him to go to the hospital to detox, and his father flew in from London to clean house.
“My dad believed everybody was a drug dealer,” says Idol, who is now “California sober.”
Idol and his friend Harry Johnson went on vacation to Bangkok, Thailand in 1989, with the idea that it would be a drug-free trip.
“We started out just drinking and stuff, but after a week or so of that, we asked a cab driver if he could get us some coke,” recalls Idol. “But he brought back this long, thin vial of this white stuff” that turned out to be heroin.
“It was so strong that … you only needed a pin prick, and you were just as high as a kite,” he says.
During his long “zombie” trip, Idol had a strange celeb encounter. “At one point, I passed out in the elevator with the elevator doors closing on me, and Mel Gibson was there with his family on holiday, horrified,” he recalls.
“The silver lining was I did put heroin behind me,” he says. “It was too horrible, the whole experience. It actually really put me off.”
Idol was hit by a car when he ran a stop sign at a Hollywood intersection on his Harley-Davidson motorcycle in 1990. He broke his right leg, which was so badly damaged between his knee and ankle that he had to have a steel rod inserted, and fractured his left wrist in the horrific accident that required seven hours of surgery.
It also cost Idol a big role in 1991’s “Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” with him being originally cast to play Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator T-1000 rival. But the singer couldn’t do the required running.
“I just had a really bad limp, so I couldn’t do it,” he says. “But I wish I could’ve done it, it would’ve been incredible. And you never know where that would have led?”
Idol, who has never gotten married, raised son Willem, 36, with former partner Perri Lister and daughter Bonnie, 35, with ex-girlfriend Linda Mathis. But several years ago he found out that he had a second son, Brant, 39, from a weekend fling.
The discovery was made through a 23andMe DNA test that Bonnie did.
“And then a few weeks later, I get the results back on the app and open it, and I’m like, ‘Who is this? This Brant,’” she says in the doc.
A DNA test had also raised questions about who Brant always thought was his biological father.
“I was like, ‘Mom, is there a chance Mark might not be my biological father?’m” he recalls in the doc. “And she’s like, ‘Well, it’s pretty crazy, but back in the day, we broke up and I actually spent a weekend with Billy Idol.’ ”