INSTANT KARMA
BILLY IDOL
AN AUDIENCE WITH...
The rebel yeller talks Tex Ritter, Television,Terminator 2and why he’s not a plastic punk
Interview by SAM RICHARDS
“IT'S like a sports car that you’re slowly bringing up to speed,” says Billy Idol on a Zoom call from Nashville, 10 dates into his world tour. By the time he reaches the UK – for the Forever Now festival at Milton Keynes Bowl and his own headline show at Wembley Arena – he promises to be firing on all cylinders. “We got the macro, we’re just dialling in the micro – haha! I enjoy performing. When you jump about like I do for an hour and 40 minutes, it’s incredible exercise. And it’s fun, too. You’re surfing on top of this incredible sound wave. I don’t go on stage high [any more], because you get a natural high from the volume of the music.”
As a kid, he used to dream about exactly this kind of experience. “I imagined myself in a group, playing guitar and singing. It was the most exciting thing I could see. I thought, ‘Wow, they’re going all around the world’, and it seemed like it was fun, you know?”
So he’s tried to keep it fun ever since. “There’s a feeling of freedom, ’cos you’re working for yourself. That’s a great thing. Then again, you have to tell yourself to do things [he mimes the cracking of a whip]. But rather that than someone else telling me what to do!”
Was music played a lot in your home when you were a child?
Wayne Spencer, via email
Yeah. My mum loved jazz. She liked Dizzy Gillespie, Count Basie, Sarah Vaughan, Dinah Washington, Ella Fitzgerald, Ben Webster, Miles Davis. And she loved the musicals: South Pacific, Camelot, all those sorts of things. I was given a record when I was really little of cowboy songs by Tex Ritter, and I liked that. Then I gravitated to rock’n’roll – Gene Vincent, Buddy Holly – and eventually The Beatles and the Stones. I was a little kid, drinking it all in.