Billy Idol: ‘My diet was pot, cocaine, smack, opium, ecstasy … and women’
Billy Idol reveals his threesomes with hookers and fight with the Rolling Stones in new book
BILLY IDOL spent his Eighties heyday so wasted on drugs that he once drifted towards death after a heroin overdose — and welcomed the end.
The Rebel Yell singer, now 58, has also spoken out for the first time about
his other addiction, to sex.
He bedded hookers supplied by Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss and held orgies in his recording studio with willing groupies.
In his autobiography Dancing With Myself he declares that for two years his life consisted of: “Never-ending broads and bikes, plus a steady diet of pot, cocaine, ecstasy, smack, opium, quaaludes, and reds.”
And the Brit became convinced he was “next in line to die outside an LA nightclub or on some cold stone floor, surrounded by strangers and paparazzi”.
In fact, the closest he came to death was in 1984, the same year that Rebel Yell, Eyes Without A Face and Flesh For Fantasy topped charts around the world.
He had gone to a flat in London with a friend who pulled out what he called “very strong Persian brown heroin”.
Billy snorted five lines of the drug before everything went black and he realised he was dying.
While his friends frantically tried to save him, he was so high that he craved death, thinking, “Let me sleep, let me dream. I don’t want to awake — I’m an emperor!”
But against his wishes he was forced back into consciousness. Drugs also got him into trouble, though he occasionally got away with things by a quirk of fate.
At one point in 1982 — the year White Wedding was released — he moved into a bungalow at Hollywood’s famous Chateau Marmont hotel. In the early hours, out of his mind on drink, he started smashing up his room.
He then panicked when he saw police heading towards his villa — and stood stark naked at the door to await them, only for them to rush straight past.
It was only later he learned that they had been called to try to help hell-raising Hollywood actor John Belushi, who had just fatally overdosed aged 33 in another bungalow.
Then there were the women — loads of them.
Billy, famed for his peroxide blond hair and his arrogant sneer, recalls: “We’d invite girls to come to the studio to listen to the music. We’d be snorting lines of cocaine, and then the girls would start dancing.
“Before long, they’d end up having sex with one or more of us on the studio floor. Once the party was in full swing, we walked around naked but for our biker boots and scarves.
“We had full-on orgies in those studios we inhabited for months. It was like a glorified sex club.”
Londoner Billy, who was born to a salesman dad and a mum who was a nurse, also describes steamy individual encounters, including losing his virginity aged 15 to a shopworker in Bromley, South East London.
He remembers that he lied about his inexperience, bragging that he had had sex before — and that the pop song Mony Mony by Tommy James and the Shondells was playing on the radio at the time.
That’s why, he reveals, he did a cover version of the track years later.
Then there was his romp in an airline at 30,000ft in a first-class loo, high on cocaine, with a girl who forced her way into the cubicle to get to him.
He adds: “I was having a great time. Today I can see I was on a tightrope hovering between life and death, but at the time I didn’t care. I ignored the dangers.”
During this whole sex-and-drug-fulled spell, for nine years from 1980, Billy was meant to be in a relationship with Hot Gossip dancer Perri Lister, now 55. She gave birth to his first child, Willem Wolfe, in 1988.
But a few months later his womanising caught up with him when Perri heard him chatting on the phone to his lover as he sat next to his son’s baby monitor.
The singer tried to deny the romance but his partner was able to repeat back to him everything she had heard over the listening device.
In August 1989 Perri left him saying, “I’ve had enough of this.”
The singer admits he reacted badly to the split and, during a three-week break in Thailand, took heroin again for the first time in two years. He then spent his time in a Bangkok hotel taking smack and over-the-counter drugs.
He got so high that one night Hollywood actor Mel Gibson and his horrified family came across him as he lay unconscious in the elevator with the door opening and closing against his stricken body.
A friend later told him that Mel gave a polite, “Excuse me,” before leading his wife and kids to the next elevator.
Idol also confesses to using the services of Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss, who supplied call girls to wealthy clients at parties. He claims he would “snag” up to three girls at a time and that the hookers never asked for anything in return as he was so famous.
As a bachelor he felt there was no way he could say no.
Idol went on to have a second child, Bonnie Blue, with 19-year-old girlfriend Linda Mathis in 1989. And it was having to face up to his responsibilities as a father that finally convinced him to clean up his act.
In 1990 he had a serious motorbike accident that almost caused him to lose a leg — and his fear of making his children orphans forced him to become a better person.
He thinks he has now put the worst of his rock and roll excesses behind him.
The star, who spent a great deal of his adult life living in the US, moved back to the UK last year to care for his father, Bill Broad, after he was diagnosed with cancer.
He and his dad previously fell out about his choice of career but managed to patch up their differences before Bill passed away on August 7 this year.
Idol said: “My father is a great man, and I am privileged to be his son.”
Billy Idol’s drug abuse got so bad that his behaviour appalled even the hard-partying members of the Rolling Stones.
He recalls how, after working on his 1986 album Whiplash Smile, he turned up at the band’s recording studio to see his childhood heroes, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood.
Idol was in a terrible mood and so out of his mind that before he knew what had happened, he had started an argument with Richards, who was not known to shy away from a punch-up himself.
The two got into a vicious spat. Idol, who began his career in punk band
Generation X before going solo, now feels awful about what happened as he was a huge fan of the Stones and they had been kind enough to invite him to their recording session.
He later became so racked with guilt he vowed to stay at home if he was going to abuse drugs.
During his time in Hollywood, Idol also had ambitions to become an actor.
He reveals that director Oliver Stone cast him in The Doors, alongside Val Kilmer.
But the rocker’s role was scaled down dramatically after his motorbike accident in 1990. He had jumped a traffic light and nearly lost a leg in the resulting crash.
The Doors movie was not the only major film part he lost due to the accident.
Director James Cameron wanted to cast him as the robot assassin T1000 in the second Terminator movie, opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger.
But the role demanded that the terminator run fast and such was Idol’s injury that he wasn’t able to move without a limp.
The role eventually went to Robert Patrick, a relative-unknown at the time.
Dancing With Myself by Billy Idol is published by Simon and Schuster at
£20.