Rock star Billy Idol has opened up about a slew of near death experiences he went through during the mid-Eighties and early Nighties.
The 69-year-old “Dancing with Myself” hitmaker, real name William Broad, just premiered a documentary about his life, Billy Idol Should Be Dead, at the Tribeca Festival.
As the film’s title suggests, Idol had multiple scrapes with death in his youth due to heavy drug use. In the first scene, he references a near-fatal overdose in 1984 where he took heroin with some friends in London.
After taking multiple lines of the Class A narcotic, Idol turned blue and was resuscitated in an ice bath.
“I nearly died that night. And the next day, we’re on Top of the Pops doing ‘Eyes Without a Face’,” he told the iPaper of the incident.
Idol moved to New York City in 1981 to pursue a solo career in music. His debut studio album Billy Idol (1982) became a commercial hit in the US with singles “Dancing with Myself” and “White Wedding”.
He hadn’t received the same warm reception in the UK and wanted his 1983 Rebel Yell album to be a hit at home, selling millions of copies like his music had done Stateside.
“I’m just glad I didn’t die,” he said, “because I had this great album and I wanted to come back to England and say – ‘Now what do you think?’ I nearly blew that. So I’m glad I lived through it.”
Idol had so many near-fatal overdoses in the mid-Eighties that his father, an accountant, flew to America and staged an intervention.
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“I needed someone to show me they loved me beyond the music,” Idol reflected. Yet, his father’s love couldn’t: “I suppose when you’re that young, you just don’t see the red flags that much,” he said.
In 1990, Idol was involved in a severe motorbike accident he was lucky to survive and almost saw him lose a leg.
While in hospital, he was put on a main box that injected him with pure morphine every 12 minutes, which ironically helped him give up drugs.
“I thought, ‘When are you ever going to be on something this pure again? Never,” he said. “How high can you get? I think I’m there.’”
