Sharing the brilliant story he wrote for LA Punk Rocker that even got the attention of the idol himself Billy Idol 🖤

You are not a symbolic rock star.
The mirror in front of you – enframed by a hundred miniature lights that were once tiny mounted wax candles, a relic from a Broadway show – tells you what you need to know.
You are not a ghost or a spectre.
Neither are you a symbol, though you have been described as such. You pinch the fleshy skin underneath your bicep to check further, and you pinch and squeeze and you nip and tweak, and you don’t let go. On impulse, you try to rip right through the flesh until the endorphins burst their banks, but the adrenaline coursing through your veins like battery acid ensures that you are superhuman and your pain is fleeting and gossamer.
The pinch mutates to the early stages of a bruise.

You are not a symbolic rock star.
You are The King Rocker.
You are Billy Idol.
You are in L.A.

You do not want to be disturbed in the five minutes before your entrance.
The management knows this and observes it.
Your Generation X days.
Back home, in the land of darkness, you remember changing in toilets where the smell was indescribable, and the blocked bowls were awash with piss.
Back home, in the land of darkness, you remember changing on cramped stages while zombies and monsters spat at you and called you a cunt.
Back home, in the land of darkness, you remember changing in a Transit in freezing Dudley, and your chilblained fingers nearly bled as you gripped the microphone.
You do not want to be disturbed.

This is your time.
Your band changes elsewhere in the warren of corridors and rooms behind the stage. That does not concern you. They do their thing, you do yours. You and the boys will mix after at Danny’s. You’ll eat burgers, drink soda pop and be merry on all sorts, but for now, you need to remember, and you need to prime the bomb. You are tight now. Tighter than a guitar string, taut almost ready to snap. You have rehearsed to the point where you are sick of each other. By now, the internal dynamics of the band are akin to those inside a thermonuclear device – and you are ready to explode it on that L.A. stage, where the kids are screaming.

Uranium – 247
Billy Idol – 247
A half-life of one hour and a quarter.
You are the detonator.
Bang.

Outside, in the amphitheatre, they wait in their hundreds.
New York Dolls played here in 1974.
Sex Pistols played here in 1977.
Buzzcocks.
(You remember people saying Ever Fallen in Love is the greatest pop song ever recorded. One day, they will be saying that about you, Billy.)
Bob Marley, Neil Young.
Patti Smith.
The Ramones.
Lou Reed played here in 1976. He must have sat here in this very dressing chair.
Four years ago, the Clash played here, this very theatre.
History etched into the timbers, the floorboards, the tiles.
The Clash.

Reclining in your seat in front of the silvered glass, you can hear them. The local warm-up has been and gone, and the crowd packs the front of the stage. They buzz and anticipate. They have been waiting for you for months. The first ticket was sold within minutes of the announcement and tonight, there isn’t a ticket to be had between here and Seattle.
They have come from miles around to see you.
The kids of America have been waiting for you to sing to them.
They await your Satanic Majesty.
You are the Queen’s Envoy and the gates of the castle are about to open.

They say Sabbath played here.
They say Zeppelin played here.
British musical imperialism.
The last vestiges of Empire, in the era where America couldn’t get enough. Where the sons of press operators, slaughter men and pipefitters from the near-dead, fume-swept, soot-encrusted streets of Birmingham strode like demigods across the stage of the world.

The Stones played here.
The Rolling Stones.
The Rolling Stones.

You are about to play here.
The thought squeezes your balls and turns your blood to ice water.

The DJ plays Pretty Vacant and you smile thinly.
Here, in LA, in the land of infinite sunshine, where the girls are bright, fun, curvaceous, buxom, Delphic and very, very willing.
Here, in Los Angeles, where the drink flows like water, and the happy powder descends like a storm of crystal snowflakes from the leaves of the boulevard Bougainvillea.
Here, in Los Angeles, where, in a Twilight Zone twist, a parallel Universe, you have become more popular than the Sex Pistols ever were. England’s fiendish, hellhound heralds of institutional carnage, washed away on a tide of indifference in Buttfuck, AZ and MooCow, OK.
The Sex Pistols.
Who you used to follow religiously all over the South of England.
Who you used to worship.
Most of America didn’t get the Pistols at all.
Anarchy in the UK.
They were rude to them. They were rude about them.
Holidays in the Sun.
They crucified Johnny, Sid, Steve and Paul, and they let them die a slow death.
But they get you, Billy.
They get you big time.

On your face is the thinnest of grins.

They hate you back home, don’t they, Billy?
For leaving.
For coming here to the Grand Playground, the sun, the sea, the stars. The beautiful smiling women. The land of excess.
What the Iranians call the Great Satan.
You moved here a year ago, and the people love you, King Rocker.
MTV love your hair and your sneer, and the people love your Englishness, your attitude.
They love your music.
When they found out you had left for New York, they hated you back home.
A land where Reagan’s Platinum Blonde lays waste to a once proud country.
Where no one has a job.
Where everyone is ill.
Where people freeze in apocalyptic winters.
Where the New Romantics reign, an illogical epilogue to punk and an equally logical bridge to the music of Thatcher’s children – George Michael and Phil Collins.
Balladeers who will soon follow you here, but while the people of the UK will love them and admire them, they will hate you because you are the King Rocker, and you sold them out for America.

There is a part of you that understands their hatred.
There is a part of you that craves the bosom of the madness of home.
But there is a bigger part of you who knew that there was only ever going to be one stage big enough for Billy Idol.

You are not a symbolic punk rocker.
You can see yourself in the illuminated black mirror of your changing room. Your hair is peroxide white, each strut shining as bright as the North Star. Each strand is cemented into place. A pneumatic drill wouldn’t be able to dislodge the putty, the wax and the embalming paste. You put on your red leather jacket, a perfect fit over your pumped, muscled, waxed pecs and your iron biceps. Unlike the pale, undernourished, ailing punks of Basildon and Hillingdon, the sons and daughters of gravediggers, lorry drivers and the unemployed, they have trained you, here.
Here, in L.A., they have got hold of you, and they have made you work.
Gold’s Gym.
Jim’s Gym.
Muscle Factory.
Outdoors at Venice Beach.
The marketing fuckers turned that gym session into a photo shoot, and after, at night, in your hotel bedroom, you nailed the New York scribe with the Siouxsie hair-explosion and concrete mascara, who said she was into tattoos, Lou Reed and Iggy Pop.
Over drinks and a rock, you told her Ian Curtis committed suicide after listening to Iggy’s The Idiot.
A year and three months ago.
The country was still in mourning.
Everyone in England loved Ian Curtis. They still do.
(They hate you, Billy.)
Vacant, eyes as flat as those of a doll, she replied that she didn’t know that, yeh.
After, you banged her all over your hotel room out of sheer frustration.
In the bed, in the bath, on the marbled tiles, on the dressing table.

The Pistols.
1977.
Five years ago.
This very changing room.
Angels of death and destruction. Forged in the fire of the nineteen seventy four English Miner’s Strike and the three day week. Fathered by Ted Heath and suckled by Mary Whitehouse. The candles (like those that once flickered around your mirror) lit a million suburban houses in the winter of 1973.
Disgruntled, starving, gravediggers abandoned the bodies of the dead to be piled high at the cemetery gates while the Queen’s sister gambolled and sunned herself in Mustique, a coterie of natives lining up to rub expensive unguent into her pale, aristocratic, nicitinous skin.
Denis Healey borrowed billions from the Americans and the Saudis, promised prosperity (in our time) and ensured Britain’s continued metamorphosis from the seat of the biggest empire the world has ever seen into a bankrupt, needy banana republic off the coast of France.
All the way through the early seventies, The Eagles sang about hotels in California and sunrises in Tequila, while in the North of England, people froze in their beds when the cold gripped their old bones with bony, unforgiving fingers.

John Lydon watched the Eagles sing.
(So did you, Billy.)
Johnny Rotten, spawned, screamed anarchy, and the old order began to burn.
The Clash did, too, but they were too clever, too cool, too insulated from the real England to do anything more than chat about the coming Ragnarok.
You weren’t like that, Billy.
You were part of anger punk, but in the end, it all passed you by.
You loved Elvis, and the Stones, and the Beatles.
From your classroom, with the names of bullies and the bored, love hearts and epigrams, gored with screwdriver tips and dying biros into wooden desks, you saw into the future, through the gun metal skies and endless black rain of Middlesex.
You saw this moment, this very moment, this very moment.
In the reflection of the windows of your classroom.
August 1982.
MTV.
Billy Idol in L.A.

The Pistols had to happen, Billy.
England spawned the Sex Pistols for reasons you have just recounted.
But so, in a different way, England spawned you.
They shouldn’t hate you back home, King Rocker.

It was inevitable.
King Rocker was inevitable.
Billy Idol was inevitable.

On the dressing table is cocaine.
Choice cocaine.
None of that rubbish back home mixed with amphetamine, floor chemicals, plaster thickener, bleach, talcum powder and low grade rat poison.
The stuff that killed two people you know at a Ruts gig, killed them stone dead.
Ripped the mucal lining of their noses away like a gang of gypsies ripping lead from the peaky nave of a Norman church.
None of that stuff.
None of that death stuff.
Not for you, Billy.
This is premium blow.

This line has been supplied and erected for you by elements of the theatre management. It was already in place on the dressing table when you arrived, a fulsome, neat, highly organised line of Columbian the size and breadth of an albino caterpillar. There it was, next to a fresh off-square bottle of Woodford, almost – but not quite – crimson red. You know afterwards that you will take as much cocaine as you can handle back at the hotel, that cocaine will fill crystal bowls to the brim – and there will be Horse and there will be Rock.

Before you walk out on stage, immediately before, you plan to ingest one single line all the way back to the forebrain, and you have waited until this very moment to do so. You bend down with your pipe and take it all down in one loud, egregious snort. The after burn hits the inside of your skull like a sledgehammer and covers the snake brain and cerebellum in a coating of purest joy.
Tears well.
The veins in your neck protrude and illuminate an inky, diaphanous blue as if tattooed.
The ecstasy and power you experience could power a grid.

You.
Could.
Scream.
But you don’t.
You surf it, don’t you, Billy?
You surf the waves of ecstasy you are experiencing, and you shut your eyes, imagining the crowd.
You are going to slay them tonight, Billy Idol.
You know it, King Rocker.

Before you zip up, you pinch your underarm again, and you wince with pain. Your eyes are aflame. You are ready. You stand erect. You look deep into the mirror and that mirror, like the abyss, looks straight back at you. There are no mad hatters or white rabbits or posh little girls with blonde hair and riddles. There is only you on the surface of the silvered glass, and you have never looked so sharp and crisp and young.
You are Billy Idol.
You are ready to rock the theatre.
You are ready to receive the worship of your acolytes.

You are not to know this, Billy, but because of you, King Rocker, in the next decade they will follow in their hundreds from the shores of the Green and Pleasant Land, and they will make America their playground, in some cases, their homes.
Just like the old boys did.
Just like Cream and Zep and Sabs and ELP, all the bands your punk generation set out to destroy, but (unintentionally or not) ended up emulating.

One day, a song from the Eurythmics will accompany Superbowl coverage. A billion people will hear waif-like Annie Lennox sing.
Elvis Costello will declare himself the King of America (and when the second invasion is over, he will appear on bad sitcoms and make comments about his homeland that will mean he can never go back, and they will hate him more than they ever hated you).
Bonnie Tyler will inspire America with talk of heroes. Simple Minds will ask us all not to forget about them and then score films, which guarantee that we never will.
The Teardrop Explodes.
Already the Psychedelic Furs have made their intentions clear.

Because of you, Billy.
Because of the King Rocker.
And most of all, because of that sneer.
The Elvis sneer.
The Pistols wanted to bury Elvis.
Johnny was his antithesis, his anti-doppelganger, his nemesis. Excess. Middle of the Road. Radio. Old people music. Elvis was a creature of America, lost outside its walls; some say lost, even, outside Memphis.
You saw it differently.
You loved Elvis.
In tribute, in homage, you adopted his sneer.
You amplified it, gavelled it, raised that sneer to an art form.

King Rocker.
Rock. Rock. Rock.

You are not to know this, Billy, but while future generations will remember Elvis for his obesity, his glitter, his mawkish Old Shep soul scraping, his Liberace impersonations on the bloated, obscene stages of Las Vegas, they will remember you for an attitudinal shorthand you borrowed from your idol, from the days where energy and defiance was a synonym for Elvis Presley.

Sneer.
You stole his sneer, didn’t you, Billy?
And you made it in your own.
After all, Elvis had left the building.

The door rattles.
It’s time.
You open it and hear the crowd.
The lights fall.
It is dark at the end of the tunnel.
You look into the mirror one final time.
The band begins to play the intro to White Wedding.
In one-and-a-half year’s time, you will write one of the biggest hits in world history, Rebel Yell, Billy, but as you look in the mirror, you are not to know to this.

You are in the now.
Your blood is afire.
You smile.
And you sneer.
Outside, the acolytes of Los Angeles await the coming of the King…