Billy Idol talks 'Rebel Yell,' 40 years on: Hiding master tapes with heroin dealer, the shelved cover song, rejecting a Rick Springfield haircut and more

In 1976, a gang of young, early-adopter punk fans, dubbed the “Bromley Contingent” by the British press, began following the Sex Pistols around Europe. One of those fans, William Broad — soon to be known to the world as superstar Billy Idol — certainly could not have imagined that nearly a half-century later, he’d be playing the first concert ever to be held at Nevada’s Hoover Dam, with Pistols guitarist Steve Jones at his side, in an effort to raise drought awareness.

But Idol’s charmed life has always been unpredictable. The theatrical release of Billy Idol: State Line — an IMAX-worthy concert film documenting his historic Hoover Dam gig and also featuring the Kills’ Alison Mosshart, No Doubt’s Tony Kanal, and longtime Idol guitarist Steve Stevens — interestingly coincides with the 40th anniversary of Rebel Yell. That double-platinum album, released on Nov. 10, 1983, helped establish Idol as the most successful mainstream rock star to emerge from the 1970s’ U.K. punk movement, and like all developments in Idol’s unorthodox career — during which he has sold a total of 40 million albums worldwide — he did it on his own terms.

“I was really lucky, because when I came to America, I had no idea what was going to happen,” says Idol, who moved to New York as his iconic punk group Generation X was disbanding, and soon linked up with Stevens, producer Keith Forsey, and high-powered KISS manager Bill Aucoin. “When I thought about the music that was top of the charts, where did I fit in? There were lot of rock bands doing these very high-harmony songs, like REO Speedwagon, and I don’t sing like that. But I couldn't stay in England. I would've just ended up propping up a bar, washed-up, because everything goes through England really fast. That initial wave of punk, the first wave, was over. Coming to America — I just had to do it. What I had to do, really, was start again.”

With his trademark peroxided quiff, chiseled cheekbones, and Generation X’s wild-youthful image (“The Clash had a political side, the Sex Pistols had a political side, but we were more about teenage problems,” explains Idol), the singer was always heartthrob material. So, it was perfect timing that his arrival in the States occurred in 1981, the year that MTV premiered. Before he went solo, Generation X had been the first punk band to perform on Britain’s pre-MTV chart show Top of the Pops, and when they played on T. Rex frontman Marc Bolan’s short-lived 1977 variety show, Marc, the glam-rock star had even jealously joked, “They have a lead singer, Billy Idol, who’s supposed to be as pretty as me — we’ll see, now!”

“Well, Marc's definitely prettier than me. I’m handsome!” Idol chuckles. “But it was great that we were on that show, because it [later] showed that I did have the ability to be on MTV. That was the thing — just the way I looked, I could be on MTV. Bill Aucoin had worked in television and he knew this 24-hour cable music channel was coming, and he said, ‘You're gonna be perfect for it.’ But in the meantime, I had to get my music right. I had to find out exactly who ‘Billy Idol’ was.”

Idol says the first sign that his career would eventually “go mega” came about two months after he moved to America, when he was at the New York nightclub Hurrah and heard the DJ spin “Dancing With Myself” — originally a Gen X song that “was already the beginning of the Billy Idol sound” and had just been re-recorded and released as Idol’s debut solo single. He witnessed “a load of people” filling the dance floor, and he “started to realize, ‘Oh, it's this is a big dance song on this kind of new wave/dance [Billboard Hot Dance Club Play] chart. Man, this answers a load of questions. I don't have to change a lot of stuff. I don't have to find this new Billy Idol. I just have to be the Billy I've always been.’”

But that didn’t mean the music-business powers-that-be left him alone. While Idol never shied away from, well, being a pop idol, and he didn’t worry about “selling out” because he was “making the music I wanted to make,” he had to fight for control of his image. “One of was second-in-command at my management did try showing me Rick Springfield's Working Class Dog imagery as ‘what goes down in America,’” he laughs. “And I said, ‘I am not brushing my hair down and becoming David Cassidy for anyone! This is really me and this is how this is, and I'm not going to change a thing!’”

This power-struggle came to a head in 1983, when Idol and his label, Chrysalis Records, disagreed about the cover art for his breakthrough sophomore album, Rebel Yell. So, in order to get his way, Idol actually got his drug dealer involved.

“We were up against [Chrysalis’s] deadline, but my thing was: ‘No deadlines, only headlines!’” Idol chuckles. “My first [solo] album had come out in ‘82, and they’d wanted to put the next album out in ’83, but it was getting late in the year, because we’d spent quite a lot of time doing it. So, there was an album cover made but it wasn't quite right, just the way it looked, and they were saying, ‘Oh, we're just going to put it out.’ And I went, ‘Wait a minute. We've worked really hard on this record. We just spent six months making sure this record is killer. The last thing I'm f***ing doing is putting out a cover that's not right!’ So, I went down to Electric Lady and got what I thought were the master tapes. And I gave them to my heroin dealer, James.”

Idol later found out from Forsey that he’d actually grabbed the wrong tapes from the studio, but his hardball and most definitely punk-rock tactic worked, regardless. “I said to [Chrysalis], ‘This guy's on the street. He needs money. So, if you mess about too long, he's just going to bootleg [the tapes]. He's not going to sit on them forever!’” Idol laughs. “James wouldn't have actually done that, I don't think. But it was great, frightening them to death. It really was torturing the record company; they’d tortured us, so we tortured them back a little bit! And they soon started listening to me. The cover was changed, and then everything went all right. I mean, for f***'s sake, they were just being stupid. And after that, they never f***ed with me again! I can tell you they didn't f*** with me ever again, after that.”

Idol, who’d always “enjoyed making videos” — like “Dancing With Myself,” directed by Texas Chain Saw Massacre filmmaker Tobe Hooper, and the Boris Karloff-inspired “White Wedding” — then went on to MTV superstardom, especially with Rebel Yell’s crossover power ballad, “Eyes Without a Face,” his first top 10 single and the overall biggest hit of his career. But when he shot the “Eyes” video with director David Mallet, a contact-lens snafu almost rendered the song’s title literal, and threatened to ruin Idol’s blue-eyed good looks.

“We’d been up for three days making that video, so I had my contact lenses in for a very long time,” Idol explains. “And then because we finished early in the morning, we flew immediately that day to a show in Phoenix. And I still had my contact lenses in. We were playing some kind of college, where there was a grass lawn, so I fell asleep there with my contact lenses in. Then I was woken up by a sheriff with a gun at my head! I had a whole Vivienne Westwood outfit on with a hat that looked like the Artful Dodger, the whole gear, but to some cop in Arizona that just looked like: ‘Hey, you're some kind of bum.’ He just thought I was some transient. Everything had holes in it. I mean, it looked great. I looked fantastic!

“But my eyes were pouring [tears], because I'd fallen asleep for a couple of hours and my lenses dried out and they'd scratched the corneas. They were stuck from the light. And [the sheriff] wouldn't let me take them out,” Idol continues. “He wouldn't believe me when I said I was with the band. He wouldn't believe the road manager. He took me inside and made all the crew line up, and he still would not let me take the contacts out. He said, ‘No, you just stand there,’ and he asked the crew, ‘OK, who is this?’ And they all said in unison, ‘The boss!’ And I went, ‘Right, that's it. I'm taking these things out of my eyes. I'm going to hospital, f*** it!’ And so they took me to hospital and they bandaged my eyes for three days. It was like my nerve endings were exposed, like having an amputation — really painful.”

Luckily, Idol recovered and went on to score many other eye-candy MTV hits, and his career took him to unforeseen heights — sometimes literally, from the looks of Billy Idol: State Line’s epic aerial footage. But his success was in many ways a continuation of his days with the Bromley Contingent, which also included two other future ‘80s post-punk icons, Siouxsie and the Banshees’ Siouxsie Sioux and Steve Severin, whom Idol first met at Vivienne Westwood and Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren’s Too Fast to Live Too Young to Die boutique. Idol reveals that at one time he almost joined the Banshees as their guitarist, before realizing he “wanted to be the singer, even though I didn't know if I could really sing or not.” Obviously, it all worked out.

“When [the Bromley Contingent was] hanging out with the Pistols, when we were following them around and thinking about own music and thinking about the scene, it was super-exciting watching all that happen,” Idol recalls. “We were just super-into music and fashion, morphing from the hippie days through digging the Velvet Underground and Iggy and Bowie and Roxy Music, morphing into this new world. We wanted our own look, our own music. It was like, ‘What is our generation going to do?’ … So, later on watching ‘Rebel Yell’ breaking through, that’s what we wanted. We were on a mission, really. People like me, Madonna, Prince, we were on a mission to make the ‘80s great, when we were being told by the people from the ‘60s, ‘The ‘80s suck!’ That's what we were always being told. So, we were like, ‘Oh, yeah? We're going to f***ing show you.’”

Incidentally, on the subject of Madonna, Idol is readying a deluxe Rebel Yell anniversary reissue with “quite a few extras on it” for 2024, and one of those bonus tracks will be a “f***ing killer version” of Rose Royce’s “Love Don't Live Here Anymore,” which Idol shelved after he found out that Madonna had recorded her own cover of the 1978 R&B ballad for her Like a Virgin album.

“It's not what you expect. My version is a kick-ass f***ing rock song. I'm really singing it, and I sound like I mean it,” Idol says. “I must’ve been broken up about something! I don’t if something was happening in my life at the time, or why I even wanted to do the song. I probably wanted to do it because I have always looked for covers that people couldn't imagine me singing, like ‘Mony Mony’ and ‘To Be a Lover.’ … But if I do say so myself, actually we would've pissed all over Madonna's version, because it's a rock version.”

The concert film Billy Idol: State Line premieres in movie theaters Nov. 15. For showtimes, click here.

Read more from Yahoo Entertainment:

• Billy Idol opens up about addiction, nearly losing leg in accident: 'I could have died'

• Steve Jones on the 40th anniversary of punk and whether the Sex Pistols 'could've ended up like U2'

• Billy Idol guitarist Steve Stevens talks horror influences, from 'Texas Chain Saw' to 'Mad Max'

• The Cure's Lol Tolhurst, Siouxsie and the Banshees' Budgie on the true origins of Goth: 'We weren't sitting in the school playground with a Ouija board trying to summon up spirits'

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