Billy Idol - Bromley contingent to Hot in the City

I've never read a really satisfactory account of how he made this move, and how he was regarded by others - his peers, I guess. The obvious thing would be to say that he became an MTV star / joke, but... that exact time was when the Clash was doing its NYC fetish, and 1982-3 presumably crossed time periods with the whole tourists taking photos of mohawks thing in London. Was it a sort of "good on you" thing, or derision, or was it an anachronistic thing in the face of colder new wave stuff? I don't really get the timeline or context, so if anyone wants to weigh in...

Hmm, well "Dancing With Myself" by the improvised "Gen X" (really just Idol and Tony James rehashing tunes from the unreleased (then) third Generation X album, with some friends helping out) became a long-lived alternative "club" hit in the States, the James / Idol partnership dissolved, and Idol hooked up with the same folks who managed Kiss, who took a totally different and very heavy-handed approach to managing Idol, just at the right moment - when new wave was seriously going mainstream and someone like Billy Idol seemed - to the masses - to have more street cred than say A Flock Of Seagulls or Duran Duran or the Human League. It worked, commercially, and Billy Idol crossed over even to dunderhead stoner rawk n roll fans who normally dug The Doors. (The Cars did this in a pretty similar manner, a few yeas earlier, but without going whole hog with the image makeover.)

I don't think Idol's story was unusual at the time, except for his level of success. There were lots of bands - the (English) Beat comes to mind - who polished up their sound to appeal to American radio, they just weren't quite as lucky. Not to mention Bow Wow Wow or Lords Of The New Church or a million more - bands who seemed pretty weird at the time to most people, but almost panderingly commercially motivated today. But don't like at me, I was listening to the Blue
Orchids and On-U Sound stuff!

The first Billy Idol EP and album were puchased by a lot of people who wouldn't afmit it now. I think the feeling was that Idol made an album that wasn't as cool as Generation X, but not total crap, either. Even cynical still thinks "Hot In The City" was a great atmospheric tune for a teenage'summer. But Idol wasn't taken seriously by his peers (for the most part, this was true even in Generation X days) and so there wasn't much of any commentary. People had been waiting a long time for some member of the UK punk scene to break through in the US, and proud enough to see i t happen that it probably deflected some of the criticism that might have occurred n the merits of the work itself. By solo album #2, though, no one deep into music gave him the time of day, really.

The tourists taking pictures of punk thing was much more 1977 than 1982-1983, and back then no one really wore mohawks. I don't think anyone really connected Billy Idol to "punk" except through knowledge of his past or the fact that they lived in Butthole, Nebraska and just got MTV. He was just a pop character, and about as punk as Boy George (who was pretty radical to some folks.)