BILLY IDOL: THE CAGE EP
If there was a living, breathing rock’n’roll meme, who else could it possibly be? And this meme won’t stand still.
We’re talking forty-five years of fist pumping, widescreen thumping, highway gliding, motorbiking, dance floor shaking, rock’n’pop. That’s Billy Idol, right? Snarling, ecstatic, erotic, ageless but not plastic. Like the old song says, “he’s good bad, but he’s not evil.”
It’s funny; maybe the name really did define him. 46 years ago when everyone was sniffing the nihilistic glue and giving themselves snotty little punk rock names, it was supposed to be “Idle” – but someone wrote it wrong, and William Broad became Billy Idol instead. And that’s what he became: An idol. But this idol is not made of stone, and he’s certainly not stuck on a pedestal to be done, dusted, and dusty. He fire-breathes dreams and nightmares, he delivers clubland croon and Bolan-blessed cool, and he moves through the desert, sluices through the cities, speeds across oceans, hills, mesas, and time. Billy Idol insists on being today’s news, not just yesterday’s memory. And if you think Idol is Idle, you haven’t heard his new four song release, The Cage EP, out September 23 on Dark Horse Records.
This is not a cage that closes us in. It’s as a cage that’s been busted through and challenges us to explode, expand, experiment, take the best of the past and giftwrap it in the new. Billy Idol and his collaborator of 41 ferocious and magnetic years, Steve Stevens, don’t want to re-invent the wheel, but they aren’t afraid of finding new collaborators to put air into the tires. On The Cage EP, the kids in the garage are producers Tommy English, Zakk Cervini and Butch Walker. Tommy has produced Kacey Musgraves, BØRNS, K.Flay, Foster the People, and many others; Zakk has been behind the board for projects by Blink 182, Machine Gun Kelly, All Time Low, and a pile of other modern noise makers; and Butch Walker has produced Green Day, Weezer, Taylor Swift and countless others. Oh, and Tommy was born five years after Billy and Steve released Rebel Yell, and Zakk seven years after that.
Not that age matters.
“The idea behind making this record was to do something that still felt like Billy, but also was fresh and competitive with today’s releases,” says Zakk Cervini. “It had to be modern sounding but still him. Billy Idol was always loud and in your face. All we had to do was say, what would this sound like if we took what Billy always was, and did it in 2022? What would it sound like? Well, it would sound like a kickass rock record. And that’s what we had to make. Billy wanted to make something that would kick the doors down, and that he would be dying to play live, songs that would be part of his set for the rest of his career.”
“Billy and I are not self-congratulatory people,” says Steve Stevens, who has been by Billy’s side since 1981. “We are always looking to move forward; we are always aware that you are only as good as your last record. We follow that. First and foremost, Tommy and Zakk are fans. But they’re also young and they understand records now, the sonic capabilities of now, and that turns us on.”
It’s been exactly one year since Billy Idol released his last EP, also on the George Harrison-founded Dark Horse Records – the rich and diverse Butch Walker-produced The Roadside, which had the effect of being both in your face and full of the uncertainty and darkness of the pandemic. But a lot has happened during that time. First and foremost, Billy Idol and Steve Stevens hit the road again, and that amazing energy infected their new work.
Billy Idol: “The last EP, we were kind of warming up to this. This EP is a lot more coming at you. Loads more guitar. And that’s a lot of fun. We were pretty fired up by the fact that we hadn’t played for a couple of years, and suddenly we were bursting on stage, and it kind of woke us up to what the next EP could be: That it could be a little more strum and drang, a little more coming at you, a little more rock’n’roll, a little more f*ck you! Well, a tiny bit of f*ck you, anyhow. The bottom line is we had a lot of fun doing it.”
“Cage,” the title cut of the EP, may be Billy and Steve’s most ferocious and flat- out punk rocker in decades. In fact, it may even make you think that the spiraling riffs, soaring melodies, and morse-code rhythms of Generation X have been transported into the 21st century. “Coming out of the lockdown era, people had a lot of energy stored up,” Tommy English says. “That was the inspiration for ‘Cage’: Getting out there and doing the things we’ve been missing. And that includes not being afraid to do a raucous punk rock song like ‘Cage.’ And we didn’t worry about whether it fit in anywhere, because it just sounds so Billy.”
“It’s 2:50, it’s not 3:50,” notes Billy. “That makes you want to hear it over and over! And we were thinking of things like that – how can we maximize what we do while at the same time keeping things taut and trimmed.”
Steve Stevens: “We’re not after perfection. We’re after adventure!”
But not every track on The Cage EP has you reaching for a handful of soap to spike your hair with. “Miss Nobody” (the sole track on the new EP produced by Butch Walker, who helmed the quartet of songs on The Roadside; and co- written with Walker and Sam Hollander) is an R&B ballad which gave Steve Stevens a chance to go to some new places, even after all these years. “I really love ‘Miss Nobody,’” Steve says. “First of all, it’s something we’ve never done before, and it reminds me of this ‘Miss You’ era of the Stones that I really love. It’s not the heavier side of my guitar playing, but there’s so many cool things I’ve never been able to express, especially this Ernie Isley type of guitar playing. The older I get the less interest I have in how fast I can play. I’m not interested in being the new gunslinger – I’m just not interested in that crap anymore. I just want to play on great songs. My job, first and foremost, is to serve the songs and to serve my partner, who is to me one of the greatest singers ever. I’m not just idly praising the guy. I love the sound of his voice. When I can put my guitars against that voice and it works, it’s like…oh yeah. And that’s when I know I’ve done my job.”
“Getting a chance to collaborate with Billy and Steve for a second time was just incredible,” says Sam Hollander. “Miss Nobody, is one of my personal favorites to date. The pairing of Billy and a punk-disco backdrop takes me back sonically to long lost downtown NYC club nights that were full of dance floor genre swapping and blessedly devoid of rules.”
Billy, Steve, Tommy and Zakk are also exceptionally proud of “Running From The Ghost,” a multi-mood song with a widescreen quality that not only evokes the FM epics of the 1970s, but also hearkens back to more ambitious Generation X material like “Kiss Me Deadly,” “The Prime of Kenny Silvers,” and “Paradise West.” Like three of The Cage EP’s four cuts, it was co-written by Billy, Steve, Tommy, and Joe Janiak (who has penned hits for Ellie Goulding, Take That, Britney Spears, and Adam Lambert).
Billy: “It’s got all our influences. Steve’s prog rock, my punk influences, and back and forth. I understand Steve’s touchstones, and he understands mine. And that’s true of Tommy and Joe Janiak, too. Joe had that title, and I said, oh, that’s great, let’s make it about Steve and I running away from the era of our drug addictions, battling to put that in the rear-view mirror. So we put all of this into the song. We are running away from the ghost of that time. We are trying to keep the drug personas we had back in the day contained. It typifies a very interesting thing about these songs: They’re very much of the moment, but they are also dealing with things of the past, while simultaneously reaching into the future, like the song about my granddaughter.”
Wait…there’s a song on The Cage EP about Billy’s granddaughter? You mean, little Poppy Rebel, who has become the star of Billy Idol’s social media? That track would be “Rebel Like You,” which the not-so-informed listener might think was about, well, something else entirely, thanks to lyrics like, “You’re in your leather boots and black waistcoat/Looking just like me/Pretty blue eyes never seen the road/Ride along with me.”
Tommy: “I played it for my dad and asked him what he thought it was about, and he thought it might be about a stripper. And I’m like, no, it’s about his granddaughter. We were laughing in the studio at all the double meanings of the lines. But once you know about Billy and his granddaughter and how much he loves her, the lyrics make complete sense within that context.”
“It sounds like it could be about any fan. But Poppy came with her mum to my concert in Las Vegas around Halloween,” says Billy, “and she dressed up like me in the ‘Dancing With Myself’ video. This little tiny thing! So, funny enough, it’s about a little girl coming to see the show. It’s fantastic to be able to write a song featuring her. See, her name actually is Poppy Rebel. So she’s both a rebel like me, and literally, a Rebel.”
Billy’s status as a true icon and avatar of rock’n’roll isn’t the only connection The Cage EP has to music history: The EP is also released on the Dark Horse label – that’s right, the Dark Horse label – the legendary record company created by and for George Harrison, and now revived by his wife, Olivia, and son Dhani. “When you think of someone that’s going on the same roster as George Harrison, Ravi Shankar, Joe Strummer, Leon Russell, they’re all individuals that fit that bill – you’ve got to be a “Dark Horse” to be on Dark Horse Records. It makes complete sense,” says Dhani Harrison. “And, most importantly, the music’s fantastic. Billy is larger than life and he is authentic to his music – he is Billy Idol and there’s only one of him. I don’t know anyone of my generation who doesn’t have a soft spot for Billy Idol.”
46 years into his recording career, Billy Idol is still the ever-moving myth, the intellectual/feral internet-age bookwork/caveman of our dreams, finding modern language for the fiery, Eddie Cochran-meets-Ziggy Stardust rip’n’roar that he’s been making since he first stepped on stage. And that’s all on The Cage EP, four tracks that engage you like classic Idol, yet keep your eyebrows raised like that stuff you heard coming out of that teenagers’ car that just rolled down the street.
“Classic is what we were shooting for,” says co-producer Zakk Cervini. It’s loud guitars and live drums yet treated in such a way that it can live alongside music being made today. I asked myself, ‘If Billy was a brand-new artist today, what would he be making?’ And that’s what we shot for. One of the goals Tommy and I had was to help Billy and Steve make songs that would just go crazy live. This time around, we were all thinking, shows are back, the world is opening up again, this is exciting, we want new material that just goes off live. High energy, kickass great rock songs. That’s what we shot for, and I think that’s what we got.”
For more information, please contact Carla Sacks, Cami Opere or
Louis D'Adamio at Sacks & Co., 212.741.1000.