Billy Idol: The Punk Rock Icon who "Should Be Dead"

0:02Billy Idol:This is a Global Player original podcast.

0:12Hello and welcome to Full Disclosure, a podcast project designed to let me spend more time with interesting people than I would ever get on the radio show. Billy Idol, welcome. Thank you. it's um i was trying to work out how i would introduce you to younger listeners um who who may not be familiar with your heyday and it's such a cliche but all i can think of is this is what rock stars were always supposed to be like great but we will we'll we'll begin at the beginning um which is i mean a slightly unlikely beginning for somebody who ended up scaling that scaling the heights that you scaled. Born in Middlesex, in Stanmore, into quite a normal family, really.

1:01Billy Idol:Yes, yes, really. Yes, I was lucky, really. I had a lot of other people in punk rock. I mean, they came from broken homes. Exactly. I was really lucky. I had a very sort of, yeah, normal upbringing, really. But that doesn't mean to say that you don't want to do something interesting with your life or it necessarily means everything's hunky-dory or whatever it is. No, of course not. You've got inner sort of rages and demons and stuff like that. But Dad was a traveling salesman. And Mum, I think, had been a nurse, but she was pretty much a housewife by the time you came along. Yes, yes. And later on, she worked with my dad.

1:44Billy Idol:They had a couple of little companies. and my dad had a tool hide by company where he sold and hired you know power tools and then my mum ran a ladder hire version of it so it's kind of great because i saw my mum in action you know really working a business so i never had a it gave me a lot of respect yes for uh women and everything and my mother was very accomplished and and uh yeah we um it's a funny thing about this day and age is that a lot of the research that i do for things like this will involve relying largely on the internet so it's possible i'm going to say things to you in the course of the next hour or so and you're going to say no that's simply not true that never happened at all i don't know where on earth that came from so we'll begin that possible process with with the observation that your mother was a very religious woman yeah oh yes well that bit's true oh yeah okay mum was uh yes so initially she was cat well she was she always thought of herself as a catholic right no she was uh went to an english high church yeah which is almost she always pointed out to me it's the catholic church of england i was but mum it's you had to become a protestant to marry my dad oh no dear it's the catholic church okay yeah so yeah she was she was yes she's very so bells and smells how did that impact on you did you go to church yourself did you yeah i went to sunday school and everything so of course i know all the biblical stories and everything and in fact i liked it because i like history so i liked i like things like learning about yeah the history of the romans or that period of first century Israel, and then what was Jesus actually doing?

3:30Billy Idol:You know, that would intrigue me, even as a child, you know. This would be presumably after you come back from the States, because the first two years of your life in Middlesex, I presume you can't remember much. Yeah, no, no, of course not. First memories are of Long Island, really, of America. Which is something else I didn't know. That was where the dad had quite a peripatetic childhood, really. I mean, and your dad, what was he doing? chasing the jackpot business-wise, or was he just a sort of... Well, he'd had some sort of bad deal with a company in England where they promised him if he built up this company...

4:05Billy Idol:He's a salesman. Yes. If he built up the sales force, and he went from himself to like 40 salesmen, if he'd built that up, they'd make him a director, and then they reneged on that. So I don't know if it was something to do with that, or we had a lot of Irish relatives. My mother's Irish, so we had a lot of Irish relatives, O'Sullivan's, living in New York state, your tri-state area, New Jersey. So I don't know if it was because of that that they just decided to try America, but then after about three years with Dad, super British, he wanted to come back. He had enough. So you remember bits of it.

4:41Billy Idol:Which was great for me because we came back just as the Beatles, the Stones, and all that was taken off. So it was like I sort of was a I was a foreigner. And but then what really grabbed me was the music that I was hearing. Tough, though, to arrive, presumably with a with a with an accent. Other kids would have. Yeah, it's the American kid. Give the ball, give the ball to the American kids so we can hack him down. You were the you were the crew cut. Not, you know, I had sneakers, not plimsolls. Yeah. All that sort of stuff, you know, and I didn't know how to play. i'm american football or baseball you know i didn't so a bit of an outsider then a bit of an outsider yeah you know but uh i quickly lost my american accent consciously you thought i want to fit in or because it's not i mean well yeah you know because yeah they were calling me the american kid and i'm i was british you know in fact that's one of the funny things that got me about america because in america they were lionizing the american revolution really more than the Civil War.

5:43Billy Idol:I think they were avoiding the Civil War or Disney in that way because they, you know, they, because the civil rights, they were kind of, they were lionizing the, you know, 1776 sort of thing. And they, of course, all the English were fops, you know. So I'd be going like, this is terrible. A bunch of fops, you know, and Americans are like running rings around the stupid bridge on the, the swamp fox and that. So, but I was glad to you know come back to England and then watch the Beatles and people take off and then you know be super knocked out than a British did you respond more to music than other children of your age I mean did I mean it's easy to mythologize the childhood of someone who's gone on to do what you've done but did you did you have a kind of musical language of your own from an early stage yeah did really I mean even as a little child someone had given me um it was text written text written either narrating stories of the wild west because he was a he was a country singer or singing uh country songs like uh country western really yeah like uh the ballad of billy the kid and uh streets of laredo and stuff like that i really liked my mother listened to uh jazz she loved jazz she loved she loved duke ellington Count Basie Ella Fitzgerald Dinah Washington and then she had a number like she had Richard Burton doing Camelot you know so I wonder what the king is thinking tonight he's born so you know I really saw oh man you can speak sing yes that's one thing I learned from Richard Burton oh you can actually have a career speak singing you don't actually have to if you can put your personality across I don't know so but yeah you don't have to be a choir boy to carry a tune so you know a lot of that sort of early music, I don't know, but it sort of set me up for liking the guitar, the guitar and piano, I suppose, more than the saxophone was that I liked, I liked this sort of, and then once I heard the music that was coming off the radio in England, it was all, yes, I fell in love with rock and roll, you know.

7:57So there was lots of music in the house? Yes.

8:00Billy Idol:And any instruments? Well, my mum played a piano, but we didn't have a piano in the house. but she had initially learned to play the piano when she was a child. So you're growing up in Dorking. You have shed your American accent. You've grown your hair out a little bit. You've become a, I don't think you were ever a model schoolboy, were you? But if you liked a subject, you could excel in it. Yes, I think even though they didn't know about ADD in those days, that's pretty much what I think was going on, that if I liked a subject, I could do it. If I didn't like it, I had a terrible time with it.

8:32and the love of rock music is established from a very early stage you move to the local from primary school in Dorking you go to the you go to a different Church of England primary school and and this is where at seven you started to learn the drums I did initially my my granddad

8:49Billy Idol:Irish granddad was had played the drums you know he's a drumming a Ringo Starr snare drum when I was about eight or something so I did start learning the drums at first I got like a big bass drum but then after a couple of years I started realizing oh the people at the front are writing the songs people playing the instruments are writing the songs that's what you really want to be doing you know very young though to be having these kind of I was already dreaming about from seven years on I was dreaming about being in a group and writing songs and being at the front from the age of about nine started to think about there was even some kids who at school they must have left the primary school but they came back and they did a gig in the playground and I could see how all the girls you know were like really interested and also the thing was they it was their winkle pickers were as important as the music they were playing and the clothes in England your clothes are as important as the music so everything appealed to you but at a very young age why do you think that was normally you'd hit puberty before you started even noticing things like that i don't know i don't know why um one of my granddaughters is a little like that she loves stop everything what is this song and she's only four now you know three so she was listening to the lyrics of jolene saying why is jolene upset why is she she was trying she was trying to you know take it all in you know and how did mom and dad respond to this i mean did they recognize that you were precocious or did they just think you're a bit strange I don't know really I suppose I suppose at first it didn't really you know would it wouldn't be something they would worry about no of course because you're getting on with everything else as well you're playing football you're doing your lessons yeah I'm like a normal child and everything but yes I'm like I started to make up fake albums you know I started to I want to cry terrible eyesight okay so one of them was about how it's a concept album about all about i you know what was wrong with my eyes so blurry vision it was called i was like 10 years old and i had each track had something to do with how shitty my eyes are but yeah i was already thinking about albums and you know yes how many songs would be on an album because there was always about nine songs or 10 songs on an album and what did you have in your collection because this is something else i struggle to explain to my kids that you you what you could listen to, apart from the radio, was incredibly limited because things were so expensive.

11:21The idea that you can just go on to Spotify now and listen to pretty much every album that has ever been recorded for your generation and for my generation, I mean, it's almost impossible to imagine what that would be like for the youngsters today. So what access did you actually have to recorded music? Did you get little cassettes from Woolworths? Or what can you remember?

11:43Billy Idol:Well at some point I got some sort of like little dance set, record player you know, that because I started by, I bought She Loves You, that was the first record I bought when I was seven, six shillings and thrums. I was going to buy From Me To You but it was slipping down the charts. I didn't have quite enough pocket money and that's one thing my parents weren't going to pay for the music. I saved up the money in the next song and I already believed in the Beatles already i believe that the next song they do would be great because i just i don't know what it was immediately i believed in so uh and the next song was she loves you it was great i mean what other song began with on the drums nothing in those days they were doing all these things nobody else was doing and and you were already aware of that at such a somehow yeah you know you started to realize just how especially if you listened yeah because i would start uh the one thing you could do was go back to the 50s you know yes and they did talk about who they liked from the 50s buddy holly the elvis little richard you know bo diddley or whatever you know so he i did listen i did realize also buddy holly was still having hits in the early 60s because they'd they'd taken some of his demos and put electric instruments to it okay so he was having hints with peggy sue got married and a couple of other songs, What To Do.

13:06Billy Idol:So you were still hearing what came before the Beatles a little bit. Like Gene Vincent had come to England and was living here, I think, at one point, or living in Germany. But so you kind of, yeah, there was a touchstone back to what had come before. And they were kind of also, I mean, the Stones were doing, their first song was Chuck Berry. So you're kind of hearing these bands, the English bands, doing what had come before as well. Well, you are, but an awful lot of people wouldn't be aware of the heritage or the lineage or the sort of evolution of the sound. Well, they were talking about, I just come from America, and they were talking how much they loved American music.

13:43Billy Idol:So, you know, there was a, it made me feel at home a bit, I think. Okay. Well, you sound like, almost as if it was a machine rather than a sound, if it was a machine rather than music, it sounds like you wanted to take it apart so that you could put it back together again. and you wanted to understand all the different bits and bobs. Yeah, a little bit. Yeah, just trying to, yes, I was interested. Also, the way the Beatles and that talked about other musicians, they talk about Roy Orbison, how serious he was as a musician. They talked about their musicianship a lot and how important that was and things like that, you know, and just...

14:21And what would happen, Billy, to you when you were listening at a very young age, really, in comparison to most of your peer group, when you were listening to something that you thought was very special like she loves you for example what would actually happen to you what would be the the relationship that you had with

14:37Billy Idol:the music well i would start dreaming about doing it myself was what was what i was doing you know i would uh i would listen to radio luxembourg for start because they either the most of the british radio wasn't playing rock and roll music no there was just uh yeah yeah the radio i mean i think there was some saturday morning show with it where they did play some rock and roll but in general they didn't play i think i was listening to radio luxembourg at night underneath the sheets you know with it fading in and out you know and i was really little i mean i was i was kind of uh you know seven eight nine doing that you know and then you get to ten and you decide that drumming is far too um background yeah that if you really wanted to get somewhere you know and uh yeah you You had to, yeah.

15:26Billy Idol:So I got a guitar and I started to teach myself. The guitar, you know. And was it a solitary process? Did you have friends that shared any of these enthusiasms or were you pretty much... Actually, over time, yeah, I had a friend. I would go around to his house. He had all the Stones singles. Okay, or his dad did. So I would take my Beatles singles over to him and we would have a playoff and things like that. And that's probably, I was eight or nine, you know. and so i was looking out and finding other people who were kind of interested in the same thing and simpatico it's not i mean you'll forgive me because my age means that i have quite a cliched understanding of the punk movement but the the this is this is not what i associate with punk is this this attention to detail this musicianship this um uh interest in in i mean the cliche for punk is that everybody just turned up on stage only able to play about three chords and just started screaming.

16:23But for you, musicianship was clearly crucial from the very, very start.

16:27Billy Idol:Well, you kind of, yeah, I mean, you sort of understood there was a serious nature to playing an instrument that you could, you know, that was important. But at the same time, over time, you know, I was sort of a teenager as the sort of progressive rock and the blues thing was going on, you know, so cream and all that. And then later on, when I was 12 and a half, I started going to rock concerts. I think I saw Black Sabbath one month before their first album came out, you know, in Worthingtown Hall. Because I knew I was friendly with the kids the year above me at school because I would see them carrying albums and I'd started and somehow started to talk to them.

17:10Billy Idol:So they said, why don't you come with us when we go to watch your gig? You know, so I started to go with with these older boys and we would go every week or whatever, you know, whatever was on. I'd do a double paper round so I had enough money to either buy an album and later on a tab of acid. Much later on, I hope. Yes, it was a teenager. We should mention that the new documentary film is called Billy Idol Should Be Dead. And an early indication there perhaps of why that title applies to the new documentary. But we'll get to that a little later. So were you now, I mean, there's a difference between dreaming and planning, isn't there?

17:50so what what sort of age were you when you began to seriously think no this isn't just a pipe dream this is actually what i'm going to do i'm going well for a long time i thought there's no chance

18:00Billy Idol:right that's what i thought because the musicianship in the 60s was very i mean of course was really high level a lot of like jimmy page and people session people so you kind of knew wow they're really good how could we but punk rock i started to listen to the velvet underground and when the Beatles broke up really, I started to look for other things and I started to get into the Velvet Underground and then Iggy Iggy and the New York Dolls and of course this music was a lot more easier to play and it started to really make sense to us too that a lot of my friends I got friendly with a lot of people.

18:42Billy Idol:I moved up to Bromley from Worthing in 1970, and I started to become friendly with a load of people who ended up being in Susie and the Banshees. Okay. And stuff like that. So we were all kind of super into music. All we did was go and see groups. I don't know, Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, whoever it was. We were just at Roxy Music. You know, as things, David Bowie. As things went on, we're just starting to follow everything and start, you know, and somewhere we're dreaming about doing it. We're just looking for this. We're looking for an opening. Yeah. And it just wasn't happening. And in a way, you were kind of, this opening's not.

19:23And then suddenly, we heard about the Pistols.

19:26Billy Idol:We saw, my friends saw the Pistols. I was down at university and they sent me a postcard saying, you've seen the band we've been waiting for. Oh, wow. because we're watching what's going on in CBGB so one of seen like that of our own we've seen the band we've been waiting for get back up here sir London there's a Bromley connection as well with the Sex Pistols yeah well yeah then so I started to come up and watch them at the 100 Club the 7 April whatever it was 76 and then quite quickly I was once I saw them I went all you got it was already in a little group of university all you've got to do is get up there and do it that's what they were showing you and you could see this this with oh it was the youth uh it was our time and our people were starting to speak about what was happening to us and um you just went this is it you know this is it this is what we're waiting for it doesn't matter whether this is big or goes big or if it lasts six months great if it lasts a year great two years we're just going to do it and that's kind of what I told myself and then I'll start to look for other people I was nearly going to be in the shoes in the banshees I was nearly going to be the guitarist but I just I really wasn't good I knew I wasn't good enough because I my whole thing was I was really learning the guitar guitar to give me something to sing to you know I wasn't really ever thinking I'm gonna be a lead guitarist I was always thinking about being a singer you know and what was your aesthetic at this point we were you now paying an awful lot of attention to the look we yeah we were still of course we were starting to go up to london and um we'd been doing that in the 70s early 70s and we started to we knew about too fast to live too young to die which turned into sex which turned into seditionaries and turned into world's end you know with vivian westwood and malcolm claren there became a bit of a focal point that was where people were meeting up was to do with through the clothes shop and then you start to realize there are other people into this scene like us but it's very small yeah but that didn't matter what mattered was it it was it was the right thing and it was authentic it was real then to you it's sports greatest soap opera and we've got your vip pass to all the drama this is up to speed your new formula one podcast with me will buxton david coulthard naomi schiff and Jolie Sharp.

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22:26there's a sense of the planets aligning here isn't there in that you've got this musical background you found your tribe albeit that when you found your tribe you weren't quite sure where the tribe was going and then it's the pistols that come along and galvanize that sort of those raw materials into something that you thought you could turn into something that would be yours

22:48Billy Idol:yeah and i started to uh yeah we started to realize as around the sort of environs of london and there were other little groups of people. And you start to realize, oh, that's what we've got to connect with, these other groups of people who were into. And then you start, you know, I put an advert in the paper in Melody Maker because it was such a small scene. How are you going to read? And through that, I met Tony James. And then I started to find out that he'd been in this group, London SS, with Mick Jones. and so I started to you know hear a band Brian James and the Damned they were all in this little group which and they'd split up and started you know Brian Jones was starting the Damned you know Mick Jones was starting the Clash and then with Tony James we began we got into this group Chelsea at first and then through Chelsea we started writing songs for Chelsea and really they were always for me to sing that's what we were kind of back we were planning on We weren't going to be in Chelsea very long.

23:51Billy Idol:By November 76, we'd left Chelsea and started Generation X. Which is the kind of beginning of the period in your life where many people listening to this will know you and know your work. But I want to back up a little bit, if I may. Was there any anxiety just as a teenager? Because you're talking about walking into rooms full of what would strike someone like me as very, very cool people. And quite often when you walk into a room full of very, very cool people, your first thought is, are they cooler than me? Did you ever suffer from that kind of thing? Or were you fairly confident from the start that you were one of the very, very cool people?

24:31Billy Idol:Well, no, I mean, I thought the Pistols were three years older than me. They just were very world, worldly. Yeah. You know, that's what I thought. I'm actually I'm a couple of months older than Johnny Rotten. Gosh. But for a first, I thought these guys must be three years older than me. Yeah, yeah. Because they just, you know, so there was a little bit of that. they were all into the clothes John obviously Johnny had created his own look you know the safety pins and everything but with Vivian Westwood I think yeah but I think some of it was I think he was doing that pre he was the he he had some old blazer that it was falling apart that he'd safety pin together and and the I hate Pink Floyd t-shirt things like that we're all him you know and you you just watch that and think I can do this not only can I do this I have to do this yeah kind of yeah this is it you know well I'm going for it I'm gonna do it there won't be another child anyways there was that thing of maybe it'll only last six months maybe a year maybe two years and we're gonna I'm gonna do it you know here we are 50 years later yeah I have had it mom and dad greet let's start with the decision to drop out of university well they were mortified really I mean because they thought I was going normal you know when when it when we kind of because we went through this because Bowie went through this pinups stage where he wore suits yes so we we'd I'd have really long hair you know before this and then we suddenly cut our hair really sure and kind of wearing suits and things so you've got a straight you got and then I went and I tried harder at school because I didn't want to get a job you know sure things like that kind of like swing in the lead release looking for this chance you know and are the other thing I thought when I did go to I got into university such University and I thought well I'm I'm gonna get in a group down there for starters and that's what I kind of did we just played in the cafeteria on a Friday night and I couldn't get them to do punk rock music so but I could get them to do 60s so I kind of did like a slow to slow down it was a Larry Williams song the Beatles used to do I like Larry Williams a lot and I did we've got to get out of this place the animals got like to Eric Burden and and then And also Gloria Vem, I liked Van Morrison.

26:47Billy Idol:So I did those. That's the three numbers I was doing in this little group. So university was never likely to stick? Not really. If this came along, if anything musical came along. It was a bit like I was doing things in case. Yeah, sure. Because you'd done some driving for your dad, I think, for your dad's business. You'd had a little taste of what the... I always think of the kinks when we start talking about going down that road of the nine to five going down that that that life of looking like everybody else it's I think Ray Davis probably nails that better than almost anybody yeah it's true and you knew you didn't want that I was listening to all that I'm sure he's growing up with the kinks yeah everybody so I know exactly what you're talking about and that wasn't for you you knew that in your boat well it's a little bit to do with the ADD thing which you know I didn't know about but i knew that i if i if i like something i can do it and uh well i love music and even though i knew it wasn't going to be easy and it's not easy writing songs necessarily or you don't even know if you can do it that's the other thing when you start out you're not really sure if you can pull it off you know you don't really know if you can do it you just just you're just sort of chancing your arm you're really clear on the chronology you could have been forgiven for um getting your dates mixed up or getting confused but i just want to clarify it so when you're when you're about 18 so it'd be in 1973 you'd started knocking around with people like susan balian who would become yes steve steve bailey um and you were were you billy idol yet you were you were still um william broad will will or bill or what did people call you from that era yeah bill just bill so but you are looking at clothes design you are now beginning to think about creativity in other ways well yeah yeah we were following kind of uh yeah we were sort of following the scene along and looking for what we kind of where you dug about yeah what was going on and uh and that looking for where it was going as well really looking for where it's going because and then starting to realize our time was coming you know well what are we going to say So here's one of the things that you might tell me is bollocks, all right, because it comes on the Internet, is that the name Idol comes from a chemistry teacher calling you Idol.

29:05Well, that's, yes.

29:06Billy Idol:Initially, we used to go to this lesbian club, Louise's, that was off Oxford Street. Yeah. And, you know, you had to have an identity card. So, yes, remembering that teacher, Bill Price, his name was, who wrote in capital letters on my third form report, because I got like 10 out of 100 chemistry. William is I-D-L-E and so I was at first on this Louise's card I was Billy I-D-L-E Wow and then Caroline Kuhn was because we were following the pistols we got this name the Bromley a number of us we didn't all come from Bromley really but some of us came from Bromley so she was calling us the Bromley contingent and then she did wanted to do a she was doing a story about who was following the pistols really and so she interviewed us and when she was talking to me on the phone she said what do you want to be called in this um in this interview and I said well uh I was calling myself Billy IDLE you know Billy Idol on and she said well you know it's Eric Idol's real name I went oh she said well look you've got 24 hours call me back and tell me in 24 hours what you want me to call so I thought about it for 24 hours and the next one i called the backup i said billy idol you know and the rest is history it's a bit like be your own hero or something it's really like ridiculous i thought this is really daft but at the same time everyone was changing their name johnny rotten or whatever so i just thought yeah i'll be my own hero and if i can't be idle and there was this chap in the dolls billy doll yeah billy mercy a billy doll he was and i thought well billy idol's not so different anyway i was talking myself into it i love the idea that part of the reasoning behind that was the fact that idol was a real name that idol spelt the other way idle was a real name i don't want that i want to because people won't understand it's not it's not a pun or a joke or a yes i'd want them to know that this is a decision that i've made rather than just something i was born with i suppose so yeah i love that things start happening quite quickly so when did you first um bleach your hair well i was dying my hair black you see and what's what was what was the natural color can you remember it's a bit housey brown a bit of red in it because my mother's irish and it's a bit of red um i was i was saying and one day i was going to uh i was going to do it with blue highlights.

31:44Billy Idol:And I thought, I'll do it black with blue highlights, like Elvis and New Hawaii or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then the girl who was dyeing my hair, she reached in, she'd bleached it, and then she'd reached into a bag to get the blue highlights, because you have to bleach it first, put the blue highlights, and then put the black. And she reached into a bag and went, oh, I don't have the blue highlights. So I sort of looked in the mirror and went, well, this doesn't look that bad. and I was going for a rehearsal with Chelsea that evening. So I went to the rehearsal, and as soon as I walked in the door, Gene October, who was the lead singer in Chelsea, was saying, you're not keeping your hair like that, are you?

32:27Billy Idol:And I went, well, I just was going to do the blue, I was trying to tell him about the blue height. He said, because you can't keep it like that. And I went, he's just, I was going to read that. No, you're not keeping it like that. and then after a little bit I went he's getting too upset I'm going to keep it like this so you look like the front man is what he's thinking I was blowing him away and then so next time I just got there to bleach it a bit more and then I did it a couple of times I did it red one time and I don't know but I went back to the bleached hair with the roots coming through the roots coming through with and and and it is now time around this point for you to become the front man how this will sound like a strange question but I'm really interested to know how do you know you're good when you're in that kind of world so well you don't really you see that's the thing you just have to you sort of like you're sort of like it's like my skinhead friends yeah so with a wishing on a dog and they used to talk about wish I could find a I'm wishing I'm wishing I find a dog it's like you're wishing yeah wishing it's gonna happen You know, you really don't know.

33:37Billy Idol:But you've just got to go for it. And you're just kind of deciding that's the job I want to do. I want to be the singer, even though I kind of knew I haven't got the greatest voice. But you kind of knew you just kind of had to somewhere believe in yourself, sort of like that over time you'd get better or whatever. You know, you just and this thing about punk was so perfect because you didn't have to be a great singer. Sure. you didn't have to be the greatest guitarist in fact you didn't have to hardly know how to play it was like this is great you could really get away with three chords and stuff like that in fact then it makes you think about even the Beatles used to talk about we're trying to write a song with one note yeah even silly love songs silly love even that he's trying to write if only we could write a song on one chord with one note they're kind of dreaming about it a bit like that's what punk's all about one chord one note it's like yeah we're just so it's a little bit like that we've just sort of and then it was just our chance of saying something too for our generation i think that's what we felt about punk that there was nothing new happening for our our time and that this was it this is what was going to say something about our time and the pistols were already writing anthems for our I mean anarchy was like when you heard that because the first when I first saw the pistols I mean they were just doing covers you know they weren't doing their own numbers and then maybe the second time or third time I went to the hundred Club they plugged in pretty vacant and it was like yeah wait a minute what what's this this isn't a cover they're writing their own songs and they're great and then the next week after that they did anarchy for the first time and when I even heard that you just went and then anarchy and you went oh my god this is a huge huge anthem and it was a bit like that you know you're watching the other people start as the clash start writing their songs and the damned and then there were there we were generation X right now our version and so it must have been significant that other people could see the front man in you most obviously i suppose to start with tony james yeah tony could really see i think tony tony believed right from the start kind of thing that i could do it you know and and then you sign up how did you find john and bob the drummer and the guitarist was that another advert or were they part of the actually i went one night i was hanging out with a bunch of my friends and went to a youth club in the fulham in fulham yeah and there was this little band playing and he was really doing deep purple uh led zeppelin you know jimmy hendrix's but i could see that bob durwood andrews was a great guitarist play and i tried to talk to him and he thought you know because he he's he had long hair and stuff he thought that we were trying to beat him up it was quite intimidating to talk to you about being come and you know so he came on all i got through but he came and auditioned and he was great and um we'd already uh found mark laugh i think through through chelsea or generation and so we had the bonds we had derwood he was a really good guitarist that's you knew you needed a final ingredient artist yeah because um you just knew you needed someone great you know that's one of the you know you just need someone great that's just what bowie and everybody had shown you that course guitarist has got to be great and and first gig december 76 central school of art and design i mean do you remember it was it burnt in your memory yeah i can kind of i don't remember much of it but i can remember doing that because uh did you know did you know this is it this will work this is right no you don't you didn't really just had to go for it and of course you know uh he kind of you know at first yeah well you know at first there wasn't competition between the different groups because we were all so new you know but uh as the record companies got interested once the pistols started to put out records once they went on the grundy show and swore on there and then that lorry driver put his boot through the television and filth and the fury was on the you know every headline was about the pistols that evening and next day on the newspapers every kit in england wanted to either be in a punk rock group or be a punk rocker so it was like overnight something we never expected boom it just went mega it's like a wave appears behind you i mean you're already there and whoosh you're off and then every record company wanted the one of their own punk rock group and so we've been turning down record companies the first year generation X was going we were saying no for a long time.

38:34You signed to Chrysalis I think didn't you? Yeah we were we wanted an