Billy Idol learns he has a long lost son from 1985 tour
In the new Billy Idol documentary, Billy Idol Should Be Dead, it was revealed that the musician has newly learnt that he has a long-lost adult son.
The discovery came to the musician through his daughter Bonnie, who was given a DNA test for Christmas. The 35-year-old explained in the documentary, “My husband just surprised me with a 23andMe, with a DNA test as a Christmas present.”
She re-lived the experience of finding another sibling out there in the world: “And then a few weeks later, I get the results back on the app and open it and I’m like, who is this? This Brant. And it says his info’s like, New York, 1985, looking for my bio dad. I was like, ‘What?'”
Idol and his two children, Bonnie and her 36-year-old half-brother Willem, had no idea that there was another member of the Idol family out in the world.
“I actually had a son that I didn’t realise,” Billy told the documentary, “who I fathered on the Rebel Yell tour without knowing it”.
Brant had also spent his life completely in the dark. He had believed someone else was his father until he accessed his family history via the popular DNA test. In the documentary, Brant expanded on this realisation, stating, “I was like, ‘Mom, is there a chance Mark might not be my biological father?’ And she’s like, ‘Well, it’s pretty crazy, but back in the day, we broke up and I actually spent a weekend with Billy Idol’.”
Billy Idol Should Be Dead, which reflects on his career to date as well as his personal life, premiered at Tribeca Film Festival in New York this month.
Idol had also recently hit the headlines after defending the artistic use of the swastika as an integral “part of punk performance art,” in solidarity with fellow musician Siouxsie Sioux. The ‘Rebel Yell’ singer explained, “They just didn’t understand the sort of London fashion performance art aspect of punk. We were reflecting back on the British society what they were doing to us by wearing these sort of political symbols.”
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