How Billy Idol’s opus turned punk into an “obvious love song”
The start of Billy Idol‘s music video for ‘Eyes Without A Face’ pans out like a daft meme.
If you play the video with subtitles on YouTube, the words “[soft rock]” creep into view. “In the midnight hour,” flashes up the first title card. A distant, almost menacingly small Idol begins to creep closer, singing melancholy about being “all out of hope”, on the cusp of falling apart, all it would take is one more heart-shattering event, or damning circumstance.
A bad break “could bring a fall”, Idol says. Is that what we think of when we think of punk?
Most of us, when we think of punk, consider stories like Fear’s infamous stint on SNL. We think of how punk is the energy of shaking and shattering the bars of oppression and societal submission. And if that’s the case, Idol certainly also walked the walk, having once been maddeningly tranquilised in a hotel in Thailand. But, amid all that, he also had a playful, tongue-in-cheek demeanour suited perfectly to the glossy sheen of dark aesthetics on the precipice of gothic fiction.
So why did Idol feel compelled to write something as close as possible to “an obvious love song”, if his game was ruffling feathers? Well, long story short, yes, that’s exactly why. But that’s not all. ‘Eyes Without A Face’ has all of those quintessential and familiar meme-esque Idol features and “obvious” love song conventions. But even the most generic, vague facilities become overshadowed by Idol’s stance of defiance. In the video, for instance, his dark attire and the fires around him signify societal disillusionment and his desire to call attention to his own bleak reality.
In a reference to Georges Franju’s 1960 film, Les Yeux Sans Visage, Idol plays with love song conventions to address a world that’s become soulless. And while it seems a little trivialised and typical of Idol’s playful style, it came from a very real place. A very punk place.
“I began to write words that, in some disguised form, spoke about my life in New York and a relationship gone wrong, on the edge of disintegrating into madness,” Idol once explained.
Continuing, he added: “Perhaps I was reflecting on my own touring infidelities. In a way, those can leave you feeling soulless, especially if you’re already in a relationship that you value but are degrading by looking elsewhere for additional sexual kicks.”
Les Yeux Sans Visage follows a particularly gruelling story about a doctor who tries to restore his daughter’s face by grafting on it the features of others after she was in a car crash. In the end (you guessed it), all that’s left that was originally hers is her eyes. There’s an obvious goriness there that Idol used as the basis of his experience in New York, and how, if you really look at it that way, all that you can recognise from the original charm of a once bustling, romantic city are the pieces hidden beneath the rubble of years of damaged tampering.
But Idol also drew inspiration from German expressionism, specifically The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, the “silent movie where everything was painted, so there was a psychotic element, because he was supposed to be some sort of serial killer”. But therein lies its true beauty; that things are inherently mad, soiled, corrupted, but only by definition of the opposing forces of hope and love.
So, yes – ‘Eyes Without A Face’ is a romantic ballad, one that immediately makes you feel soft around the edges the second it starts playing in the cereal aisle of the supermarket. One that makes you feel you’re in the 1980s as you regard a box of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. But it’s also arguably one of Idol’s most quintessentially punk songs, one that chewed on the parameters of the classic love song for his own personal expression, or rumination, on everything wrong about romance in modern society.
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