Billy Idol’s favourite Talking Heads song
Look at Billy Idol, then look at Talking Heads. If you were told one of them was CBGB mainstays that helped define the sound of punk as we know it today, who would you assume was being talked about? The fierce-looking young man with the spiked-up blond crew cut whose sneer was second to none? Or the kids that look as physically intimidating as your D&D group does in real life? Well, looks can be deceiving, and Billy Idol proved that. The Stanmore native only moved to New York to begin his glossy, big-budget solo career as a teen idol with all the punk cred of Englebert Humperdinck.
That said, both Idol and the Heads went mainstream at around the same time. Byrne’s group of post-punk weirdos had been creeping closer to breaking out as the 1970s became the ‘80s. Albums like Fear of Music and Remain In Light, along with singles like ‘Take Me To The River’ and especially ‘Once In A Lifetime’, grazed the top 20 of their respective charts. In the meantime, Idol had already reached the mainstream himself as the lead singer of “punk” band Generation X.
In the early ‘80s, his management team decided that he was too much of a star to be hemmed in by something as trivial as a band and that a solo breakout was the way to go. Fair play to them, though; they were right. Two of his early singles, ‘Dancing With Myself’ and ‘White Wedding’, would make a dent on the charts initially but would become sensations on the nascent MTV, much in the same way ‘Once In A Lifetime’ would colonise the channel thanks to its unforgettable video.
For Idol, this would culminate in his biggest success, Rebel Yell, in 1983, the same year that the Head would also strike gold with a song very close to Idol’s heart.
During a 2021 interview with BBC Radio 2, Idol spoke of the Heads’ pop masterwork Speaking in Tongues. “It’s really interesting the move that the Talking Heads made,” he said. “Initially, I first heard about them adventuring punk, you know. Things like ‘Psycho Killer’, which had some kind of funky thing but nothing like what they got into the Remain In Light album and then later on in things like ‘Burning Down the House’.”
Inadvertently, Idol has hit the core difference between him and the Heads on the, erm, head. Idol and his team took the punk sound and made it mainstream. It’s arguable that the Heads did the opposite, with Byrne and Co taking the mainstream sound and punking it up. What else is a track like ‘Burning Down The House’ but the sound of someone taking the dancefloor-filling funk-pop of the time and creating something that no one else could make other than the Talking Heads?
It’s the ultimate way to have your cake and eat it, too, and God bless him; Idol would try to learn from it. 1993’s Cyberpunk was a hugely ambitious concept album that took his interest in technology, the work of William Burroughs and the societal unrest of the early ‘90s and presented it in a way that’s uniquely him. It was a catastrophe, but it’s memorable and his own, which makes it quite possibly the most punk rock thing Idol’s done in his entire career.
