Billy Idol took his stage name from a school report calling him idle
A chemistry teacher named Bill Price once wrote that young William Broad was idle. The pupil, who admits he hated the subject, turned the insult into a stage name, swapping the spelling partly because Monty Python already had an Eric Idle. As Billy Idol, he became one of MTV's first stars.
Broad was born in Stanmore, north-west London, on 30 November 1955, to a mother from Cork and a salesman father from Birmingham. The family spent four years on Long Island in his early childhood before settling back in England. He started a philosophy and literature degree at the University of Sussex in 1975 but left after a year, joining the Bromley Contingent, a band of Sex Pistols fans who followed the group from gig to gig.
In late 1976 he joined a new band, Chelsea, as guitarist, and its singer remade his look: contact lenses instead of glasses, and bleached, cropped hair. After a few weeks Idol and bassist Tony James left to form Generation X, with Idol now singing. They were among the first punk acts on Top of the Pops, and unlike angrier peers openly admitted they loved the Beatles and the Stones.
In 1981 he moved to New York, teamed up with guitarist Steve Stevens, and rode the wave of British acts that MTV carried into America. White Wedding and a remade Dancing with Myself played constantly; the stunt in which a motorbike smashes through a church window was performed by a London courier. Rebel Yell, from 1983, went double platinum in the US, and his live cover of Mony Mony topped the American chart in 1987.
On 6 February 1990 he ran a stop sign on his motorbike and was hit by a car, needing a steel rod in his leg. The crash cost him a larger part in Oliver Stone's The Doors and the role of the liquid-metal villain in Terminator 2, for which James Cameron had wanted him first. Unable to walk, he was filmed from the waist up by David Fincher for Cradle of Love, which reached number two in the US. His 1993 album Cyberpunk, recorded at home on a Macintosh, was an early experiment in computer-made rock.
Source: Billy Idol
