If you’re familiar with Billy Idol’s music — and if you were listening in the 1980s, you surely remember “White Wedding,” “Eyes Without a Face,” “Dancing With Myself” and many others — then you probably know exactly what to expect from the new song Idol has written for “Billy Idol Should Be Dead,” a documentary about his stormy career and life.
It’ll be aggressive, guitar-driven and full of attitude, just like the snarling, punk-inspired rock songs that made him an MTV staple and earned him enough money to almost kill himself with drugs.
Right?
Wrong. “Dying to Live,” the song that closes the documentary, is a total rarity in Idol’s catalog. It’s intimate, even gentle, with an arrangement centered on piano and string quartet; if his smash 1983 solo album was called “Rebel Yell,” his new song could just as well be called “Grandpa’s Whisper.”
“The first time I saw the end of the movie with the song and with the strings and everything, I cried,” said Idol, who was born William Broad almost 70 years ago. “The song really brought out the drama of what we’d been talking about in the documentary — it enabled us to get what we were looking for, a kind of emotional crescendo.”
You can watch the song as it appears in the film here.
As the title suggests, “Billy Idol Should Be Dead” delves into the excesses that nearly killed Idol during his ’80s heyday. But it’s also a story of maturation and survival, which meant that another brassy rock anthem really wouldn’t be an effective coda.
“Setting Billy’s story and vocals in this environment allows him to reveal a vulnerability in his singing in a way that I’ve not really heard,” said J. Ralph, a composer, songwriter and activist who’s been nominated for three Oscars for his songs from documentaries. “Without the density of electronic music, of guitars and drums, you hear every nuance, every word. And you realize the profundity of this artist, not just the show, the bravado, the magic that we all know Billy for. This is something different, something very endearing, revealing, raw and vulnerable.”
When they were writing together, Idol thought about “Kings and Queens of the Underground,” an autobiographical song he’d written for a 2014 album of a the same name. “But I didn’t think it went deep enough,” he said. “And that’s what I was looking for. I knew we had to go a little bit deeper lyrically.”
The result is a chronicle of good times and regrets (“So many memories made/Wish I was there for them all”), set to an arrangement that reminded Idol of songs he loved by the Beatles and Marc Bolan; it is presented at the end of the film with its lyrics displayed on screen.
“We wanted to set it in a musical universe that brings out the complexities of this guy’s life,” Ralph said. “This is a very unique artist with a very unique trajectory: stratospheric highs, meteoric lows.”
Idol added, “I started out in 1976, so it’s been 50 years. I can really see the landscape of my life, and that’s what we were trying to evoke in the song.”
By the way, Idol put out a new album this year. It contains a version of “Dying to Live,” retitled “Dream Into It” and recorded with a full rock band. “But the orchestral version,” he said, “really takes the cake.”
This story first appeared in The Race Begins issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
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