“I should be dead, but someone up there likes me.” Billy Idol looks back on his wild adventures in ’80s New York, including the night he met David Bowie while covered in his own vomit

The title of the new Billy Idol documentary, Billy Idol Should Be Dead, speaks volumes about the English rocker’s uninhibited and incessantly reckless embrace of hedonism and debauchery at the peak of his fame. Idol had a reasonably profitable profession in England with London punks Generation X -once dismissed as “really dreadful garbage” by Elton John – who scored three Top 40 singles and one Top 30 album in the UK earlier than disbanding in 1981. But it was solely after he relocated to New York that he actually realised his potential, with the invaluable help of guitarist Steve Stevens, and profession steerage from Kiss‘ wily supervisor Bill Aucoin, who inspired his new shopper’s reinvention as an MTV-friendly pop-punk-New Wave cartoon character.

“One of the things Bill Aucoin told me was, ‘New York’s bankrupt. Anything goes’,” Idol, now 70, recollects in a brand new interview with The Times. “It was a post-apocalyptic place, like the bomb had been dropped and we were living in the rubble. The cops didn’t care about anything. They were looking for the real criminals – unlike England, where the police were always bothering people like us.”

Idol’s first solo album, 1982’s Billy Idol, bought half one million copies in the US, and spawned two hit singles, Hot In The City and White Wedding, which made the singer a family title. His second album, 1983’s Rebel Yell, was a good higher business success, promoting two million copies in the US alone. Unfortunately, this success additionally enabled him to develop a ferocious cocaine behavior and turned him into, in his own phrases, a “sexual maniac”. One of the extra memorable quotes in his new movies finds him telling an interview “I just wanna get screwed to death”.

“The free love of the Sixties was still happening,” he tells The Times. “We’d heard about this thing called Aids but until Magic Johnson [the American basketball star] got it in about 1991 no one cared. Until that point, it was just our generation’s time. We were very young and having fun with it.”

“There was a no-holds-barred feeling about the eighties,” he recalled to Classic Rock in 2016. “We were partying as if it was the end of the world, as if tomorrow there’d be no more drugs and there’d be no more fun. There would be nothing. We were all living in a fool’s paradise.”

In 1984, Idol nearly died of a heroin overdose while back in London. Upon his return to the US he sought to kick his dependancy to heroin by smoking crack. This did not go terribly nicely, as one may think.