Billy Idol was already a punk star and a rock star by the early Eighties. “Eyes Without a Face” made him a pop star. However behind the 1984 hit ballad’s romantic pulse, satiny sheen, and creamy melody lies a backstory involving freaky horror films, sexual transgressions, Idol held at gunpoint, and a mad sprint to the hospital.
Again within the early 1980’s, the previous Era X frontman spent a few years placing loads of daylight between himself and his British punk previous, together with relocating to the States and betting massive on solo stardom. His first solo efforts yielded explosive hits like “Mony Mony” and “White Wedding,” however the 1983 album Insurgent Yell shot him into an entire new stratosphere.
Order the expanded model of Billy Idol’s Insurgent Yell now.
Whereas the album is stacked with hits, what makes “Eyes Without a Face” stand out is the ex-punk’s peroxide Sinatra croon backed by warmly whooshing synths, a heartbeat bass line, and a tempo that always led radio DJs to segue it into The Automobiles’ contemporaneous smash “Drive”–one other post-New Wave mixture of melancholy and seduction. “Eyes Without A Face” discovered its strategy to No. 4, and the hit helped make him an arena-level act.
The music and lyrics
The music’s title resonated with classic movie buffs as Idol’s entree into the Prime 10 takes its title from the 1960 French horror film of the identical title. The movie facilities round a frightfully unhinged surgeon struggling to revive his disfigured daughter’s face with options from his homicide victims. It prompted fairly a stir in its day. After watching it, Idol dreamed up a melody to go together with its title.
It turned out Idol’s right-hand man, co-writer, and guitarist Steve Stevens had the proper music to match it. In a 2001 VH1 Storytellers efficiency, Stevens described listening to ‘50s pop chord progressions and deciding to “Idol-ize those chords, slow ‘em down, make ‘em sexy.”
However if you zero in on the verse lyrics, there isn’t a lot about stitching sections of varied folks collectively. It’s about dislocation of the extra emotional sort. In his 2014 autobiography, Dancing with Myself, Idol means that the music’s actual topic was his romance with Perri Lister, who sings the title in French (“Les Jeux Sans Visage”) on the refrain. He muses, “I used to tell people ‘Eyes Without a Face’ was a murder song. I wonder if I was aware that it was my hijinks and gradual infidelity that were killing Perri’s and my love story… It’s possible I was predicting our eventual dissolution.”
The video
The darkish irony behind the music even extends to the shoot for the gloriously creepy video that helped deliver Idol into America’s front room (It was No. 1 on MTV for six weeks). As soon as once more, his love of cult horror movies got here into play as Idol brainstormed a setting for the clip. “I recalled my affinity for the German Expressionist silent horror film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” he wrote, “and the strange, twisted nightmare sets suggested the psychotic world of the somnambulist killer.”
Even these unacquainted with Nineteen Twenties German cinema had been sufficiently transfixed by Idol’s disembodied head floating round, and the imposing presence of a phalanx of hooded, monastic-looking sorts. However for Idol, the true horror started the day after the video shoot, as a direct results of its calls for.
A go to to the hospital
The singer and his entourage had been in Tucson for a live performance. He’d had a pair of laborious contacts in his eyes for a day and a half because of the marathon video manufacturing, and fell asleep on the bottom exterior the venue, with the lenses nonetheless in. His impromptu nap was alarmingly interrupted by Tucson legislation enforcement pointing a gun at him and aggressively informing him that the grass wasn’t a mattress for “bums.”
It took the eventual intercession of Idol’s total touring firm to set the officer—clearly not an MTV devotee—straight. By this time, the contacts had been giving Idol far more to fret about. “The pain was intense and my eyes were gushing,” he wrote. Idol was hurried to a hospital as quick as wheels would deliver him. The scenario was so extreme he needed to cancel the live performance and ended up with bandages over his eyes for the subsequent two days, wanting like he was prepared for a remake of Les Yeux Sans Visage.
Idol’s self-described “twisted ballad” would have a seismic impact on his profession. It continues to resonate with youthful generations, cropping up in playlists and memes, a timeless addition to the canon of slow-burning, late-night love laments.
Order the expanded model of Billy Idol’s Insurgent Yell now.
