about the inspiration for one or two of his hits.
The found inspiration for one of his songs – Hot in the City – when he was, er, hot in the city in more ways than one.
It was on the humid streets of City that the rocker thought up this raunchy, drum-heavy 1982 hit.
It’s no wonder the music video sees him strip down as women writhe around on the floor in leather lingerie – as he’s just made a fairly explicit sexual confession about how he was feeling while writing this song.
He’d just moved to the Big Apple from London, and was inspired by the club scene, drippingly-hot air and his own desires.
‘I was literally hot in the city but also I felt sexually alive. I was sexually hot,’ he toldin a recent interview.
‘I remember one night I was walking down some stairs and thought of a hit single Nick Gilder had a couple of years earlier, “Hot Child in the City.”
‘There’s no refraction on his song. I thought, “Why’d you need the child? You could do a song Hot in the City, because not only is it f***ing blazing hot, I’m hot.”
A year later in 1983 – when Billy had a girlfriend he was truly, very into – Rebel Yell was born.
‘I was thinking about my girlfriend,’ he confessed, talking about how he wrote it.
‘She was a dancer, so I made it about the sexual cry of love; this orgasmic cry of love and how great women were.
‘That’s what I was singing about because I was so in love with her. I just wanted to lionize our relationship.’
That becomes clear when you listen to the lyrics of the now-classic anthem, as the chorus famously goes: ‘With a rebel yell she cried more, more, more / In the midnight hour, babe, more, more, more.’
The Dancing with Myself hitmaker thought of the name for Rebel Yell – also his album title – in perhaps the most rockstar way possible; when he was at a party hosted by a member of the Rolling Stones.
At one point in the evening, he locked eyes on Ronnie Wood, Mick Jagger, and Keith Richard, who were all drinking from a bottle which was labelled with a picture of a cavalry officer in a Confederate outfit, and some writing which read: ‘How is it called Rebel Yell?’
After asking the rockers in front of him whether they got the drink made for the party, they said no. He then asked if they would make a song or an album called Rebel Yell. They said no again, and Billy was set on it.
Billy first garnered fame in the 1970s in London’s punk rock scene as the lead singer in Generation X, and shot to international heights after pursuing a solo career in the early eighties.
Born William Michael Albert Broad, Billy’s stage name cames from a teacher, who once wrote on a paper he submitted: ‘Billy is idle.’
Not wanting to be confused with actor Eric Idle, Billy changed the spelling to Idol.
