The Blindboy Podcast - Billy Idols Childhood Guitar

Episode Date: July 22, 2020

Hot Take, music and culture episode. A critical reapraisal of Billy Idols 1993 bizaare concept album about a computer that destroyed his mainstream career. Also a history of Cyberpunk Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Crack your back on your khaki checked rucksacks you jam-packed slatteries. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. If this is your first podcast and you're a new listener, go back to an earlier episode. Don't start with this one, okay? There's just too much for you to take in at this time and that's okay. If you're a regular listener, what's the crack? I'm up late recording this one.

I've just used some retinol eye cream. On my eyelids. To lubricate my blinking. Um. So this week's podcast is. It's a. It's kind of a music podcast. And it's kind of a philosophical.

Hot take podcast. I'm not quite sure. I think it's going to be a shortish podcast but i always say that and then they're not but we'll see how it goes this is going to be part music podcast part philosophy podcast 100 podcast hug okay so my days are currently taken up mostly with my twitch stream um which is my latest venture my latest venture during this pandemic several times a week i live stream at night times i'm making music playing video games live stream at night times i'm making music playing video games playing a video game called red dead redemption and i'm writing and performing a live musical to the events that are happening in the game i'm recording this live and putting it out live to an audience twitch.tv forward slash the blind by podcast you can see it tonight at half nine if you want i'm doing this wednesday

thursday friday saturday sunday tune in but anyway most of you have probably gotten a squint at it so far or seen some of the videos of what of what i'm doing and what one thing it's making me notice is what one thing it's making me notice is so i'm i'm able to play musical instruments live okay so i can play guitar i can play bass i wish i was better at piano i'm okay at piano i wish i was better i can do percussion but because i'm doing this as a live stream and people are watching I have to the skill I have to develop is I have to become more rapid and quicker as how quickly I reach the desired set of notes if I'm writing a fucking song live, I'm trying to write a song live, songwriting as a process, it takes a long time because I've got a guitar or a keyboard and I'm messing around with cards to find the right ones to make a song. But watching someone messing around with cards isn't particularly entertaining to watch

so I have to write songs but also make it entertaining to write songs which is something new and the key to that is how can I get to the best chords as quick as possible so what I've been doing is relearning music theory especially with piano just sharpening up my skills and thinking back to when I first learned how to play guitar and first learned how to play piano in order to do it and it was in doing this in learning music theory and learning about things like scales learning about chords on the piano stuff that I hadn't thought about in many many years because I didn't have to going back to that brought up like childhood memories for me in particular with guitar so I first learned how to play guitar when I was about four or five years of age

because one of my older brothers who was very much into their music and was a musician very much into their music and was a musician just made sure I was able to play guitar he he himself was a musician and he used to notice that I would as a little child I would respond quite actively to music I would get very excited about hearing T-Rex or David Bowie or whatever was playing on the radio so he was able to notice that I was responding to music so he got me to learn guitar when I was 4 or 5 years of age now I learned it I remember being 5 years of age

and my fingers bleeding playing guitar which is anyone who learns guitar fingers bleeding is is that's something you have to do your fingers have to bleed if you're learning guitar and practicing and then your fingers toughen up and I was learning guitar at that age then I gave it up and I only properly relearned guitar then at about 16 when I was about eight or nine I started learning piano but what got what what it got me thinking about was the first and I'd forgotten about this completely the first ever guitar that I owned.

So when I was four or five years of age, and my brother was like, okay, I gotta teach him how to play guitar, but he's fucking tiny, he's a little child, he can't hold my adult-sized guitar, so now I gotta get him a child sized guitar so my brother went about procuring a child sized guitar and this is where the story gets gets odd and it's something I'd kind of

I'd forgotten this from my memory and it's something I don't actually say to people either because it's a fact that's so bizarre it sounds like I'm lying and that it's the type of lie that makes me sound unhinged and I remembered it this week and that's what I want to talk about before I get into what it is specifically I did a podcast before on a very special carpet that was in my house when I was growing up right I did a full podcast on this carpet so my father as I mentioned he used to work in Shannon Airport he had a desk job in Shannon airport customer service and this would have been he was working there since the 60s so he was working in shannon airport 60s 70s 80s and i think early 90s and the thing with shannon airport which is it's not in limerick but it's limerick is the closest city

shannon airport shannon airport used to be very, very important internationally, especially in the 60s, 70s and 80s, because Shannon Airport is the most western airport in Europe. And if you flew from America to Europe in the 60s, you had to stop in Shannon Airport. You had to stop in Shannon Airport you had to all right there was no way to get from New York to Germany or wherever without stopping in Shannon Airport so Shannon Airport was a very very important airport it's not important anymore unfortunately the only thing that's keeping Shannon Airport open is US military flights which I don't agree with and a lot of people don't agree with.

But there was once a time when all passenger flights from the US had to stop in Shannon Airport. Which meant my dad met a lot of famous people in his day-to-day job he made a lot of very anyone who was famous in the 60s 70s and 80s was in shannon airport assuming they left america and went to europe or vice versa they were in shannon airport like michael jackson the pope bob dylan john fitzgerald kennedy mother theresa Bob Dylan, John Fitzgerald Kennedy Mother Teresa Che Guevara David Bowie, Kate Bush everyone

was in Shannon Airport and if they were really famous they went to the VIP lounge in Shannon Airport so one day the VIP lounge were getting a new carpet and my dad went to the workmen and said,

What are you doing with the carpet in the VIP lounge? Like, you're ripping it up. Now, this was a really good quality carpet. This was 100% wool carpet. It would have been very, very expensive. Far more expensive than what my dad could afford. And he went to the workers who were putting up the carpet and said what are you doing with it and the lad said we're throwing it

into a skip so he said can i have the carpet and they said go on take the carpet so he took the carpet got it got a loan of a van or something took the carpet from the shannon airport vip lounge took it back to my house and put the carpet in the front room of my house and i was a little child and i he used to say to me and my brothers would say to me because this was the carpet in the room where music was listened to he would say every famous person you can think of has stood on our living room carpet Michael Jackson stood there

Bob Dylan stood there, David Bowie stood there and when I was a little child listening to music in that front room I would visualise I'd be listening to T-Rex or David Bowie when I was a little kid and I'd be touching the carpet going, not only am I listening to this incredible music, but they stood here. teachers that the pope stood on my carpet that michael jackson stood on my carpet and i'd get in trouble because i sounded mad but it was true it was a fact a famous carpet was in my living room

because my dad got it out of the airport it's now gone a square of it remains my mother uses it to line the back of the boot of her car. I think I did a full podcast on this carpet about three years ago. The reason I gave the full story to it there is because not everyone's been listening to this podcast in its entirety. Well, that's not a fact I just kind of throw out. And like I said, I grew up being chastised for that fact because it's not very believable. It's very strange, you know, but it's true.

The other fact, and I just remembered it this fucking week, and this is what is going to inspire this week's podcast. So taking it back there to my first ever guitar when I was a child, right? So my brother wanted me to learn how to play guitar, but he didn't have a child's guitar to give me. And he'd have been like fucking 19. My parents didn't have a lot of money. He wasn't going into town buying me a child's guitar.

So he took it upon himself to figure out how can I get a child's guitar. So he called over to his friend's house. And whatever way the conversation was going, the friend happened to have a guitar upstairs. It was a child's guitar. So my brother was like, fuck it, can I was a child's guitar so my brother was like fuck it can i have the child's guitar and the friend was a bit apprehensive going okay i'll give you the guitar but you will you mind it and my brother's like yeah of course i'll mind it look it's just it's just for my little brother i want him to be able to learn guitar on a child's guitar and you have a child's guitar and nothing's happening with it can I just have it so the friend

went okay yeah but I think it's a really important guitar and my brother was like what do you mean and he goes well you know who I'm a cousin with and this is Limerick now and my brother goes yeah Billy Idol you know he's one of the most famous people in the world and that's your party piece this is Limerick I think everybody knows that your cousin is Billy Idol and Billy Idol Billy Idol was this artist in the 1980s who this would have been the early 90s when this conversation is happening but billy idle one of the biggest artists in the world of the 1980s you definitely know he's got a song what is this it's a white wedding nice day for a white wedding and he's got a song called rebel yell billy idle huge. He was part of what's known as the second British invasion,

which is when MTV became a thing in America in the early 80s. You had bands like Dire Straits, Duran Duran, The Police, and Billy Idol were English artists who became huge. And it was the second British invasion because the first one would have been the 60s. When you had the Kinks and the Beatles. Becoming huge in America. But. Billy Idol anyway.

Is like half Irish. Right. And. His ma or something is Irish. And members of the family. Happen to live in Limerick. And my brother was friends with one of them. So he came back to the house to me with this guitar.

This little guitar. And he just said this is Billy Idol's childhood guitar. And it's just a regular. Like acoustic guitar. and there were some drawings on it and stuff but the first guitar I ever received was the guitar you were going to learn how to play music on is Billy Idles childhood guitar and again this was another thing I would go into school and say to the teachers i'm i'm learning guitar on billy idol's guitar and then they'd go ah yeah yeah and the pope was on your carpet as

well yeah yeah yeah and they just think i was a strange little child but no i actually in my gaff had a carpet that Michael Jackson and the Pope's stood on and my first guitar as a child was Billy Idles as far as I know all right as far as I know my brother's friend is most definitely Billy Idol's first cousin, without a doubt. And he said, this guitar... Now, here's the thing. If you're listening to this now and you're going, blind boy, you're making shit up now because you want podcast content. I'm not.

I'm not. Let's look at the facts here. For a fact, my brother's friend is Billy Idol's first cousin. For a fact. Right? The friend is saying, this guitar somehow made its way over to Ireland. Probably a cousin or an uncle or someone was like, that's Billy Idol's childhood guitar, can I have it? And then someone said, yeah you can.

Billy Idol's childhood guitar can I have it and then someone said yeah you can but I have strong reason to believe that this is Billy Idol's childhood guitar you can't do a DNA test on a guitar it's a child's guitar it's old and

I have reason strong reason to believe that this is Billy Idol's childhood guitar and I still have it because it's in my mother's attic I hadn't thought about that fucking guitar until this week when I'm relearning music theory and when I'm relearning music theory and going back to when I first learned instruments it just this memory came up I was like oh fuck I remember being a little child playing guitar and my fingers bleeding the first song I ever learned was

it was Eddie Cochran was it what the fuck was it Summertime Blues by Eddie Cochran because it's just a straight blues song and I would have been obsessed with T-Rex Mark Boland who had a cover of Summertime Blues and my brother taught me that on guitar and I was have been obsessed with T-Rex, Mark Boland, who had a cover of Summertime Blues. And my brother taught me that on guitar, and I was able to play Summertime Blues by the time I was five. And then I stopped playing guitar. But Billy Idol's childhood guitar, and I still have it,

was my childhood guitar. I can't confirm 100%, but I have strong reason to believe that it is. So, after ruminating on that, I just kind of got thinking, fucking hell, what's Billy Idol up to? You know, because I hadn't thought about Billy Idol

in a long time. I vaguely remember his songs, because I would have been like a baby in the 80s and then I'm kind of like just thinking the other day fuck it he was fucking huge and then he kind of disappeared I wonder what happened

I wonder what happened to Billy Idol that he just you just don't hear about him anymore I mean the last I heard of Billy Idol was maybe 10 years ago when I was playing a game called Grand Theft Auto Vice City and White Wedding was on the soundtrack and that was the last I heard of Billy Idol. He made a cameo in a film called The Wedding Singer

with Adam Sandler around 1998. But other than that, that haven't heard much from Billy Idol and it made me want to Wikipedia him, made me want to check him out, just to wonder how does someone go from being you too

or Michael Jackson big to with all due respect kind of being forgotten about. I don't mean that in a mean way, but you don't hear Billy Idol's name being brought up an awful lot, okay? And I mean that with all due respect. So I wondered, how does that happen?

How do you go from being one of the biggest artists in the world to not being one of the biggest artists in the world suddenly I'm a very curious person I'm very passionate about music if you've listened to my music podcasts you know that I'll research and think about music at a very

but great depth alright I have a tolerance for I have a fascination with music and music culture that goes beyond

that level most people would just think that's it's getting boring now and I'm like no no no no I need to go further I need to go further

so I fell into a fucking hole at about 2 in the morning the other night finding out what happened to Billy Idle and the answer is fucking fascinating it's fascinating and it's incredibly relevant and that's what I want to do this week's podcast on the answers that I found fascinated me so Billy Idol was was massive up until about 1991 and then it's like something happened in 1992 where he just he did a huge gamble and it didn't work and then that was enough for him to stop being huge and for him to slowly fade into I don't a word like obscurity is mean he stopped being Michael Jackson famous and went

just went a bit quiet um one thing I do remember when I received his childhood guitar around that period is I remember my brother talking about Billy Idol being in a car crash no no no a motorbike crash

and him being very injured and I remember him speaking about it because his family in Ireland were worried because it was quite a serious motorcycle crash and he was very lucky to escape it alive and I do remember that being a little child so when Billy Idol was in this motorbike crash and it made shite of his legs right he was recovering for quite a long time if you've got a very badly broken legs you're talking about it's it's a year you're you're a year out of circulation you're six months sitting down with casts on your legs another six months properly recuperating that was the extent of the injuries that billy

idle had and this would have been about 1991 so when billy idle was recovering from his broken leg he did an interview with a journalist now another thing about this podcast is there's going to be two instances in this podcast of what's known as nominative determinism which is one of my favorite things and i love it when it happens nominative determinism is when a person's name or second name their name determines that person's career or achievements in some way right and it's rare but this podcast has got two relevant instances of it the first one is this so billy idol 1991 is recovering with a broken leg and he does an interview with a journalist a music journalist whose name happens to be Legs McNeil.

And while Billy Idol is lying with his legs astray in front of him, broken, the journalist Legs McNeil notices that Billy Idol, as part of his recuperation, has got pads on his legs that are called um ems pads electric muscle stimulator you might remember 15 years ago on tv or in the argos catalog they used to sell these things that was like electric pads that you put on your belly and you don't have to do any exercise you just turn them on and they work your muscles and you'll get a six-pack by just plugging these these pads onto your belly right that's ems it's ems is you know people setting them to fucking grow muscles i think they're bullshitting but ems is used for someone with a broken leg if someone has a broken leg and it's been in a cast for six months and that leg the muscle wears away on the leg to the point that the person might have difficulty even walking because they no longer have the

strength in their muscles to hold their body up ems is used to strengthen that muscle without exercise so the pad is on the leg and it sends an electrical charge to the muscle which stimulates it and can cause growth so billy idol has his legs up talking to a man called legs with electronic pads on his legs and legs says to him those things that are on your legs and this is during an interview legs and this is during an interview those things that are on your legs make you look like a cyborg it's very cyberpunk and then billy idol says what what are you talking about legs and legs goes your your legs they're very cyberpunk you're like a cyborg you're like half man half machine you know with those pads i didn't mean anything by it just you look like a cyborg, you're like half man, half machine, you know, with those pads, I didn't mean anything by it, just, you look like a cyborg, so the interview finishes, and then Billy Idol is like, cyberpunk, fuck is cyberpunk, that sounds pretty cool, fuck is that, and the thing is

now with Billy Idol, Billy Idol's image, so Billy Idol started off in the 70s as an actual punk, he would have been late 70s part of the British punk movement of which the Sex Pistols were involved, he was in a band called Generation X and Billy Idol's roots are that of an authentic, genuine punk and punk was all about diy aesthetics rejecting record labels rejecting punk was a rejection of like in britain anyway punk was very working class like billy billy idol is a working class english man um a fucking you know half irish working class english man and punk was a working class diy movement in britain that was very much a reaction to um progressive rock which in britain at the

time by the late 70s prog rock was very middle class if not upper class prog rock musicians were middle class posh kids that had been trained in classically trained in oboe and violin since they were kids because they'd been to private school and that was part of their education so you had bands like not so much pink floyd but like emerson lake and palmer and yes rick wakeman and and they were very accomplished virtuoso musicians doing this huge stadium rock, but it didn't say anything to the working class youth of Britain. So punk came out of that as a rejection. It's like, we don't need to be able to be virtuosos on violins.

We just need a guitar and three chords, and we can set up our own gig in a pub and we don't need a record label and that's punk and billy idol was part of that movement in the late 70s but billy idol got famous in the 80s by appropriating the image of punk so like if you think of white wedding and billy idol stuff where he he became huge on MTV as part of the second British invasion, it was, that wasn't punk, that's pop rock. But he looked like a punk. He looked like a healthy, well-fed version of Sid Vicious or Johnny Rotten.

Enough rebellion about him that it would piss off your parents. version of Sid Vicious or Johnny Rotten enough rebellion about him that it would piss off your parents but good looking enough that you'd get a huge amount of screaming female fans so it was the pop iconic

appropriation of punk aesthetics for the MTV generation and that was Billy idol's thing in the 80s but with all due respect he's rooted in genuine uh 19 late 1970s british punk so billy idol's lying there with his leg and legs the journalist says to him you look like a cyborg this is very cyberpunk bill when the interview was over bill Billy Idol couldn't stop thinking about that word cyber punk the punk part is what stuck

with him he's like cyber punk the fuck is that so then he went finding out what cyber punk is while he's laid flat with these fucking pads stuck into his body now this is 1992.

Billy Idol's possibly the biggest musician in the world. Definitely in the top ten. And he's now obsessing about cyberpunk. Now, cyberpunk... I could do a whole separate podcast on it, which I probably will at one point, but I'm going to give you a brief overview of what it is. Cyberpunk is two things. It's a genre of science fiction.

By 1992, it was also very much kind of a movement. A movement of people trying to live their lives as cyberpunks. But just from a science fiction point of view blade runner is cyberpunk cyberpunk is a genre of science fiction which is dystopian dystopian means that it was science fiction about a near enough future the thing with cyberpunk is is cyberpunk science fiction was very much right now 2020 blade runner is set in 2019 cyberpunk is about now 2020 post-millennium and it was you can trace its roots to french comic books from the 1970s. Philip K. Dick who wrote Blade Runner, an English writer called J.G. Ballard and the most quintessential cyberpunk science fiction

writer is William Gibson. William Gibson wrote a book called Nor Noromancer. Which is. It's the genre defining cyberpunk novel. I believe in the early 80s. Which is about. It's about a hacker. It's about a hacker who I think. Takes on giant corporations. Or something.

1982. A tabletop game comes out called cyberpunk 2020 which is heavily influenced by the work of william gibson and i i there's there's the blade runner cyberpunk which is cyborgs and what does it mean to be human and then there's the william gibson's cyberpunk which is is it satirical it's the early internet plays a huge part in William Gibson style cyberpunk the early internet the I suppose what cyber and punk what it is is a dystopian vision of the future whereby governments are replaced by corporations right and the corporations control and own

freedom because they control technology and the cyber punks are rebellious outlaws who use the technology of the corporations against them to like a Robin Hood. It's Robin Hood but with an early version of the internet. And Cyberpunk, like Cyberpunk pretty much really did, it really predicts right now. Really, really does.

I mean, huge influences for cyberpunk the early internet reaganomics early 80s the policies of both reagan and thatcher in the uk what do you see around then you see the creeping neoliberalism. What is neoliberalism? Neoliberalism is when a government, instead of running things through public services, instead of, we'll say, hospitals being run by the government, the government instead hands the hospitals over to private corporations. And you really see this started aggressively in the 1980s with Thatcher and with Reagan so these fears of oh fuck if they're not stopped what's it going to be like in 2020

will the corporations become more powerful than governments and will they run everything and and yeah yeah they have look at the last election there Donald Trump look at the fucking Brexit look at the role that Facebook and Google and how these things were exploited by hackers look at how this has shaped our political landscape today

there's strong reason to believe that brexit exists and donald trump is in power because of outside interference by russian hackers or if they're not russian someone else who managed to spread disinformation on Facebook and Google and things like that, which convinced people and now our trust in what is real information and what is trustworthy information and what is untrustworthy. We can't do it anymore because the internet has been exploited by sources that want to confuse us. So that right there, there's your cyberpunk dystopia. We're living in it right now. Okay. The corporations which are Facebook and Google

don't give a fuck. Facebook and Google want our data. Our data is the most important commodity in the world right now. It more more important than petrol it's more important than gold data what is data data is our phones record every single aspect of our behavior this is recorded and sold as information which is valuable so that's our data we're living in a cyberpunk future we're living in the cyberpunk dystopia right now, okay, so it got it right, hackers and big corporations and data is shaping quite, is shaping our reality, okay, like even right now, like what I'm doing with my life right now, you know, in my studio right now, which is, like i've got neon lights all over the place i'm

consciously i've consciously embraced the cyberpunk aesthetic in my studio because i grew up watching blade runner i love cyberpunk aesthetics so visually my studio ironically looks like a cyberpunk 2020 setting but in unironically there's a global pandemic right now which means that I have my live streaming setup

looks like it's out of a science fiction film from 1992 I've got multiple monitors hooked up on pulleys and cables with several cameras snaking out of these arms and I have this bizarre machine in my studio with screens and cameras and things hanging off it that looks like something from Akira or a machine that's described in the pages of noromancer and what makes it cyberpunk is that's not necessarily intentional i own this live broadcasting machine and i don't leave my house because there's a global pandemic

and my job right now is to is to create musicals about a virtual video game environment to an audience of thousands who just want to have some type of human connection because they can't leave their houses because of a global pandemic that's dystopian cyberpunk future and that's my reality our reality right now so we live in the cyberpunk dystopia I've digressed, I have definitely digressed from Billy fucking Idol's leg but I need to tell you what cyberpunk is before I continue on with the Billy Idol's leg story and I'm just realising as I'm talking about this I can't talk about

cyberpunk isn't a science fiction genre anymore it's not this cool cyborg, neon, Blade Runner Akira thing anymore it's our lived reality and we don't have flying cars

and people aren't physically merging a huge tenet of cyberpunk 2 is within the dystopia it's people merging with machines that you plug a machine into your body we don't have that but we are most certainly merging with machines um our consciousness is listen you've got a social media account how much of your day how much of your real emotions your everyday stresses your fears your worries are caused by or centered around the version of yourself that is on twitter instagram or facebook there is a version of you and all of these social media are something that you curate

yourself and the version of you on Instagram is different to the version of you on Twitter. There's things you say on Instagram that you won't say on Twitter, that you won't say on Facebook and you have micromanaged different personalities for yourself that you care about in real emotional terms that have actual real consequences and then there's your actual physical fucking life that you can feel and touch the ground with people that you meet face to face but right now during this pandemic 90% of my lived experience is my virtual self I have my consciousness has merged with the machine of social media. And so has everyone else's.

So that's cyberpunk. That's what they got that right too. But in 1992, when Billy Idol had a broken leg. And the journalist whose name was Legs said to him. You look like a cyborg from cyberpunk. In 1992, cyberpunk was just science fiction. So before I get on to where i'm going with this it's the halfway point it's time for an ocarina pause i don't have the ocarina this week i all my ocarinas went into the dishwasher um and they're just in the other room plus i've i've

i've gotten a bit bored of the ocarina i I now have several new instruments that I use for live streaming, so why not make the most of them? So I think this week we're going to have a castanet pause. A castanet is a traditional flamenco Spanish percussion instrument. So while I do the castanet pause, that's when a digital advert... Again, pure cyberpunk, lads. A digital advert is going to be inserted here by Acast

right and you're all listening to this podcast but each one of you is going to hear a different advert and the advert that gets inserted to the podcast that you hear is dependent upon your data

so if you if you if you. If you. If you spent the week. Fucking. I don't know. Going onto your phone. Speaking to your friends about soccer. Or.

Reading up about soccer on your phone. Then there's a chance that the advert that you hear. Might be sports related. But if instead. You spent the week. I don't know. Looking up cooking and food. And that's what you've been putting your data into your phone then you might hear an advert that has something to do with food and your data and your cyborg relationship with your phone is about to determine the advert that is generated and placed into this podcast that I have no control over.

So let's just play a Spanish flamenco castanet in honour of that. Do you know what? I'm talking about this is all rational reality and things that are happening and I sound mad and this is real. This is all real. Here's the castanet pause on April 5th you must be very careful Margaret

it's a girl, witness the birth bad things will start to happen, evil things of evil it's all for you. No, no, don't. The first omen, I believe, girl, is to be the mother. Mother of what? Is the most terrifying.

Six, six, six. It's the mark of the devil. Hey! Movie of the year. It's not real. It's not real. What's not real? Who said that? The first omen, only in theaters April 5th.

You're invited to an immersive listening party led by Rishi Keshe Herway, the visionary behind the groundbreaking Song Exploder podcast and Netflix series. This unmissable evening features Herway and Toronto Symphony Orchestra music director Gustavo Jimeno in conversation. Together, they dissect the mesmerizing layers of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, followed by a complete soul-stirring rendition of the famously unnerving piece, Symphony Exploder. There you go. Support from this podcast comes from you, the listener, this is a 100%, this is a fucking cyberpunk podcast, beholden to no one, alright, okay, I have to put it out on fucking Google and Spotify and all these giant corporations, but I'm not beholden to anyone, no advertiser

owns me, no one tells me what to do. I'm here in my cyberpunk studio. Talking about whatever the fuck I want to talk about. And no one can say don't talk about that. Or that's boring. I want you to do a podcast about whatever's trending on the internet. No. I do whatever the fuck I want. because this podcast is supported by you the

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there you go so 1992 Billy Idol's got a broken leg. I said to you, this started because I'm like, I learned guitar on Billy Idol's childhood guitar. I wonder what he's up to now. What happened to his career? And this is the start of what happened to Billy Idol's career and how he could go from one of the biggest artists in the world

to not being the biggest artist in the world. And it all stems from that journalist called Legs bringing up the subject of cyberpunk with Billy Idol because he started to obsess over it. Billy Idol went and learned as much as possible

about what cyberpunk was. The name just stuck in his head. He loved the punk part because he's an old school punk. But he found the cyber part particularly interesting. Because he'd just gotten himself an Apple Macintosh computer. And he was a very early user of the internet in 1991 which is it's something you found with a lot of famous people a lot of famous people in the late 80s early 90s David Bowie is another example 1992 I believe is before the world wide web or no no the world wide web i think was like 1990 but it would have been in its absolute and

utter infancy so people who used the internet in the 80s and 90s it was very strange and very niche and a small group of people who had access to personal computers and access to a modem it was internet users were either wealthy or complete and utter tech nerds and like the reason famous people were using the internet earlier is they had the money to have access to a home computer and the anonymity david Bowie used to use what were known as message boards, and a message board, I don't know, it'd be like boards.ie. It's just a community in the 80s or early 90s where people would use an only text, speak to each other on the screen.

Like WhatsApp, except with strangers they did now this is unlike anything you or i know as the internet it was a tiny niche community and it was very radical and these people were either complete nerds or people who identified as cyberpunks. People who were doing this as a radical act. Okay? And Billy Idol started to get into this. He started to get into this cyberpunk thing and this cyberpunk idea.

And this is the beginning of the demise of his career because he has this... He starts to think of releasing an album that's called Cyberpunk now this is how can I this would be like

Justin Bieber in terms of how radical this concept is imagine Justin Bieber like has a voice box 3d printed and is has his voice box surgically replaced with a 3d printed one and talks like a robot that's the 2020 equivalent of just how bizarre this is billy idol was massive he was huge he was a pop punk rock star on MTV.

And then he breaks his leg, has a conversation, becomes obsessed with cyberpunk and decides he's going to do something very radical and new and unlike anything that's been seen before. And it ruined his career. So his album, Cyberpunk, was released in 1993. It was an absolute commercial failure. It was critically torn to pieces. Okay? In 2020, I think he deserves a hell of a lot more respect. A hell of a lot more respect a hell of a lot more respect than that

in 2020 like it's musically it's not a particularly good album alright I'll be honest I went and listened to it last night there's a cover of a Velvet Underground

song called Heroin which I do think is listenable but it's not last night, there's a cover of, a Velvet Underground song, called Heroin, which I do think, is listenable, but, it's, it's not, a particularly listenable album,

but, that's not why, I think it deserves respect, the, as a piece of art, as a concept, Billy Idol's, cyberpunk album, was fucking,

years, ahead, of it of its time in many different aspects and it doesn't have to be good for something can be not good and also be hugely important that's the nature i would refer to it as avant-garde the avant-garde. The avant-garde, the phrase avant-garde comes from, it's an old military term. When an army was advancing, there was a small number of soldiers, the avant-garde, who would go miles ahead of the larger army. And the purpose of the avant-garde was to discover new territory. And they might die. They might die and they might also lead the army into their deaths but the point of the avant-garde it wasn't about being good soldiers it wasn't about winning battles it was about being the ones to find something new first even if that meant

failure and billy idol's album cyberpunk is a commercial failure a critical failure and without being too harsh maybe an aesthetic failure as well but as a piece of fucking art a concept it is not a failure and 2020 Billy Idol's album needs to be reappraised in 2020 as a very important visionary piece of work and i'll explain why um firstly from a musical perspective all right cyberpunk the album billy idol's album does not sound like anything else billy idol made why because in 1991 when he began recording it instead of going to a music studio billy idol decided he was going to because he's taken from the punk the whole thing with he's an old school punk from the 70s diy do it yourself he decided i'm not going to go to a music studio i'm going to get a computer an apple macintosh and i'm going to make the music on the computer.

In 1991, this was in its utter infancy. Nobody was, nobody in the mainstream. Now, Billy Idol isn't the first to do this shit, but nobody in the fucking mainstream, with a platform that he has, is going to say, I'm going to get this Apple Macintosh computer in 1991. With shitty software.

And I'm going to be one of the first. To make a mainstream pop album. By myself. On a fucking computer. Now this is completely normal now. This is now. Everyone now makes their music on a computer. And studios are going out of business.

Making it at home by themselves. but not in 90 fucking 91. Musically, the album sounds like kind of Nine Inch Nails. It has an industrial feel. It doesn't sound like Billy Idol. It has an electronic vibe and it's clearly self-produced. um the reason cyberpunk the album was a a failure i think it was conceptually it's a bit scattered right now billy idol is i've seen a lot of interviews with him talking about it he's not particularly articulate okay now i don't mean i don't want to say that as a critique of someone's intelligence. Sometimes people will equate intelligence with a person's ability to communicate ideas, and that's not right. Billy Idol is someone, he's clearly intelligent because he's radical enough to have the concept of doing something that's different than anyone else is doing, but he is unable to verbalise precisely and doing something that's different to anyone else is doing but he

is unable to verbalize precisely and exactly what he's doing there's plenty of people out there lads who are fantastic at verbalizing ideas but the ideas that they're verbalizing are utterly stupid such as people on the far right so cyberpunk billy idols album is a concept album and this is where it starts to get silly it's a concept album made on a computer about making an album on a computer so it's a concept album about making an album on a computer but it's made on a computer so right there that's the first kind of fall down because that doesn't really make sense um another thing is when he was doing interviews for the album for the promo he demanded that every journalist who spoke to him had to read a copy of william gibson's no romancer if they were to even

have an interview with bill Idol about the Cyberpunk album but it would appear that Billy Idol himself had not read No Romancer instead kind of glanced through it and had some vague ideas what it would appear is I'm sure Billy Idol went at this Cyberpunk concept with utter passion but he appears to have instead of actually reading the literature and going deep into what cyberpunk was and what it is he went onto the early internet onto a message board called well I think it was called and spoke to a lot of

people who were involved in the cyberpunk movement and cherry-picked ideas from cyberpunk without giving it any great depth. So the recording process of cyberpunk was revolutionary for an artist of his time to take such huge risks and to record it himself on a Macintosh computer when it was at least 10 years before a sentence like that sounds normal. Artists weren't seriously recording on computers at home until 1997 and it wasn't normalized at least until I started learning production lads on computers in 2006 and even in 2006 it was strange and people had little faith in it that you could make music on a computer um the second thing about billy idol's cyberpunk album that is utterly revolutionary and flopped at the time but time now shows that he was right how he made the music videos for the singles for the fucking album so there was one song called blendo and he was making videos for

the the songs and the way he did it a quote from him at the time they asked him can you elaborate on how you made the Blendo video? Billy Idol says, I loved Lawnmower Man and through a group of friends ended up meeting Brett Leonard. He and I swarmed various images with high-eight cameras. Me at the acupuncturist, me at the alpha spa, me at a mind gym, whatever the fuck a mind gym is, various LA landscapes.

Related images and we fed them back through a band of desktop computers the operators of these computers act as musicians for as they hear the music being played back in real time they edit the images one on top of each other i've been building a blend of bed of footage to use on the tour like that's very revolutionary that's billy idol again for the music videos creating music but then having several people getting a load of random footage having several people on several different computers and conducting them like a visual orchestra to create a video. Now, the end results weren't particularly mind-blowing, but that process is...

I mean, that's what people do now on Adobe Premiere, when you make a music video now. Back then, making a music video meant you probably shoot it on film, you have to really plan it in advance you have to have a shot list you have to know what you're doing you didn't have the luxury of simply record record record and worry about it in the edit that now that's normal now that's why fucking the martin scorsese film on netflix the irishman is four hours long. That's why films are really long now.

You record it digitally. It's never ending. You can record as much as you want and worry about it in the edit. Billy Idol was doing that in 1991 with the music videos for the Cyberpunk album. Quite interestingly too, all this footage that he was having recorded to use for the music videos he also intended to get you know thousands and thousands of hours of random images and footage to project on the screens at his live gigs and a quote he said in 1992 about his intentions again i think in 2020 he managed to predict what live gigs are like are like now he said we're going to be lit by these stream of consciousness images it's going to be almost like that's your mind and we'll have four people swarming the gig with camcorders which they'll put live into this blend and the people

from the audience can bring their own footage god knows it could be anything could be them with their girlfriends but we're going to take their footage, and we'll put it up on screen, live at the gigs, and I think this will give us a vision, of what rock and roll gigs should be like, we're working, we're pushing the technology to the edge,

and, so I think, I don't think Blendo was the name of the video, I think Blendo was the name of the process, that he'd come up with, of using footage, in a live way. And what he's just described there in 1991, that's what's happening now.

Everyone goes to a gig and we record it ourselves on our own phones and then sometimes the artists will even take that gig footage. Like one of the biggest things on the internet right now is known as a fan cam. Like, if you're on Twitter and you search K-pop bands in particular, like BTS, these big Korean bands, fans go to gigs,

record their own footage of the artist and post their own fan cams. So he correctly predicted that with Cyberpunk 2, even though at the time people thought he was mad and finally i think the most important element of the cyberpunk album and why it's so revolutionary and deserves respect in 2020 and respect doesn't mean we say that it's good or it's listenable it means saying saying to billy idol fair fucking play for your effort um people were wrong to critically pan what you were doing and to laugh at you for what you were doing because

you know what it's 30 years on and you were fucking right you were right and people need to apologize Billy Idol promoted the album through the internet in 1992 the internet wasn't even it wasn't a thing this wasn't being done now Frank Zappa in the late 80s had suggested sending people music via telephone lines Todd Rundgren is another artist

who'd messed around with the internet earlier but no one on Billy Idol's scale. Billy Idol was huge. He was using an early internet message board to communicate with cyberpunk aficionados, people who were in the cyberpunk community. He was using an early internet message board called The Well. And now here is the second instance of nominative

nominative determination in this podcast the first one was the journalist called legs who looked at billy idol's legs and said you remind me of a cyborg here's the second one billy idol was using an early internet message board called the well which was founded by a man called larry brilliant and larry brilliant before founding the well is instrumental in eradicating smallpox so that there is nominative determinism he was born larry brilliant and it's like your second name is brilliant what are you going to do with that i'm going to eradicate smallpox and be an integral part in the early internet fuck you but anyway and he first off for the process of making the album he was heavily involved in cyberpunk internet communities to speak to them about ideas they got pissed off about it they felt that the he appropriated

cyberpunk culture picked bits out of it and didn't show it respect um he was promoting the album via early internet boards um when journalists were told about the album they were sent a floppy disk with lyrics on it and excerpts of songs he was actively using technology to really try and strip down what is an album what is music what can technology do for all aspects he's he's creatively looking at the cutting edge of how an album is recorded how the videos for the album are made of how an album is recorded, how the videos for the album are made, and how the album is distributed and promoted. So that for me is an entire rounded piece of art.

Yes, he's flawed in his thinking. Yes, mistakes are being made. Yes, it's fucking ridiculous. It's a concept album made on a computer and and the concept is i can't even fucking describe it's an album made on it's a concept album made on a computer but the concept is that it's it's an album about an album made on a computer i mean that's like flannery bryan like flannery bryan's the third are at swim two birds it's a book about a man writing a book and then the characters in his book write a book about him

except Flann O'Brien was doing it from a perspective really masterful post-modern art and it's a masterpiece and nobody was doing Billy Idol seemed to be had this really class idea but didn't fully follow through intellectually with it why did it ruin his career?

why did this destroy his fucking career um you have to view what he was doing in the context of wider culture 1993 who's the biggest band in the world nirvana nirvana changed fucking everything. Nirvana ushered in, into the mainstream, post-modernism. Alright? Nirvana made post-modernism, mainstream. And, what post-modernism is,

is it is fucking ironic, and it is cynical. Now, ironically, cyberpunk is very postmodern. Pure cyberpunk, Philip K. Dick, Blade Runner, William Gibson, J.G. Ballard, very fucking ironic postmodern art forms. They critique the future, they critique corporations, they critique power, they critique corporations they critique power they critique technology

they're ironic but billy idol cyberpunk was not ironic it was a hundred percent sincere and sincerity is not a tenant of post-modernism sincerity is the enemy of post-modernism you look at what nirvana were doing like like 1993 you would have had a video like in bloom so what nirvana were doing at the time that was revolutionary is they were and i did a podcast on this before on nirvana's music post-modernism uses nostalgia okay nostalgia was a huge part of post-modernism quentin tarantino 1994 a year after billy billy idols fucking album nostalgia looks to the past and it it takes the fuzzy childhood memory that we have of cultural artifacts from our childhood and then it regurgitates them back in an ironic funny juxtaposed way that makes it dark you look at nirvana's video for their song

in bloom which is the lads in nirvana black and white on television as if it's the um the ed sullivan show when the beatles are first on it in 1962 which is a cultural memory that would have been in american people's minds of the first time the beatles went on tv black and white tv and you've got an audience of screaming girls and the beatles were they had slightly long hair but they're wearing suits and they look like nice boys and they're singing this music with smiling faces, smiling to the camera, and the girls are screaming, and this is an iconic moment from the 60s in America, and Nirvana's video for In Bloom is Nirvana looking exactly like the Beatles in the 60s on black and white TV, but fucking the bass player, Kurt Novoselic is wearing

a dress and the music is as far removed from the Beatles as you can get it's based in the chord structures of the Beatles but it has a distortion and an aggression and an irony and a sadness and an anger which is a pastiche it's juxtaposing the memory of the Beatles, we'll say, on the Ed Sullivan show. So that's irony. And irony, you can't be sincere about something when you're being ironic. So Nirvana had changed the landscape in the early 90s, where if you're being sincere, you're simply fucking uncool and billy idol approached this album with with what in 1992 was utter cringy sincerity he's not

critiquing anything well he thinks he's critiquing something but he's not doing it ironically he's not playing by the rules of culture the zeitgeist at that time he is with utter sincerity looking towards the future and you don't do that nerds weren't cool in 1992 nerds are cool now nerds are very very cool now mainstream culture is fucking marvel films if you liked fucking batman in 1992 you were a nerd who lived in your mother's basement and you were chastised and the piss was taken out of you and you were so far from from what was considered cool if you were a nerd in 1992 if you were using the internet in 1992 you were deeply deeply uncool you were a fucking nerd with no life and all you did is you cared about numbers and you were on the computer think of that simpsons episode where homer goes to college homer goes to fucking college and he's hanging out

with nerds who were using the internet, who are on the internet all day. They're playing Dungeons & Dragons. The cyberpunk tabletop game from 1988 was just a futuristic version of Dungeons & Dragons. Billy Idol was hanging with nerds. That moment in The Simpsons where Bart says to Homer, and Homer's like, I've gone to college. I'm in college, and I'm hanging out with these cool guys

and we play Dungeons and Dragons all day and we're on the internet. And Bart goes, you're hanging with nerds. And then Homer goes, but nerds are my sworn enemy. I'm a cool jock. Billy Idol did the most uncool thing you could possibly imagine. He believed in something. He believed in something and he

looked towards the future and it was completely out of tone and out of touch with nirvana pearl jam quentin tarantino and culture at the time and it was so fucking uncool and embarrassing he was also in his fucking early 30s and you better not fuck up in your early 30s because you look like a dad he dared to be sincere at the height of post-modern irony and it ruined his fucking career it destroyed his career and i just want to do this podcast to say that i think Billy Idol deserves respect for the 1993 album Cyberpunk, he was visionary

he took massive fucking risks, he ruined his career doing it fair fucking play to him for such a beautiful failure and to have the naivety and courage like what he should have been doing was wearing ripped jeans and growing his hair greasy And to have the naivety and courage.

Like what he should have been doing was wearing ripped jeans and growing his hair greasy. And wearing dirty cardigans and trying his best to sound like Kurt Cobain. He didn't. He started wearing leather and spiked his fucking hair up. And looked like your man Max Headroom. And said this album is about robots. Here's an album made on a computer and it's about making albums on a computer and a very

the title track on it was very it was about the LA riots about a cyberpunk version of him in the LA riots and I don't know I just think it needs a reappraisal and someone needs to give him a pat on the back, and say, people didn't get it at the time, but we now live in fucking hell, we live in a dystopian

tech hell, and you got it right Billy, and Kurt Cobain didn't, do you know, you think as well of Kurt Cobain, Rage Against The Machine were another huge act at the time. And Rage Against The Machine were the last warning. Like Rage Against The Machine were highly political. And Rage Against The Machine were warning us, saying, this is our music. Now we're going to tell you that the world is about to be taken over by huge corporations. Like Rage Against the Machine filmed the music video on Wall Street and had Wall Street shut down for the day. Rage Against the Machine were screaming at us.

The banks control the world. The world is racist. The corporations are going to take over. This music has to be really loud. And I need to scream about it. And you need to listen. And we didn't listen. We didn't listen.

And Billy Idol got it right. And now we live. In a cyberpunk dystopian future. With no flying cars. The world is burning. There's a global pandemic. And. We've uploaded our consciousness to social media and someone needs to fucking tell

billy idol fair play to him where did it go wrong 9 11 9 11 i'm this is a separate podcast that i'm gonna do because it's a biden hot take that i'm bubbling up 9 11 is where it went wrong that was the death of post-modern irony rage against the machine we're warning us 9-11 happens and then sincerity becomes mainstream again why because fucking the american 9-11 happens america george bush turns around and goes um i think it was afghanistan and iraq and then the world goes nah it wasn't george wasn't at all and he goes it was we're going into ir and Iraq and then the world goes nah it wasn't George wasn't at all and he goes it was we're going into Iraq and then France said in the UN we are not supporting you in your war in Iraq and then America turned around and said well then we are changing the name of

French fries to freedom fries and everyone said that's normal and then george bush introduces the war on terror which is a war on a concept and introduces a thing called the patriot act which was a way to strip people's liberties and privacy basically if we think you're a terrorist we can tap your phone we can do whatever the fuck we want and And fuck your constitutional rights. What comes out of that? The NSA. The NSA. And all that Facebook shit. And what Obama did.

That right there. That's the start of it. And now what happens? The tech companies rule the world. And all our data is not private. There you go. I still have Billy Idol's childhood guitar. It's in my mother's attic

I'm going to get my hands in it over the next couple of days hopefully I might bring it on my live stream and play a few songs on Billy Idol's childhood guitar even though I've had it for over two decades I understand that it's still on loan

so if Billy Idol or members of his family want to repatriate the guitar, you're more than welcome to it. It's not mine. It's still on loan. I don't know. Okay, I know for a fact that Brian Eno listens to this podcast.

Johnny Marr from the Smiths listens to this podcast. One of the lads from Oasis listens to this podcast. Bons listens to this podcast one of the lads from Oasis listens to this podcast Bono listens to this podcast there's enough people in the music industry who probably know Billy Idol Robbie Williams listens to the podcast

there's enough people who listen to this podcast who probably know Billy Idol to give him a text and say listen to this podcast it's about you so Billy if you hear this and you want your childhood guitar back, give me a shout, I will give it back to you.

I'm merely hanging on to it, it's resting in my mother's attic. I'll talk to you next week, don't know what next week's podcast is going to be about. My voice is nearly gone now because of that cyberpunk rant. God bless mind yourself have a bit of self compassion any of the shit there that I said that was quite dystopian don't be letting it bring you down

there was a tinge of irony there as well a bit of irony going on we don't live in post modernism anymore now we've got meta modernism that's the thing it's like modernism is about sincerity post-modernism is that nirvana irony and now what we've got is metamodernism which is sincerity and irony existing alongside each other what do you mean blind boy well i've got

a plastic bag in my head and i look like a clown and people listen to me for mental health advice that's sincerity and irony existing perfectly alongside each other. And it's okay. So, don't allow me and my talking about us living in this dystopia bring you down too much. It's not that bad. You can still have meaning in your existence. There's still hope. I'm happy um i i understand and acknowledge that life contains inevitable suffering that this is the price that we pay for

love um i accept that i have no control over what happens but i have full control over my attitude towards what happens and the liberation of that realization allows me to be happy and have meaning you know and no everyone can have that everyone can have that all right so mind yourself be compassionate towards yourself be compassionate towards other people rub a dog feed a cat notice anaw it as a fucking leaf, listen to the sound of water. You're invited to an immersive listening party led by Rishi Keshe Herway, the visionary behind the groundbreaking

Song Exploder podcast and Netflix series. This unmissable evening features Herway and Toronto Symphony Orchestra music director Gustavo Gimeno in conversation. Together, they dissect the mesmerizing layers of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, followed by a complete soul-stirring rendition of the famously unnerving piece

Symphony Exploder April 5th at Roy Thompson Hall. For tickets visit tso.ca ...smell the air at night time as it changes into autumn you know that's the real stuff as Werner Herzog would say

that's the real stuff alright yart Thank you.