Today marks the release of the 40th anniversary reissue of Billy Idol’s sophomore album, Rebel Yell, the LP that broke the former Generation X frontman in the U.S. in a big, big way. Oh, sure, he’d had a couple of top-40 hits on the Billboard Hot 100 with his self-titled debut, with “White Wedding” hitting No. 36 and “Hot in the City” climbing to No. 23, but it was the Rebel Yell album that provided Idol with the first top 10 hit of his career, courtesy of “Eyes Without a Face.”
In a recent edition of the ongoing video series Vevo Footnotes, Idol detailed the origins of the song and walked viewers through the making of the video as well.
'I think I was deliberately trying to write not a love song because the '80’s was full of love songs,' Idol said.
Produced by Keith Forsey and co-written by Idol and his longtime guitarist/songwriting collaborator Steve Stevens, "Eyes Without a Face" was the second single released from Rebel Yell. (The first, of course, was the title track.)
“I think I was deliberately trying to write not a love song because the '80’s was full of love songs, all drippy, soppy love songs,” Idol said in the video. “So I thought maybe I just write an anti-love song. It’s almost a murder song; it’s what I was thinking about, something like a serial killer.”
From a musical standpoint, the biggest struggle Idol had with the song was figuring out the bassline.
"I like reggae, you know, so I wanted it to be like a really prominent bassline," said Idol. "We were having a hell of a time trying to find someone who could play my idea until we met Sal Cuevas, who was playing in the Dreamgirls Broadway band, and he nailed it."
Idol was inspired by classic horror cinema for the 'Eyes' video.
As for the video, Idol's vision involved a blend between silent films and horror films.
"I liked a lot of silent movies because you knew they were doing things with paint, wood and glue; you know, it's very sort of cheap in a way, but with maximum effect," said Idol. "It was an old book I had that had a lot of old stills, you know, Boris Karloff movies like ‘The Black Cat’ in front of an altar with a lot of crosses behind him. A lot of these things were influencing me with the ‘White Wedding’ video or ‘Eyes Without A Face.’ That’s what I was sort of bringing into my videos: this kind of old influence of movies one hundred years before. It’s more something like ‘The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari,’; it was sort of painted, so there was a psychotic element because he was supposed to be some sort of serial killer."
You can watch the entire Vevo Footnotes installment by clicking right here, but in case you want to refresh your memory on the original video beforehand, you can easily do so: we've embedded it directly below.
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Idol spoke to Q about his career, his recent concert film, and his near brush with playing the T-1000 in Terminator 2: Judgment Day earlier this year -- revisit the interview here.
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