While answering some fan questions posed by readers of The Guardian, Billy Idol confirmed a 40-year-old story that not only did he steal the master tapes to his sophomore Rebel Yell album, he also threatened to have them bootlegged if his record label didn't start listening to him.
"It was because of the cover," Idol, 68, said of the reason he stole the master tapes. "I was saying: 'There's a flaw in this picture, and if we blow this up it will get worse.' The record company started to say: 'We're leaving it. It's not that bad.'"
This arguement was just the latest in a series of power struggles Idol was having with his label, Chrysalis Records, at the time. He was happy with the direction his music was going -- his first solo, self-titled album in 1982 had included songs like "White Wedding" and "Hot in the City," and he was just a few months away from releasing his first U.S. Top 10 Hit, "Eyes Without A Face" -- but his label wanted to change up his now-iconic Euro-punk image for an American audience.
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In 2023, Idol told Yahoo! Music that a higher-up at his management agency "did try showing me Rick Springfield's Working Class Dog imagery as 'what goes down in America.'" Idol was not having it. "I said, 'I am not brushing my hair down and becoming David Cassidy for anyone!'"
Rebel Yell was released in November 1983, and was preceded by "Rebel Yell" the single the month before. (Idol recently released a 40th Anniversary Expanded Edition of Rebel Yell in April.) Both the album and the single have similar cover art, with overexposed black-and-red portraits of the blond Idol scowling, and it's unclear what exactly the flaw he was opposed to had been. But whatever it was, the English punk rocker, who was 27 at the time, decided to take matters into his own hands.
"I just thought: 'I'm just not going to let this happen. It's so silly. They just need to reprint the picture. I'm not listening to what the record company guys say. In fact, I'm gonna blackmail them,'" he told The Guardian. "So I went down to Electric Lady [Studios, in New York City] in the middle of the night and got to where I knew the tape boxes were. I took them and left the studio."
Rather than stashing the tapes at his place or finding some other secure location for them, Idol hopped in a cab and took them to his heroin dealer.
"I said, 'James, here's my album. Bootleg this album when I tell you to bootleg it,'" Idol recounted in an animated short that he produced with UDiscoverMusic. "We'll have it out on the street and they can f*ck off."
Of course, once he called the record company and told them where the masters for his highly anticipated next album were, they were understandably "freaked out" and "relented" to Idol's demands to change the photo.
The moral of this tale, as Idol told The Guardian? "Don't let them walk all over you."
