As hard as it is to believe, Billy Idol, the English punk-turned-rock singer/songwriter who was a key part of the MTV-driven “Second British Invasion” in the ’80s — his hits include “Dancing with Myself,” “White Wedding,” “Cradle of Love,” “Eyes Without a Face” and a chart-topping cover of “Mony Mony” — is now 70 and a grandfather. But rest assured: his trademark sneer, spiky blonde hair and seductive voice are all still there. And his career, now in its 50th year, is still going strong.
Indeed, since the darkest days of the pandemic, when “Dancing with Myself” experienced a resurgence in popularity (for obvious reasons), he has released two EPs (2021’s The Roadside and 2022’s The Cage) and a studio album (his first in 11 years, 2025’s Dream Into It); toured North America with old pal Joan Jett; and collaborated with ardent admirer Miley Cyrus on “Night Crawling,” a song on her 2020 album Plastic Hearts. He also was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2023 and nominated for induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2025 and 2026.
Late last year, Idol experienced a major “first”: he was shortlisted for the best original song Oscar. The recognition came for “Dying to Live,” a reflective ballad that he wrote with past Oscar nominee J. Ralph, which plays over the closing montage of Jonas Akerlund’s documentary about his rollercoaster life, Billy Idol Should Be Dead. That film had its world premiere at the Tribeca Festival in June 2025, was very warmly received and began rolling out in select theaters at the end of February 2026.
During a recent conversation at Idol’s home high in the Hollywood Hills, on a spacious property that he has owned since moving from New York to L.A. in 1988, Idol reflected on his life and career, as well as the doc, the song and the feeling of being Oscar-shortlisted. You can listen to the full conversation above or on any major podcast app, or you can read excerpts of it, lightly edited for clarity and brevity, below.
On why he decided to cooperate with the documentary starting in 2019…
“As you get into your 60s and 70s, you have a vantage point that you didn’t have before, and you can see the landscape of your life, really, and you’re in a position to look at it and quantify it and be able to talk about that in a serious way, which you maybe couldn’t have done earlier in your life because you just weren’t far enough along the road. And I think that’s what happened. It just made sense to do a documentary. And also we started to think about the fact you want to capture people while they’re still here. My dad had died in 2014, and then my mom passed on in 2020, so we just got her in the documentary. There were things like that that were starting to happen that were making you realize, ‘If we really want to capture people while they’re still here, this is the moment to do a documentary,’ and a serious one, one with gravitas.”
On the inspiration for the song “Dying to Live”…
“We created a montage piece towards the end of the documentary, before the credits, kind of almost in short-form showing you what you’ve just watched. What we didn’t have was music to go along with it. In the rest of the documentary, you’ve seen my life, but now we wanted you to feel what I went through, and we came up with ‘Dying to Live.’ When I met Josh Ralph, it made sense that we might do it with a string quartet, which I’d never done before; I had had some orchestral instrumentation on Kings and Queens of the Underground, an album I’d done, but we’d never actually done something where it was me singing to a string quartet. I mean, I grew up with The Beatles and stuff like that, so I liked “Eleanor Rigby,” and some of the George Martin orchestrations for “I Am The Walrus” are pretty incredible. Also, Tony Visconti did some orchestrations for some Marc Bolan songs — on the documentary Born to Boogie, they did three songs, and I think one of them was “Children of the Revolution,” where it was Marc singing his songs to a string quartet — and I loved that. And that’s what kind of made me think, ‘What about if we try something I’ve never tried before?’ Which was me just singing with a string quartet — it’s actually called doubled quartet. ‘What about if I’m singing that? ‘Maybe that will bring out the lyrics of the song and bring out the emotional content of this montage and help you feel what I’d gone through.’”
On the lyrics of “Dying to Live”…
“It is the story of my musical life, really — what I decided to do with my life from punk rock onwards, when I got a chance to live my dream of doing music and of having an artistic life. So now you’re getting to feel the emotions of someone who got to live their dream and has had an artistic life, and it’s still going on. It’s not ending. It’s carrying on. It’s growing.”
On “Dying to Live” being shortlisted for the best original song Oscar…
“It’s just incredible. I mean, you can’t imagine things like that, especially if I go back and think about the young me, even prior to punk — could I ever imagined what was going to happen, that one day you’d even be on a shortlist with all these other great people doing fantastic work? I mean, it’s pretty incredible. That in itself is an award.”
