It was late morning when Billy Idol arrived at Olympic studios in Barnes, West London and he was…. well.. late. Of course, true to insatiable form, he’d met this girl the night before and of course ended up back at her flat …and had woken up with a terrible ‘what have I done’ hangover, but..
But….. there was music in his head.
He burst into the studio full of enthusiasm as always. “You know that song title you had Tony …I think I’ve got a bit of a tune for it.”
The night out had been good for him.
We’d been ensconced in the famous studios for a while now recording what was to have been the third Generation X album with the original line up. It was May 1979… But things were not going well.. the heart , the spark, seemed to be missing. Derwood the guitarist had already said in angry times he was going to leave and I felt we were struggling to find a direction for our music. We looked at each other differently and somehow the music felt hollow, like a bad dream you hoped you would wake up from…..
We’d been really influenced by the just released Public Image track with its massive throbbing reggae style bass and Keith Levines scratchy lead guitar lines floating above it – it was a revolutionary sound, leaving out the traditional rhythm guitar and it had inspired our earlier rehearsal sessions a month previously in a cottage in the Oxfordshire countryside. It was the first time we’d departed from our traditional writing pattern.
Not many people knew that I wrote all the lyrics for Generation X back then, usually written sitting on the floor at home in my old bedroom at my parents house on my mothers original 50’s stiff black typewriter, tapping with one finger. I’ve still got lots of the originals. I’d give Billy completed sets of words and he too would go home and later come over to me to put his tunes together into completed songs and arrangements. What simple times!
This time we had a dozen songs for the Olympic sessions but we knew there was no obvious “single” … its always the scent of a hit track that sets the sessions alight but on these days it was an uphill struggle ….. Was it because I’d broken with tradition and I was writing at the Mews house I was sharing with Mj and his girlfriend at the time, Viv from the Slits? The revenge of mums typewriter? Actually I loved the recording of the track “Stars look Down” we’d just finished so something was working….. Then Mick brought home a rough of a track he’d just recorded..called London Calling… damn, it was really good!
Meanwhile over in Barnes I can remember the days seeming endless and, ridiculously, spent looking forward to going to dinner in the restaurant around the corner where the record label had agreed we could eat what we wanted on their tab!…bloody hell, this was seeming like a job now, waiting to clock off. Black clouds were gathering. Oh yes.. we seemed to be producing ourselves too… or not …. always dangerous.
So that morning, after Billys night out, was a ray of sunlight into our world with, at last, the scent of magic in the air.
We sat on the back fire escape steps, on the cold concrete, and Billy leaned against the iron railings and played me a driving E,A,B, A chord sequence on his Epiphone guitar, singing da da daaa da da da tune…. Idol always had such a teenage enthusiasm every time he presented something new, seemingly amazed at finding this tune somewhere out of the air….. and it always brought the mood to a frantic pitch of creativity that we both got caught up in.. he la la la’d the next couple of phrases and into the chorus ending with “with the records reflection and the mirrors reflection..and back into the hook.. from the Tokyo seed…..
That day the words and arrangement just flowed out of us both and we scribbled them down in pencil on a scrap of paper ..it happens like that when you’re on a roll – everything is so right that the words seem like they’re already there… you just pluck them out of the ether and of course they fit perfectly, like filling in a crossword puzzle as if you already knew every answer… we rushed to the middle bit and the solo was obvious.. (alright, yes I know its not Shakespeare… it is magic though!)
Lets just repeat verse one again after the solo, Billy plinking the notes on a guitar not plugged into any amplifier and me with my bass.. we both looked at the scribbled notes as we sang the now completed song through once more, laughing at the symmetry and the fit of the words and melody..
Thats the way it happens on those sunny days.. easily. Or not so easily I guess.. in fact it is really hard to sit down to write a simple song about a simple idea with words that the listener already feels they know on first hearing. Otherwise we’d all keep doing it…. every day.
But on some magical days it just comes and you know it. Mick told me the moment he wrote Should I stay that he knew it.
I’d had had the idea for the title and lyric when we were in Japan earlier that summer for our first and only Japanese tour… and I was of course drunk in a Tokyo disco after a show…. Mississippi Queen (actually I already had the T-shirt cos Mick had bought one back home when he’d been there with the Clash)… anyway I’d watched as hip kids danced with their own reflections in the floor to ceiling mirrors that edged the dance floor and I logged the idea in the back of my brain. I must have told the idea to Idol later and we both carried the seed around until now.
We left the stairwell and as the equipment was already set up in the vast cavern of Studio One we showed Derwood the chords there and then.. Mark Laff, listening, spontaneously played a kinda “ballroom blitz “ dance beat and we were off..playing in that hallowed room that had held everyone from the Stones, Hendrix and Yardbirds.
We recorded the backing track in a couple of takes and that song, Dancing with Myself was to change everything. It was one of the best we’d ever written and it had the magic.
It changed everything not least because the sessions came to an abrupt end as Derwood suddenly announced he was leaving the band ….and drummer Mark Laff followed soon afterwards – this time they had decided they wanted to write their own songs rather than play mine and Billys…. and went off to pursue their ideas in their band to be called “Empire”.. I did not realize at the time that this was the start of the end of my first proper band….
The original Olympic recordings, buried for years, did finally appear as the bootleg album “Sweet Revenge”. If you listen closely you’ll hear that that first recording of Dancing with Myself is one of the only completed tracks – many of the others have the guitar solos missing, never completed because of Derwoods early departure. It’s sad and painful listening for me today….. I loved that band.. and the people. How is it that something so good, maybe so great, certainly in terms of friendship, can then fall apart so easily? We’re all friends again, but I wonder what those two think looking back now? I guess it’s happened time and time again.
Well, a lot went on in the next year.. (And I guess that’s another longer story…) ….until we were standing again in another legendary studio – Air Number One high above Oxford Circus in London’s West End.. to re-record and produce the definitive version of Dancing with Myself. Oh yes, and A group called Japan were in the other studio there and it was June 1980.
We had a new manager and this time a new producer, a young ex drummer called Keith Forsey – he had been Giorgio Moroder’s drummer on tracks like “Rivers of Babylon” and the Donna Summer hits… (I hadn’t met Georgio himself yet – I did not know then that that was to come!) . Forsey was disco groovy..and it was to turn out, a great songwriter too, he wrote “Don’t you forget about me” for Simple Minds…
But this time on drums – Terry Chimes, ex of the Clash playing that blitz beat.. on lead guitar, lying on the floor with a bottle of methadone to hand, surrounded by a circle of vintage amplifiers so loud you couldn’t get near – step forward an inspired but disintegrating Steve New, ex Rich Kids playing the lead guitar phrase…. on rhythm guitar, giving it, in his own special way, some “Bollocks” on the choruses was Steve Jones and the trusty cream Les Paul. To play the tight chugging guitar in the verses, courtesy of the Tom Robinson Band.. Mr Danny Kustow. Billy idol on the voice – his own burgeoning heroin habit reasonably in control ……and finally myself on Rickenbacker bass… now THAT is a rocking line up.
Actually the weird thing I remember now is that the famous Iranian Embassy siege was on the TV in the lounge when Billy and I left the studio later that day. We walked to Regents Park and sat amongst the summer flowers by the fountains while Keith got up the mix for us to hear.
It’s this version, contrary to many misinformed rumours, that is the ONLY version of the song recorded. Billy Idol later took the song the two of us had recorded and used it in his solo career – he NEVER re recorded it. Even the record company get muddled about this, to my continued annoyance. It’s the same version in his video and on “Vital Idol” that we recorded that day. I was glad Billy used the song because it never got the exposure it deserved under the Gen X flag. That track has been in more movies and adverts than any other Generation X track ever. And it’s been covered by bands like Blink 182, Greenday, The Donna’s and recently a jazzy version by French band “Nouvelle Vague”.. its their version used as the theme tune for the USA TV series “LA Ink”. All from that crazy hour sitting on the cold steps outside Olympic studios
I’m telling this story today because a couple of weeks ago Mj and I were in Paris for a Carbon/Silicon press conference and while I was getting ready to go out I heard the familiar tune ringing out of my hotel TV… its still a thrill to hear your song playing, even after all these years (nearly 30) even if it was in an advert for a French bank!!!
Anyway, back then, Billy and I returned to the studio to hear the mix an hour later. I have this enduring vision of listening to the playback and realising Steve Jones had somehow got out of a window and was now on the outside of the soundproof glass of the studio dancing and gesturing to the shoppers six floors below from the narrow window ledge, inches from a plummeting death, but silently mouthing the words to the chorus through the glass as he windmilled his Les Paul, legs defiantly apart…..
I was, he told me after, trying it out…you know…. Dancing with Myself…
and having a hell of a time apparently…..
Tony James
4 Dec 2008
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