Whatever Happened To Billy Idol?

Idol and Stevens spent the first few years of the next decade largely out of the public eye, but rather than playing hardcore shuffleboard in a headbangers' retirement home somewhere, they were doing what they'd always done: writing songs. Enlisting producer Trevor Horn (formerly of Yes and The Buggles, the band who fingered Video in the heinous murder of the Radio Star), they spent most of 2014 in the studio cranking out new tracks — and in December of that year, they dropped Kings & Queens of the Underground, Billy Idol's seventh studio album.

Critics were mostly kind. Rolling Stone singled out standout track "Can't Break Me Down" as "a punky pop tune with a ... chorus catchier than anything Fall Out Boy have written lately," and Ultimate Classic Rock praised Idol for being "more interested in exploring new, more mature territory than in recapturing his Rebel Yell heyday." Also in 2014, he released the aforementioned autobiography Dancing With Myself, a New York Times best-seller which didn't skimp on the sordid details of Idol's hedonistic early years. "I am hopelessly divided between the dark and the good, the rebel and the saint, the sex maniac and the monk, the poet and the priest, the demagogue and the populist," he wrote. "Pen to paper, I am putting it all down, every bit from the heart." As if he has ever done anything any other way.

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