Billy Idol on Oscar-Shortlisted Tune ‘Dying to Live’ From Doc About His Life
Billy Idol’s heyday may have been the 1980s, but he has never gone away. The English punk-turned-rock singer/songwriter — a three-time Grammy nominee who was a key part of the MTV-driven “Second British Invasion” of America, with hits including “Dancing with Myself,” “White Wedding,” “Cradle of Love,” “Eyes Without a Face,” “To Be a Lover” and a chart-topping cover of “Mony Mony” — is now 70, a grandfather and leading a much quieter life than he did during his hard-partying days. But his spiky blonde hair, trademark sneer and seductive voice are all still there. And the last five years have included as many wins for him as any such stretch.
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 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 now, in the 50th year of his career, he is, for the first time, shortlisted for an Oscar — best original song — for “Dying to Live,” a reflective ballad that he co-wrote with Oscar-nominated songwriter J. Ralph to play over the closing montage of Jonas Akerulund’s documentary Billy Idol Should Be Dead.
During a 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, he discussed the doc, the song and the feeling of being Oscar-shortlisted. Excerpts of the conversation, lightly edited for clarity and brevity, follow.
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.”
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