By anyone’s standards, Billy Idol’s solo rise to fame was highly impressive. Leaving the U.K. after his initial punk outfit, Generation X, split in the early 80s, he arrived in New York with a cult following – yet within three years, he was an MTV poster boy with a multi-platinum second album, Rebel Yell, making him a bona fide superstar. Indeed, by the time his third solo set, Whiplash Smile, was released in October 1986, Idol was doing battle with the biggest names in rock and pop.
With that in mind, it’s no surprise that Idol sometimes doubled down on what he did best on the confident Whiplash Smile. The album burst into life with guitarist Steve Stevens’ suitably muscular riffing on the opening “World’s Forgotten Boy,” and its clutch of flashy, hi-octane anthems (“Don’t Need A Gun,” “Soul Standing By,” and “Fatal Charm”) played to Idol’s strengths, with their punk and hard rock credentials given a mainstream sheen and embellished with dancefloor-friendly beats by producer Keith Forsey.
Listen to Billy Idol’s Whiplash Smile now.
To his credit, though, Idol was also brave enough to tear up the formula and reveal his slightly softer side on several of Whiplash Smile’s best tracks. For example, he excelled on the glorious “Sweet Sixteen,” a haunting, Del Shannon-esque ballad featuring a lyric which – for him – was entirely personal.
“With ‘Sweet Sixteen,’ I’d broken up with [my girlfriend] Perri Lister, with whom I was very much in love,” Idol recalled in a 2024 interview with The Guardian. “So I was really singing a song about her. I used the [true] story of this chap from Latvia called Edward Leedskalnin, who had been jilted by his sweetheart at the altar.”
“He came to America,” he added, “and built a homestead and then started to build this big place called the Coral Castle [in Florida], made of huge slabs of granite. And when he took people around it, they’d say ‘why did you build this place?’ and he would say it was for his sweet sixteen.”
Idol’s heartfelt “Sweet Sixteen” went Top 20 in the U.S. and numerous European countries, while Whiplash Smile’s other big-hitting single “To Be A Lover,” rose to No. 6 in the U.S. Idol also looked beyond rock to find this tune, penned by William Bell and Booker T. Jones and originally released as a single (as “I Forgot To Be Your Lover”) on the legendary soul label Stax in 1968.The song first reached his ears via George Faith’s reggae cover from 1977, but Idol’s reworking of the song was instilled with rockabilly. The singer freely admitted he found it liberating to master singing different styles of music on Whiplash Smile.
“I was feeling so pent up inside before that I wasn’t able to show my real self,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “It has sort of taken until this record to get what I really feel…to sing love songs and stuff. Before, I was battling that side of myself as the whole punk rock thing was so anti-love. For the first time, I’ve given myself the space to be a bit more human.”
Certainly, Billy Idol’s public believed he’d gotten the balance between hard and soft correct with the confident Whiplash Smile. Indeed, thanks to the cumulative effect of “Sweet Sixteen,” “To Be A Lover,” and a third U.S. Top 40 success with “Don’t Need A Gun,” the album went No. 6 in the U.S. and eventually sold over two million copies globally. Its commercial yield kept Billy Idol ahead of the game, while expanding his palette – goals he would again pursue on his next album, 1990’s Charmed Life.
