It was 1989 and Billy Idol was a huge star. He’d been selling records hand over first and with that came the money and fame that so many musicians crave. Billy Idol was on top of the world, but as always with these cautionary tales, it wasn’t enough.
He’d already overdosed a fair few times by then and had been addicted to nearly every drug you could mention, and probably a few you wouldn’t even know existed, but his favorite pastime was heroin, and it was this dalliance with Mr. Brownstone that landed Billy Idol in trouble with the Thailand army.
In an interview with Classic Rock back in 2016, Billy Idol explained what happened;
“We were just going to drink and not take any drugs. After about a week, drinking all the time was getting really heavy so we asked this cab driver if he could get us some blow. He went off and came back with this thin vial. It was six or seven inches long. We looked at each other, like, “What do you think this is?” Because cocaine doesn’t usually come in a long thing like that. My friend put his finger in it and had a taste. It wasn’t blow.”
It turned out that Billy Idol and his friend had stumbled across the strongest, and most addictive, heroin he’d ever had.
“You only needed a pinprick and you were out of your mind. Then we had to work out, well, how are we going to take this? We needed some tin foil. so we went around all the supermarkets in Bangkok looking for that but they don’t have it there. We ended up using the foil from the chocolate bars at the hotel. This stuff was so strong and severely addictive that we then had to get off it before we could fly back home. It’s a fourteen-hour flight, and there’s no way you could do that while coming off heroin. You had to get semi-well so you weren’t shittng yourself. We went to a pharmacy and got all these downers to knock ourselves out until we were kind of normal again.”
Their ingenious plan to get clean proved to be very dangerous for Billy Idol, who said;
“I don’t do well on tranquilizers at all. It just made me change personalities completely. I would become violent and start smashing things; I’d been lifting weights so I was massively powerful. I think we went through a few hotels like that before the Thai army escorted me out of the country on a gurney.”
And by escorted out of the country on a gurney, what Billy Idol really means is that he managed to cause somewhere between $20,000 to $150,000 dollars worth of damage to his hotel room, depending on what sources you read, was told to leave by the hotel management and when he refused, they called in the Thailand army who shot him full of tranquilizers and dumped his ass on a plane.
Considering everything that Billy Idol has done to himself and everything he’s been through, it’s remarkable that he’s still around, where many others have stepped over the edge, never to return, and it’s even more remarkable that he made it out of Thailand at all.
Which Idol himself suggested on an episode of Behind the Music where he simply stated about the Thailand incident;
“I was very lucky. I expect they could’ve put me in prison.”
Prison, Billy? Considering Thailand has incredibly strict laws regarding drugs, I’m stunned you didn’t end up in front of a firing squad.
