Garbage Days Revisited #28: Billy Idol - “Devil’s Playground” (2005)

 

“Does he still have the magic? Yes he does” - Billy Idol - Super Overdrive

We’ve already dealt with one under-rated classic that Mr Idol was involved with last week but for this entry, we're going to rapidly skip forward a couple of decades to 2005. By this point, your correspondent is in his mid-twenties and...well, let's just say that it wasn't a year I look back on particularly fondly - it had relationship break-ups, prolonged spells on the dole and having to move back into the family home after three years living on my own due to financial circumstances.

Anyway, I think it was one of the parts of the year where I was actually working and had a tiny bit of disposable income as I ended up in the local record shop and seeing that both Judas Priest and Billy Idol had new albums out decided to buy them both. Both of them had received mixed reviews in the press but I figured they were worth a listen - by this time I was increasingly despairing of the sub-Arctic Monkeys/Libertines snorefest that indie had descended into (the dreaded landfill era) and the emo Bert & Ernies who were clogging up the pages of Kerrap by this point.

The truth is that Priest's comeback Angel of Retribution unfortunately did deserve the cool reception it got - it had some decent songs scattered through it like the thunderous Judas Rising and the brooding Worth Fighting For but whoever came up with the idea of the utterly laughable 15 minute prog song about the Loch Ness monster that closed it should have been sat down and given a very stern talking to. I mean, we were already losing Iron Maiden to prog metal silliness at this point, we didn't need another group of metal legends going down that route as well.

Now Devil's Playground on the other hand...not only was this Billy Idol returning after a decade plus absence and well and truly torching some of the by-numbers efforts he'd made in the late '80s and early '90s but it was him arguably coming up with his best album ever. Yup, even better than his debut and Rebel Yell, both fine efforts in their own right. Reuniting with guitarist Steve Stevens (fresh off less than successful spells with Vince Neil's band and before that with Michael Monroe in the ill fated Jerusalem Slim project) and producer Keith Forsey, his two right hand men from the glory days was a sound move as the album opened with the storming statement of intent Super Overdrive before well and truly knocking you into the middle of next week with World Coming Down which sees Billy taking a look at impending social collapse and mortality, laughing and ordering in his next JD and Coke ("And everything you do to protect yourself, well it ain't gonna happen right/So you junkie pigs and muthafuckin' whores enjoy yourselves tonight!"). Add to that a whiplash riff from Stevens and an outro perfect for bellowing along to and you've got yourselves a winner.

The truth is though that while there's plenty of the fist-in-the-air rock action you'd expect here on the likes of Scream ("You are a little tease/You love my demon seed" erm, yeah, thanks for that mental image Billy), Romeo's Waiting and the catchy pop-punk of Sherri (the song Green Day wish they could've written circa American Idiot), it's the little tricks that you maybe don't expect that really catch you out and elevate this from being a good solid rock album to something genuinely great. The woozy noctural country strum of Lady Do Or Die is a great song, seemingly Idol looking back at his misadventures and celebrating the fact that he's still about after all of them ("Kings on the road keep travelling on, every mile a ragged one, kings on the road keep smiling on, play the guitar and sing the blues and cry, the lady do or die") while the sinister skeletal Evil Eye looks back at his drug issues in earlier years and Cherie is a joyful acoustic-led reminisce of good times before past relationships went bad.

Best of all was the album closer Summer Running though and it's the track I kept coming back to. If World Comin' Down was the sound of Idol at his most anthemic and defiant then this was the other end of the scale, a gentle acoustic led look back at the good times touring the States on his motorbike. As I've mentioned earlier in the article, when this album came out I was going through a pretty low time in my life, seeing all of the progress I'd made over the previous couple of years come crashing down around my ears and this song seemed to be putting an arm around my shoulder and saying "hey mate, it's gonna be alright, things will get better" with lyrics like "All of the bad brained people, one of these days we'll run over you" and "I don't walk, I run, ride on into the sun/I don't know what's ahead, we don't talk of the dead..." - it kind of made me realise that sometimes you have to keep walking forward and hope that something better's around the corner (thankfully for me it was) because you don't have any choice and brooding over the past doesn't really do you any good. A great song which everyone who's feeling a bit down should listen to.

Billy would dip his head back below the waves again soon after this (albeit continuing to tour a fair bit in the intervening years), eventually resurfacing with the ballad-heavy Kings And Queens of the Underground album in 2014 which was decent enough but could've done with a couple more rockers like World Comin' Down or Scream to balance things out (although Ghosts In My Guitar and the title track were fine efforts as was the rollicking Whiskey And Pills). He's still out there at the moment and I reckon we're probably due a new album from him some time soon so touch wood the magic is still there. In the meantime though, I thoroughly recommend Devil's Playground if you missed it first time out - packing proper nitro powered rock anthems and some surprisingly nuanced moments in equal measure, it's a damn fine effort.