An English singer has admitted he wasn’t shocked discovering he’d fathered a child in the 80s due to his promiscuity.
Billy Idol – real name is William Michael Albert Broad – first achieved fame in the 1970s London punk rock scene as the lead singer of Generation X.
After embarking on a solo career, he released hits like Dancing with Myself and Rebel Yell but spent years out of the public eye in the latter half of the 1990s.
Away from the spotlight, the 69-year-old has never married, but was previously in a long-term relationship with singer and dancer Perri Lister.
They share son Willem, 36, while Billy also daughter Bonnie, 35, with Linda Mathis.
It was just a few years ago that Billy discovered the existence of Brant – finding out he was actually a father-of-three through a DNA test.
After Bonnie became a mother, she decided she wanted to find out more about her family tree and was shocked to be see a connection with Brant, whom she soon found out was her half-brother.
The discovery forms part of the new documentary Billy Idol Should Be Dead, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival earlier this month.
When speaking to iNews about finding out what it felt like to uncover he’d fathered a child during his 1985 tour Rebel Yell, he reflected on his hedonistic lifestyle at the time.
‘Maybe a little bit, but the more I thought about it, I guessed there must be something like that,’ he responded when asking if it had been a shock.
‘We were going around in the ’80s and ’70s, just having knockdown, drag-out sex with a million people you didn’t know.
‘A lot of people in the rock world got children beyond their usual relationships.’
He was then probed on whether he’d considered the possibility he might have other children he’s yet to connect with.
‘I think we would know about them now if there were,’ he said.
Billy, who is now a grandfather of four, went on to share he was now at a ‘better place in my life’.
He said the fact he was no longer a drug addict allowed there to ‘be there’ for his children and grandchildren.
In the documentary Billy spoke about his children and how he wanted to make up for lost time.
‘I really enjoyed being a dad. I always wanted a boy and a girl, and I finagled my way into a boy and a girl. In your own daft way, you’ve achieved what you set out to do,’ he said.
‘And I actually had a son that I didn’t realise, who I fathered on the Rebel Yell tour without knowing it. So, I somehow finagled this as well.’
Once his children met, he noticed how they all shared the ‘same quirky sense of humour’.
Meanwhile Brant said that after getting to know his dad, he now sees him as a ‘man who loves his family’.
Over the decades Billy has struggled with alcoholism and drug addiction, including heroin and cocaine.
In his 2014 memoir, he wrote about waking up in hospital after passing out in a nightclub several times.
After collapsing outside a Los Angeles nightclub due to an overdose he ceased his drug use, deciding his children would never forgive him for dying of a drug overdose.
He’s not taken hard drugs since 2003, but Billy wrote in his memoir he continued to smoke cannabis and drank occasionally.
IBL/ Rex/ Shutterstock)
Last year Bily reflected on how his sexual exploits inspired his 1982 hit Hot in the City.
He’d just moved to the Big Apple from London, and was inspired by the club scene, drippingly-hot air and his own desires.
‘I was literally hot in the city but also, I felt sexually alive. I was sexually hot,’ he told Vulture.
He then said his 1983 hit Rebel Yell was about being ‘blazing hot’ for a girlfriend, who he wanted to make an ‘orgasmic cry of love for’.
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