Billy Idol defends punk movement’s past use of swastikas as “performance art” 

Billy Idol has defended the use of swastikas in the punk movement, saying it was about “performance art”.

The soloist and Generation X singer shared his view while appearing on a recent episode of the Turned Out A Punk podcast. During the interview, he recalled what it was like to be a key name in the ‘80s punk scene alongside Sex Pistols and Siouxie And The Banshees, as well as the controversial use of swastikas in their fashion.

He recalled one incident in particular, where he and Siouxie Sioux went to Paris to watch Sex Pistols perform, but the inclusion of a swastika on Sioux’s outfit nearly led to violence.

“Siouxsie was wearing her night porter gear, where she had the swastika on, and she was driving these left-wing French people crazy because they didn’t get that it’s a performance art kind of thing,” he recalled. “They just thought she was – because they were practically communists – they were thinking she was an anti-communist. They didn’t realise it’s part of punk performance art.”

He continued, saying that the use of the Nazi symbol as a fashion statement “really upset” many audience members, and led to the two of them having to “escape across the stage”. He shared that this was a key difference between audiences in London and Paris.

“They just didn’t understand the sort of London fashion performance art aspect of punk,” he said. “We were reflecting back on the British society what they were doing to us by wearing these sort of political symbols.”

“Like Vivienne Westwood would combine the swastika with communist symbols, Karl Marx. And that was all a bit of a fuck you to the conservative forces in England that we were sort of feeling that they were going fascist,” he explained. “So we were going, ‘Oh, if you’re going to go fascist, then we’re going to reflect that back to you.’

“It was a kind of a reflection back on the powers that be. ‘This is what you want us to be? You want us to be fascist? Oh, what about we’ll dress like that to frighten you?’ And it worked.”

The use of controversial symbolism in the punk scene also extended further, with Sex Pistols’ Sid Vicious often wearing swastikas as a statement against authority, and Vivienne Westwood also including inverted crucifixes in her designs.

As highlighted by Far Out, Siouxie Sioux shed more light on the reasoning in the book England’s Dreaming. “It was always very much an anti-mums-and-dads thing,” she wrote. “We hated older people. Not across the board, but generally the suburban thing, always harping on about Hitler, and, ‘We showed him,’ and that smug pride.

“It was a way of saying, ‘Well, I think Hitler was very good, actually’; a way of watching someone like that go completely red-faced.”

In other Billy Idol news, the singer recently dropped his first studio album in over a decade, ‘Dream Into It’. It features a collaboration with Avril Lavigne on a pop punk inspired song called ‘77’, and the two teamed up to perform it live on Jimmy Kimmel Live! last month. 

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