(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Mon 8 December 2025 11:00, UK
“I’m not used to singing for real,” Billy Idol confessed to the Sacramento Bee in 1987. “I usually scream, make a noise.”
Billy was selling himself a bit short there. By this point, the leather clad, bleach-blonde MTV mainstay had fully transformed from an actual punk (with the 1970s outfit Generation X) into a sort of delightful, late ‘80s cartoon characterisation of a punk, notching quite a few fun, sing-a-long hits along the way: ‘White Wedding’, ‘Rebel Yell’, ‘Eyes Without a Face’, etc.
Even so, the 32-year-old wasn’t exactly sitting around expecting to get an invitation to collaborate from one of the greatest singer/songwriters of all time – especially one who seemed to have settled into her later career happily making mellow jazz albums.
But, lo and behold, there she was – a 43-year-old Joni Mitchell on the horn asking for Billy Idol by name, saying she was looking for “an aggressive singer” for a specific new song she was working on called ‘Dancin’ Clown’.
“I laughed, and I was shocked,” Idol said, apparently not offended at the notion of being aggressive nor potentially a clown. “I wondered if it was right for me to do, but she read me the lyrics over the phone and the track was near to what I would sing about anyway.”
Idol’s specific lines, as he would later perform them, do certainly sound more like something from his own back catalogue than anything one would generally expect from the writer of ‘Both Sides Now’: “You’re a push button window / I can run you up and down / Anytime I can make you my dancin’ clown”.
‘Dancin’ Clown’, which was finally released on Joni’s 1988 semi-return to pop, Chalk Mark in a Rain Storm, was just one of the many high-profile collaborations on the album, which also included cameos from Peter Gabriel, Willie Nelson, and Don Henley. Weirdly, Tom Petty and Thomas ‘She Blinded Me with Science’ Dolby also have small guest spots on ‘Dancin’ Clown’ – a very bizarre song that feels like a Frankenstein monster of 1987 elements that don’t work together.
It has the immediate vibe of an over-produced, light-rock Stevie Winwood single with the contrasting, nutty inclusion of an occasional Def Leppard riff. Billy Idol’s “come ons!” and “woos!” also feel like they’ve been forced out of him by the use of an electric shock collar, and they very well might have been for all we know.
So, how did this get made? And why would Joni Mitchell have sought this out for herself? This was, after all, the woman who’d played with the likes of Neil Young, Miles Davis, and Charles Mingus! “I cast voices the same way you’d cast a face in a film,” Mitchell explained in an interview with Knight-Ridder News shortly after the release of Chalk Mark. “This has happened all through my career. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, James Taylor – my generation was hippies back then, and we worked together. Nothing has changed.”
In the case of ‘Dancin’ Clown’, Mitchell’s selection of Billy Idol’s face/voice didn’t lead to an illustrious series of future collabs between the mismatched pair, but it didn’t lead to any regrets either.
“I’m an artist,” Mitchell proclaimed at the time. “What is an artist’s pursuit? It’s always been the same thing – truth and beauty. If you hit that truth, that’s the stuff of art. Gossip [about collaborators, for example] is trivial next to the work, but that’s what this society responds to.”
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