Dancing with Myself By Billy Idol Touchstone Books, 336 pp., $28

When a young, snotty, peroxide-headed English punk rocker needed a moniker more in touch with his current life than what his birth certificate said, he recalled what a chemistry professor had once written across the top of a school report: "William is IDLE."

But since the country already had a famous Idle (that would be Monty Python's Eric), and the lethargy of the word did not match his explosive lifestyle or stage presence, he repositioned a few letters -- and, by default, its meaning. Thus, William Broad became Billy Idol, one of the most reliable hitmakers and video stars of the '80s.

Dancing with Myself is more than half over by the time Idol gets to the part where he makes the video for "White Wedding" and his career goes into the stratosphere. That's fine, though, as he gives an amazing recounting of the late-'70s punk movement in England, which he was squarely part of; rubbing shoulders and sharing stages with members of the Clash, Sex Pistols, Damned, Pogues and Siousxie and the Banshees.

Idol's own group in which he was a guitarist and singer - Generation X - did not have the anger or stridency (or, honestly, cumulative talent) of any of those bands. But they did form a sort of bridge between punk and new wave with their more fun, danceable, but still hard-edged music that would also prove the basis for Idol's solo (and much more successful) career.

Even in a literary genre where tales of debauchery are as common as dangling participles (though his is rarely dangling), Idol's tales that feature booze, drugs, or sex -- individually or as co-stars -- are pretty raw. In fact, Idol seems to have ingested as many substances as all four members of Motley Crue did in The Dirt.

By the time of his 1990 motorcycle crash that almost cost him a leg, Idol had been indulging in "booze, broads, and bikes" as well as a laundry list of drugs both soft and hard as a full-on addict for many years.

But it's Idol's tales of incessant sucking and fucking that are often the most flat-out amusing. As when he is fist-fucking a San Francisco admirer, only to get his hand literally caught in the nookie jar as the rest of him is jerked and dragged across the bed by his writhing paramour.

This is not the sort of stuff that happens to the history professor that Idol might have become had never picked up a guitar.

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