I don’t know what it is about the flirting 80s pop did with post-punk, but I love it. Billy Idol just about flies in the face of everything Joy Division/New Order was trying to accomplish with their music, with a tuff-guy haircut and permasneer, strutting without a shirt with an unironic machismo that would have made Ian Curtis blush.

Sonically, though, it’s incredibly similar; everything is run through tons of reverb while dissonant synths and electric guitars build a creepy ambience on the bedrock laid down by the locked-in drums-and-bass (in any good post-punk act, the drums and bass have to function as a unit). It’s not the most difficult thing to pull off well, and Billy Idol and his band does just that. Or maybe, having been born three years after it’s release, I’m far enough removed from the cultural statement it must have made that I don’t recognize it as pastiche.

The most immediately engaging song is the famous title track, which leads off the album, at the risk of making everything else sound like filler. Amazingly though, someone involved must have known that trying to make eight rehashes of a good single wouldn’t have been successful, so instead of an album filled with nothing but high-octane synth-filled punk songs, we have an album that has spatterings of artsy post-punk (Daytime Drama), new-wave ballads (Eyes Without A Face), prog-informed pop (Flesh For Fantasy), et al. It’s much more diverse than one would expect knowing only his most popular singles (White Wedding, Rebel Yelll. And yet, it manages to be a cohesive project, thanks to Idol’s punk-rock Elvis impression and Steve Stevens’ signature lead guitar lines, which sound more hair-metal than new-wave. Along with these elements, genre bending enough as they are, add to them the band’s punk rock attitude and their love of The Beatles, Stones, etc., and it will seem even more amazing that such a cohesive record was born out of such eclecticism.

Billy Idol now lives in that place where everyone knows his hits, but no one listens to his albums. But as this listen has proved to me, that’s a tragic place to be. While the rest of the tracks may not be as killer as those singles (and let’s be honest, how could they be?), the album tracks are impressive in their own right, and their absence in the public consciousness is a loss to society.