Eyes Without a Face

The shoot for "Eyes Without a Face" left Billy Idol in a hospital bed. The video, released in June 1984, was filmed over three exhausting days on a set filled with fog machines, lighting, and fire sources. Straight afterwards, Idol flew to Arizona to perform, where he found that his contact lenses had fused to his eyeballs, a problem he blamed on the harsh shoot and the dry air on the plane. Doctors removed the lenses and bandaged his eyes for three days while his scraped corneas grew back. The video itself earned nominations for Best Editing and Best Cinematography at the MTV Video Music Awards.

The single, from Idol's 1983 album Rebel Yell, came out in April 1984 in the US and that June in the UK. Softer than most of the album's other singles, it reached number four on the Billboard Hot 100 and gave Idol his first top ten hit in America. Its title came from the 1960 French horror film Les yeux sans visage, directed by Georges Franju, about a surgeon who grafts faces from murdered victims onto his disfigured daughter. Idol had long been fascinated by old black and white horror films, and he saw a parallel between the film and the moral decay he felt in 1980s New York, writing lyrics about a relationship gone wrong and, he suspected, his own touring infidelities.

In the studio, Idol handed guitarist Steve Stevens the melody, lyrics and basic structure. Stevens built a revolving four-chord pattern, then added a hard rock riff in the middle, over which Idol improvised rap verses because rap filled the discos and clubs of New York at the time. His then-girlfriend Perri Lister sang the French phrase "Les yeux sans visage" during the chorus. For the reggae-flavoured bass part, Idol and Stevens struggled until they met Sal Cuevas, a New York musician known for salsa and Broadway work, who played it to their satisfaction.