BILLY IDOL - EYES WITHOUT A FACE

Released: March 1984

Charted:  UK: #18   US: #4 

"Eyes Without a Face" is a song by English rock musician Billy Idol, from his 1983 second album “Rebel Yell”, and released as the second single from the album. The song is softer and more ballad-like than most of the album's other singles. It reached No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100, becoming Idol's first top-10 hit in the US.The recording features the voice of Perri Lister, she appeared in the banned video for "Hot in the City" who sings "Les yeux sans visage" (French for "Eyes without a face") as a background chorus. 

The title of the song refers to the English title of French director Georges Franju's 1960 film “Les yeux sans visage”, a chillingly horrific yet classically poetic film. In it, a gifted plastic surgeon is involved in a near fatal auto accident which horribly disfigures the once beautiful face of his beloved daughter. Along with his assistant, he abducts young women so that he may surgically remove their facial features and graft their beauty onto that of his daughter's grotesque countenance. More than the typical Mad Scientist gore flick of the "horror" genre in movies, it deals with real humanistic themes rather than the loud crash and bang after a minute long string instrument is played in a high key. The arrogance, vanity, and what we ultimately come to realize, guilt of the father who now treats his daughter as a sort of porcelain doll with interchangeable parts. Though he supposedly loves her so, what he does in effect, is dehumanize her for the sake of his own personal redemption.

The song "Eyes Without a Face" uses similar imagery for effect. However, he tackles the concept of the modern romance and uses the same metaphors the movie used to show the absence of humanity and how cold and callous the modern world has grown to be. All that we have endured getting here has made us like the doctor. While the daughter has become eyes without a face (she wears a mask a la Halloween's Michael Myers and the only visible part of her face are her eyes), the doctor has become a face without eyes. He has blinded himself to the hideousness that he has involved himself, his family, and his poor victims in. While the woman in the relationship in the Billy Idol song is "Eyes Without a Face", the singer has become the face without the eyes. Wrapped in guilt for what once was a perfect love, he must face his own pettiness and the fact that he has forever altered his partner and their relationship.

The video was directed by David Mallet, who once again accented the video with three girls slapping their own butts in time to the music. Idol's memories of the video are painful ones. His contact lenses dried out during the shoot, and when he fell asleep on a flight to his next gig in Arizona, they fused to his eyes. He had to get his corneas scraped at a hospital and wear bandages on his eyes for three days.