“A lot of people ask if I wrote this for my sister which is not completely true. My sister was pregnant, she was getting married but there was no argument or anything. I thought about all the different people, all the times past when that was such a taboo thing. I thought about me galavanting around the world looking for who knows what. That was part of it too. I think the part of the song that is most important is when it comes to the piece in the middle because leaving home made me realize there is nothing fair in this world, there’s nothing sure, there’s nothing pure. So you better look for something left in this world.”Billy Idol (41)

“I heard a story, an American story, that became an urban myth, but there really is a place called the “Coral Castle” down in Florida. It was built by this chap from middle Europe and it’s made of these huge blocks of granite. Supposedly he did it all himself with no help, apparently there are pictures of him levitating with these blocks of granite. I can’t go that far but then he used to start taking people around this Coral Castle that he had built and when people would ask him, “who have you built this for?” he’d say, “it’s for my sweet sixteen.” And then he would tell the story of how he was jilted at the altar when he was sixteen and how he’d never found his sweet sixteen and he’d built this place as a memorial. I was looking for another way of telling my own story – we all lose people, or people run away from us in one way or another – I really identified with the story…”Billy Idol (41)

“I was at a party for Mick Jagger with Ronnie Wood and Keith Richards. They were drinking from a bottle with a confederate cavalry officer on it. It was called Rebel Yell. They told me it was a Tennessee southern sourmash and I decided to name my next album after it, and write a song called that.”Billy Idol (41)

“It is about two punks, whether that’s you and your girlfriend or two boys or two girls, and then going into this underworld of a new life. So it’s a journey song, a landscape song, it’s the journey we were taking, possibly the journey me and Tony James in Generation-X were taking writing songs, even digging into our own lives. So we wanted to write this landscape song taking in everything we were doing, all the background of punk rock. And it did have emotion in it, not just anger, but love.”Billy Idol (41)