Not so much his sister as the people around her trying to cover up. Traditionally, the bride in a white wedding is supposed to be a virgin.
Oh god, me too. Great show!
Johnny Johnson: “Hey, I’m evil.”
Perhaps I’m just living up to my name, but I always got an incest vibe from the song.
I always got an incest vibe too from this song. “I’ve been away for so long” I let you go for so long" “it’s a nice day to start again” – these lines make no sense in the context of a shotgun wedding. And the guitar chords are very sinister sounding.
Insert appropriate zombie wedding reference here. Or white zombie, Zombie Idol, etc.
But now that it’s awake, I always wondered if the song was meant as a theme song for the movie “Cat People”.
One of the very best ever made. Billy Boys rocks this world!
Ewww, zombie incest.
But from what I remember of an interview, Mr. Blue Sky nailed the intended meaning in the first response, all those years ago. Steve Stevens’ guitar parts on the song are still a great set of lead parts.
I think they were pointing. Dammit, now I have to go watch the video.
ETA: yeah, at 1:41, they’re all pointing accusingly.
I remember reading an interview with Mr. Idol in Playboy magazine some years back and he is quoted as saying the song was indeed about Heroin. More specifically, it was about speed balling, which (IIRC) is shooting up a mixture of heroin and cocaine.
This. Only way I know about this song.
This song is among the most common songs played at weddings.
Zombie and all but I recently read Billy Idol’s autobiography and he talks about this song and making the video for it. It is indeed about his sister’s wedding, I’ll see if I can find the paragraph and quote it if folks are interested. Nothing to do with anything awful (e.g. incest, white power, etc) as some have suggested.
The bride in the video is played by Idol’s g/f at the time (Perri Lister), a professional dancer and mother of his son Willem. She’s one of the girls smacking their own butts in time to the music. As a young lad I most definitely enjoyed the video 
Does anybody know what the sister’s response to the song was?
Who is Billy Boys?
Billy and the Boingers?
OK, just flipped open Billy Idol’s autobiography (“Dancing With Myself”) and here’s what he says about the song:
“I stared at the blank piece of scrap paper in front of me. Taking the pen sitting alongside it in hand, I wrote white wedding at the top. What made me think of that? Well, my sister had recently gone to the altar pregnant. And while that fact was perfectly all right with everyone, seeing as how she loved the guy, I started thinking about how, in the more recent past, this would have been called a “shotgun wedding.” I started to imagine at alternative reality, one in which I was pissed off at this violation of my sister and I arrive at the wedding hell-bent on revenge.” (Dancing With Myself, page 162)
So the song originated with him thinking about his sister’s wedding which evidently didn’t have any special drama associated with it however he used that as a jumping-off point to write a darker song. Some of the other lyrics “create an uneasy feel” and some of them he says are related to his solo career after his previous band (Gen X) broke up.
So there you go.
My big brother told me it was about satanic rituals when they first started playing it years ago and until this day I assumed he was telling the truth. I feel duped.
Yep - and KISS stands for Knights in Satan’s Service, and when you play Queen’s Another One Bites the Dust backwards, you hear “I like to smoke marijuana”!!!
Clearly the video was trying to stir the pot with teenage minds like ours back in the day. Billy’s sneer is one of the best.
I made a typo. I was either trying to say “Billy Boy’s one of the best” or “Billy Boy is one of the best.”
Funny thing … I have no recollection whatsoever of making that post.
Geez. No wonder I get into so much trouble.