Punk rocker Billy Idol said he managed to get himself off heroin by using crack instead.
The 70-year-old Brit appeared on Club Random with Bill Maher on Monday, where he dropped the bombshell admission about his past drug habits, after years of being known for living life on the edge.
“Once you’re trying to get off heroin, what do you go to? You go to something else. I started smoking crack to get off heroin,” he told Maher, wearing a punk-appropriate black leather jacket, drainpipe pants and chunky shin-high boots.
When Maher asked if it had really worked, the “White Wedding” singer replied, “It worked. It worked.”
Elsewhere in the interview, he was candid about how he used to take heroin, saying he tended to snort it, saying he only shot it “a few times.”
“I didn’t like that idea, my mother was a nurse… I’m glad I did that,” he said.
He said that heroin was “really great,” but added that “it’s just getting off it that’s terrible, and that’s what stops me going back to doing it is the thought of getting off it. It’s so terrible.”
The “Eyes Without a Face” singer has been candid about the effects of his drug use in the past, telling The New York Times in February that “I had it all, and I lit it with butane.”
The newspaper reported that his habits would go on to erode his career during the 1980s and his relationship with longtime girlfriend, dancer Perri Lister.
Speaking to the Associated Press last year, the Hollywood Hills resident said, “There’s a point in my life where I was very drug addicted.
“I’m lucky that I’ve kept the brain I’ve got, because some people went brain-dead, and some people ended up in jail forever. Or dead.
“Imagine if it was today. If I was doing what I was back then today, I would be dead because I would have run into fentanyl.”
He released a new album, Dream Into It, last year, while a new documentary exploring his wild years, Billy Idol Should Be Dead, was released February 27.
