Billy Idol - Eyes Without A Face (Rare Extended)

"Eyes Without a Face" is a song by English rock musician Billy Idol, from his second album Rebel Yell (1983). It was released in 1984 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 USA. 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.

In a retrospective review of the single, AllMusic journalist Donald A. Guarisco praised the song and wrote: "The music plays against the dark tone of the lyrics with a ballad-styled melody comprised of yearning verses that slowly build emotion and a quietly wrenching chorus that relieves the emotional tension in a cathartic manner."

In his memoir, Dancing with Myself, Idol explained he had always been fascinated with the titles of horror films, including the 1960 French movie Les Yeux Sans Visage (Eyes Without a Face). The movie concerns a plastic surgeon who vowed to restore the face of his daughter who had been disfigured in a car accident, and this quest led him to murder victims and graft their facial features onto his daughter in an attempt to restore her beauty. By the end, all that remained of her original face was her eyes, thus making her "eyes without a face". Idol saw some parallel between the movie and the moral decay he experienced living in New York in the 1980s.

He said,

I started to use "Eyes Without a Face" as a possible title/lyric/chorus for the song. I began to write words that, in some disguised form, spoke about my life in New York and a relationship gone wrong, on the edge of disintegrating into madness. Perhaps I was reflecting on my own touring infidelities. In a way, those can leave you feeling soulless, especially if you're already in a relationship that you value but are degrading by looking elsewhere for additional sexual kicks.

In the studio, Idol told guitarist Steve Stevens about the tune he had, and Stevens fleshed it out with a revolving four-chord pattern (Emaj7-C#m-G#m-B). Stevens then came up with a hard rock guitar riff in the middle of the song. Idol said he improvised some rap verses over the riff because "rap was everywhere in New York at the time, in all the discos and clubs, so it made sense after my croon to start talking streetwise over Steve's supersonic barrage of sound."