BILLY IDOL guitarist Billy Morrison has posted his latest diary entry, this time covering rehearsals for the latest and last string of live dates for 2010:

"It felt a little like returning home after a couple of months traveling. Walking into the rehearsal room for the first day of rehearsals, it was like we never took a break! All the crew were at their usual stations – Rob tweaking the crazy light walls that we have, B-Ranks, Jimbo and Roy all changing strings, Robert buried deep under a pile of synth patch cords, and Charles banging the shit out of a snare drum. (Never quite understood that one – it always sounds the same …..good, cracking and fucking loud!!) Matt and Joe doing whatever it is they do to make it sound good in our ears and your ears. Karel greets me with a smile and a handshake, and within 10 minutes we’re running through 'Ready Steady Go' instrumentally and it all comes flooding back to me. There’s maybe two or three little runs and details that my mind refuses to remember first time around, but by the time Billy arrives to run through the set, my muscle memory is back in full effect and its business as usual – a good feeling.

Rehearsals are a delicate thing. A band can definitely be over-rehearsed. Ever watched a band that is so perfectly tight and sonically sound that it crosses the line from amazingly good, to slightly boring? Kinda like listening to the record through a very big stereo. Well, I guess if you are a huge Back Street Boys fan or maybe some of the new breed of auto-tuned R+B type pop music, then that’s the sort of live experience you will be used to having. For rock n roll it’s a different thing entirely. No one wants to watch a band that’s bad – making mistakes – sounding like shit. But at the same time, rock n' roll is meant to have an element of danger, of aaaaalllmost coming off the rails but staying on despite it all. There’s no danger if the band is in a computer, being pumped out in sonic perfection every night. So rehearsals become important. Muscle memory in the fingers ensures that in moments of emotion, or losing oneself in the music, that it will still get played correctly, but allows the heart and mind to wander into the moment. To stop concentrating on what fret you’re gonna play next, and to actually FEEL what the band is doing….to experience what the audience is experiencing. THAT is when a great rock n roll show happens."

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Idol's schedule is now as follows:

December

16 - Los Angeles, CA - Nokia Theater
18 - Ventura, CA - Majestic Ventura Theater
20 - San Francisco, CA - The Fillmore
21 - San Francisco, CA - The Fillmore

Go to this location to purchase tickets.

As previously reported, Billy Idol has signed with Touchstone, a division of Simon & Schuster, to write his memoir, Dancing With Myself. Idol, a natural-born storyteller who helped forge the early punk music scene on his way to multiplatinum worldwide success, will write the book himself. His bold, strikingly literary account will capture not only his remarkably colorful life, but also an extended period in music history that saw punk rock’s emergence through to its lasting impact on musicians across the world. Stacy Creamer, Vice President and Publisher of Touchstone made the agreement for North American, open market and first serial rights with Kirby Kim at WME. In addition, Dancing with Myself will be published in the UK by Simon & Schuster UK, where Colin Midson will edit. Touchstone will publish Dancing With Myself sometime in late 2011 or early 2012.

An early architect of punk rock’s sound, style, and fury who went on to become an iconic and controversial superstar through the nascent era of music video and MTV, Idol is penning a memoir that mixes punk’s audacious, take-no-prisoners attitude with a voice that is both unflinching, as it describes the debauchery that success allowed, and profound, in its vulnerability as it exposes the human experience beneath the headline-garnering chaos.

“Life gave me a golden key when I fell in love with rock n roll music,” said Idol. “It was the key to the answer of how to live and achieve your dreams. This world opened up to me with all the good opportunities but also every temptation—the drugs, the booze, the women, the 24-hour around-the-clock excess. And yet you have to write good songs to survive. Life had to be lived to do all that! Now I’m putting it all down in book form—from the heart. I’m going out on a limb here, so watch my back.” Commented Creamer: “In part a survivor’s story, but equally a very funny, sometimes chilling, and always riveting account of one man’s creative drive joining forces with unbridled human desire, Dancing With Myself is unambiguously literary in its character and brave in its sheerwillingness to tell. Billy Idol is destined to emerge as one of the great writers among his musical peers.”