Cyberpunk (album) - Release

Release

A press pack was distributed to the media prior to its release to promote the album. The centerpiece of the pack was a copy of the Billy Idol's Cyberpunk custom stickered 3½" floppy disk, which was housed in a custom multi-coloured folder with artist and title logo on the front and contact information on the back. The pack included a 5-page version of the biography in the diskette, for the benefit of any journalist who lacked the equipment to operate the floppy disk. Also included in the pack were three black-and-white publicity photographs. Two pictures of Idol were taken by Peter Gravelle and the other was a digitally edited image of Idol as he appeared in the blendo video, "Heroin".

As we get set to address a new millennium, science and technology are becoming the new weapons of change, and who better to arm you for the future battle than BILLY IDOL.

As part of press junkets promoting the album, Idol reportedly insisted attending journalists be familiar with cyberpunk fiction. It was also revealed that Idol was not entirely as familiar with the genre as he had proclaimed. William Gibson reported in an interview, "A London journalist told me when Billy did his 'Cyberpunk' press junket over there, he made it a condition of getting an interview with him, that every journalist had to have read Neuromancer...Anyway, they all did but when they met with Billy, the first thing that became really apparent was that Billy hadn't read it. So they called him on it, and he said he didn't need to..he just absorbed it through a kinda osmosis."

Upon release, the album did not fare well, failing to make the top 20 in either the UK or United States. Instead, the album debuted at #48 on the Billboard 200 on July 17, 1993, and quickly plummeted to #192 in seven weeks before falling off the chart completely. The album saw slightly better chart placings in Europe, where it peaked at #5 in Austria, and #15 in Switzerland.

The first two singles fared slightly better. "Heroin", a cover of The Velvet Underground's "Heroin", peaked at #16 on the Hot Dance Club Play chart. "Shock to the System" peaked at #7 on the Hot Mainstream Rock Tracks chart, #23 on the Hot Modern Rock Tracks chart, and #5 on Bubbling Under Hot 100 Singles chart. The last two singles, "Adam in Chains" and "Wasteland", both failed to achieve any chart ratings within the United States, but did in other countries.