"Dancing with Myself" is a song by the punk rock band Gen X, first commercially released in the United Kingdom in October 1980, where it reached number 62 on the UK Singles Chart.
It was remixed and re-released by the band's singer/frontman Billy Idol as a solo artist in the United States in 1981, where the song reached number 27 on the US Billboard Hot Dance Club Play chart.
The inspiration for the song occurred during a tour of Japan by the English post-punk band Generation X in mid-1979, when its vocalist/frontman Billy Idol and its bassist Tony James were struck by the sight of the young crowd in a Tokyo discotheque dancing with their own reflections in mirrored walls rather than with one another.
[7] After that band had split later in that year, Idol and James re-branded the act as Gen X, and in production sessions with Keith Forsey for a new long-player at AIR Studios in London in mid-1980, the song was re-recorded for commercial release as a single.
For the 1981 United States single release a music video for use on the newly launched MTV was made, directed by Tobe Hooper, with Idol in a scenario drawn from the 1971 cinema film The Omega Man, playing a lone figure in a post-apocalyptic cityscape besieged upon a skyscraper rooftop by partying mutant street-waifs.