“Dancing With Myself” was originally recorded and released by Gen X, Idol’s punk-rock group, in 1979 but it failed to gain commercial success in the UK. When Idol left for a solo career, he remixed and re-released the song in the United States on his first EP, Don’t Stop in 1981. Then it was re-released in 1983 after the success of “Hot In The City” and “White Wedding” and this time it reached #2 on Billboard’s Bubbling Under Chart, which tracks songs that have almost made it onto the Hot 100. Despite not making the Hot 100, the song remains one of his best known.

The inspiration for “Dancing With Myself” came to Idol during a 1978 trip to a Japanese discotheque, when he noticed the crowd “dancing to their own reflections in the mirror and not really with each other."

The music video for “Dancing With Myself” became an MTV mainstay, with Idol’s new-wave/glam-rock sound and punk image leading to his breakthrough as a chart-topping musician in America.