Billy Idol Rebels, Phil Collins Gets Emotional and Rick Rubin Clones Invade the Rock Hall Induction Ceremony

Rick Rubin summed up the 2026 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony in one line: “You can’t kill rock ‘n’ roll.”

Fair enough, given how many people onstage Saturday night have spent the past half-century testing that theory.

The show, at Los Angeles’ Peacock Theater, was sprawling, sentimental and often thrilling: rappers, punks, metalheads, soul singers and producers, plus enough rock royalty to staff a truly dysfunctional family reunion. Some inductees didn’t bother to show. Others turned up to prove that age is just a number, even if the number now comes with reading glasses, canes and a hand up to the podium. (The ceremony airs Dec. 8 on ABC and streams the next day on Disney+ and Hulu.)

And then there were the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who showed up dressed as Rubin.

Big white beards, balding white wigs, orange-tinted shades: the band turned themselves into a squad of Rubin clones and tore through “Give It Away,” the hit from Blood Sugar Sex Magik, the first album he made with them. Chad Smith’s bass drum carried a portrait of the man himself. It was the most gloriously ridiculous sight of the night, and proof that the Peppers can still act like the guys who once played shows in strategically placed socks.

The real Rubin, inducted by Neil Young with the Musical Excellence Award, accepted in shorts, sandals and rose-tinted sunglasses. His entire speech: “You can’t kill rock ‘n’ roll.” Then he walked off.

By then, the night had made his case for him.

U2 had opened with a surprise set, playing their song “Silencio” off of new album Carnival de Luz, surrounded by dancers in riot helmets and shields before launching into “Pride (In the Name of Love).” Bono flashed a peace sign, then a raised fist, then a peace sign again. Later in the night, Trent Reznor named U2 among the bands that would sound very different without Joy Division and New Order.

Still, the Rock Hall has always been as much about who doesn’t show up as who does. Oasis made their presence felt by staying home.

Bob Odenkirk inducted them with a deadpan speech. He said he played Oasis every day before stepping on set as Saul Goodman, for “swagger, energy, moxie.” The band, he said, was “a dose of Viagra for the ego.” Then he addressed the empty seats. “Anybody surprised they didn’t show up?” he asked. “It would have been out of character if they had. I would have been worried about them.”

Stephen Wilson Jr. followed with a stripped-down “Wonderwall,” trading Britpop strut for his own rough, country-tinged rasp.

Iron Maiden had a better excuse for missing their own induction. They were busy being Iron Maiden, currently on tour in Australia.

Jack Black opened their segment by belting a line from “Run to the Hills,” then got to the point. “Has there ever been a band who has rocked this hard for this long?” he demanded. “The answer is no!” As for the no-show: “In fact, they aren’t even here tonight,” he said. “Because they’re rocking a world tour as they have been for the last 50 years!”

Black then brought out the night’s least likely supergroup: Metallica’s Kirk Hammett and Robert Trujillo, Rage Against the Machine’s Brad Wilk, guitarist John 5 and, on lead vocals, St. Vincent. “Give it up for the St. Rage Metallica Five,” Black roared, and they charged into “The Trooper.” St. Vincent was the inspired pick, an art-rock guitar hero taking the reins of metal’s most famous gallop. If Maiden couldn’t make it to their own coronation, the stand-ins made enough noise to cover for them.

For all the noise, the night’s most affecting moment belonged to Phil Collins.

Collins, whose health has kept him off the stage in recent years, made his way out on two walking canes, with his children Lily, Nicholas and Joely in the house, and he broke down at a standing ovation from a crowd that included Jimmy Kimmel and Vince Vaughn.

Travis Barker introduced him like a kid meeting his hero. “Sussudio,” “Take Me Home,” “Easy Lover” and “Against All Odds” were his childhood soundtrack, he said, but nothing hit like the break in 1981’s “In the Air Tonight,” “arguably the most badass drum fill of all time.”

“You don’t even have to be a drummer to know that, Phil,” Barker said. “When that part comes on, everyone plays air drums.” The joke, he added, is that Collins never looked like a guy who could make that much noise. “That sound changed everything.”

Collins, now a two-time inductee after going in with Genesis in 2010, punctured the moment right away. “I’m really not as bad as it looks, you know,” he said.

He thanked longtime manager Tony Smith, who he claimed had been managing him since 1485. “I grew up just wanting to play the drums,” he said. “Everything else has been a really happy accident.”

The biggest thanks went to his assistant, Lindsay Evans, whom he credited with turning his health around. “Without her, I wouldn’t be here,” he said. “I’d be in a box, six feet under.” He made clear he isn’t finished. “You haven’t heard the last of me, I can promise you that.”

Then Cynthia Erivo took “In the Air Tonight” from its slow, ominous simmer all the way up, with Barker behind the kit. When the fill finally landed, he pounded it like a man crossing off a lifelong dream: the kid who air-drummed that break, now playing it for the man who can’t anymore. Collins got up out of his seat and applauded, no canes.

Chris Rock had the unenviable job of following that. He didn’t pretend to be gracious about it. “She fuckin’ did that shit for us,” he said, before claiming Collins had already ditched the canes and was dancing backstage.

Then he went back to one of the great unhinged moments in Grammy history. At the 1998 ceremony, after Wu-Tang lost best rap album to Puff Daddy, Ol’ Dirty Bastard hijacked the show to declare that “Wu-Tang is for the children.” Rock, who was there that night, had an update on the winner: “Who is definitely not for the children,” he said. “I’m just saying, history has proven that.”

But Rock wasn’t just doing a set. He remembered Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) pouring out of cars and bodegas all over New York in 1993. “Wu-Tang rewrote the rules of hip-hop and did it without a big machine behind them,” he said. “Those dudes took their gritty street stories and Kung Fu samples and created something that the world had never seen before.”

He credited RZA’s business model, which let members cut their own solo deals while staying in the Clan. “They built a whole world and invited everyone in,” he said. “The Wu-Tang didn’t leave Staten Island. They took it with them.”

All eight living members piled onstage, backed by a full jazz band, for a medley that included “C.R.E.A.M.” and ODB’s “Shimmy Shimmy Ya.” Method Man put the night in one sentence: “We went from being banned on the radio to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.”

Megan Thee Stallion inducted Queen Latifah with a definition of her own. “The word queen embodies strength, confidence, and resilience,” she said.

“When Queen Latifah stepped onto the scene in the late 1980s, hip-hop was overwhelmingly male,” Megan said. “Women were often treated as accessories, rather than equals.” Then the aside: “Still a little bit like that today. But we fixed it.”

The room laughed. The point stood. With “Ladies First,” her 1989 track with Monie Love, and later “U.N.I.T.Y.,” Latifah went straight at hip-hop’s misogyny. Megan credited her with kicking the door open for the women who followed, then building an empire on top of it.

Latifah spent her Early Influence Award speech on everyone else. She remembered basement sessions where kids traded rhymes and sharpened each other. “We were kids,” she said. “We didn’t know what the hell we were doing. We just knew we loved this music.” They also knew what it could do: “We knew that it could change the economic future of our families. We knew we could buy our moms houses. We could get out of our neighborhoods.”

Her warmest words went to MC Lyte. “If it wasn’t for Lyte, I don’t know if I would have knew this was really possible,” she said.

Lyte, inducted by Remy Ma, called herself “a b-girl from Brooklyn” and told younger artists to build multiple income streams. Then she turned to Latifah. “This is nothing without you,” she said. “Where we started, how we started, this is full circle.” The two closed it out together with “U.N.I.T.Y.,” Lyte’s “Ruffneck” and “Ladies First,” still making the case for sisterhood more than 30 years on, this time from the Rock Hall stage.

Oprah Winfrey skipped the superlatives for Luther Vandross, who died in 2005, and went personal. He used to give her life advice, she said: “Girl, use all your good dishes for yourself.”

She remembered leaving her Chicago studio late one night in the ’80s, popping a new Vandross cassette into the car stereo and hearing “Power of Love.” She was almost home. Instead of pulling into the driveway, she kept circling the block to hear it again.

“There are voices that can sing, and then there are voices that sing,” Winfrey said. Vandross never had to overpower a song. “He trusted the tenderness.” And on what happens when “A House Is Not a Home” comes on: “Suddenly, you’re not in your living room anymore. You’re standing in the doorway of every love you ever lost.” Usher followed with a medley that included “Here and Now” and “So Amazing.”

If Collins was the night’s lesson in survival, Joy Division and New Order were its lesson in reinvention. Reznor traced the line from Joy Division’s bleak post-punk to New Order’s guitars-and-synths dance floor.

Reznor said he wore out Jonathan Demme’s video for “The Perfect Kiss.” “I was just one of many that studied that blueprint,” he said, then named some of the others: U2, Radiohead, the Cure, the Killers, Nirvana, Depeche Mode.

Peter Hook was the only original member there. “I’m on my own, but I’m not alone,” he said, a line with some bite given how long he’s been on the outs with his old New Order bandmates. He didn’t stay alone for long. Deftones’ Chino Moreno, who has built a career in the gap between heavy and fragile, joined him for “Love Will Tear Us Apart.” CHVRCHES’ Lauren Mayberry, a synth-pop lifer, took “Bizarre Love Triangle.” Hook thanked them for making “an old man very happy.”

Sade skipped it too. After Andra Day’s induction, rising British singer Sienna Spiro drew the hard assignment of “Smooth Operator.”

Others got a quicker spotlight. Celia Cruz became the first inductee who sang primarily in Spanish and Fela Kuti the first born in Africa, alongside country-rock pioneer Gram Parsons. Joining Rubin in the Musical Excellence class were Philly soul songwriter Linda Creed, producer Arif Mardin and Jimmy Miller, who produced the Stones from Beggars Banquet to Exile on Main St. Ed Sullivan took the Ahmet Ertegun Award for putting rock ‘n’ roll in America’s living rooms.

The last inductee to take the stage was the one who’d wanted it most.

Billy Idol’s road to the Rock Hall started with a bad report card. “Idle. Not active, not in use, or having no real purpose or value,” Gwen Stefani read from the podium. A chemistry teacher had once used the word on a student named William Broad. Broad turned the insult into a stage name. Fifty years later, the allegedly unmotivated schoolboy was a Hall of Famer.

Stefani, joined by No Doubt bassist Tony Kanal, remembered riding the bus to Huntington Beach in the summer of 1984 and hearing “Eyes Without a Face” blasting from boom boxes up and down the sand. “It was pure euphoria,” she said. She had no idea what the song meant. It didn’t matter. Then there was the look: spiked hair, leather, fingerless gloves and that lip curl. “He was handsome. He was stylish. He was crazy sexy,” Stefani said. “And perfectly rebellious.”

Steve Stevens accepted first, saluting his “six-string goddess” and recalling how his parents put up with his Joni Mitchell and James Taylor covers right up until he got a fuzz box and spent days mangling “Purple Haze.” He called Idol a great songwriter and “the real effin’ deal.”

Idol stepped up, put on his sunglasses and made a surprisingly earnest case for punk as a philosophy of freedom. “We were told there was no future, but we had found our tribe,” he said. “And we made punk rock and charted our own course.” Punk, he added, “was and remains a tremendously positive thing.”

He thanked his family, his old Generation X bandmates and, above all, Stevens, saying he couldn’t imagine going into the Rock Hall with anyone else. He left the kids with a dare: “Go make the impossible possible. Find out who you are. And be it.” And he signed off with the line of the night: “And now, I’m going to party with the Wu-Tang Clan!”

Then he and Stevens, with Billy Morrison on bass, tore through “Rebel Yell,” before Stefani came back out for “Eyes Without a Face.”

Idol didn’t get the last word, though. Chuck D came out to introduce one more surprise: Run-DMC and Aerosmith, with Chad Smith on drums, for “Walk This Way. Rubin co-produced it. The night ended right where it started.

Rubin had it right. You can’t kill rock ‘n’ roll. On Saturday night, at least, the old bastard wasn’t going quietly.