It was fantastic to see Iggy Pop and The Stooges play live again at Hyde Park at the Hard Rock Calling Festival. Iggy is such a force of Nature.
When Paul McCartney sang When I’m Sixty Four he sang of holidays in the Isle of Wight (if it’s not too dear). He made little mention of gallivanting around like a demented madman with his shirt off. And yet Iggy Pop (now 65) makes the whole shirt-off-and-madman thing look effortless.
I last saw Iggy and The Stooges when he was 64 and in The Isle of Wight. He ended up filling the stage with Kate Moss’ hen party and Head Foo Fighter Dave Grohl among others and getting them to dance around, before roundly abusing them, saying “I f- hate VIPs!” All priceless stuff – it seems that little has changed for the man who began his career climbing over the crowd on live TV in order to fling peanut butter over them and smear it all over himself.
No such breakfast related antics were on show last night at the Hard Rock Calling support slot for Soundgarden at Hyde Park in London, but we did get some priceless animal impersonations during I Wanna Be Your Dog…
I’m a big Iggy Pop fan. The Stooges make a great noise and Iggy is a force of nature. He has extraordinary energy whilst James Williamson throws out the sort of riffs that would be dismissed at a Neanderthal’s dinner party as being too unsophisticated…
What sets Iggy apart is the sheer joy in what he does together with the anti-establishment attitude he still retains.
I read his biography I Need More last week. Written in 1982 it provides an insight into what life was like for the young James Osterberg growing up in a trailer park in Ann Arbour, Michigan in the fifties and sixties, at a time Detroit was at war with itself (see the amazing MC5 documentary A True Testimonial for further insight into this). I was on the train and thoroughly engrossed reading page 78, entirely oblivious to the fact that a full size and full frontal nude picture of Iggy is on page 79. Mortified when I noticed, the book was so good I just moved my arm slowly over the offending photo and carried on reading, desperately hoping no-one had noticed. Typical of Iggy to do that, if you ask me…
Iggy was every bit as electrifying at Hyde Park as he had been last year. We were treated to versions of No Fun, Raw Power, Search and Destroy, Open Up and Bleed, I Wanna Be Your Dog and Kill City.
There are some things you should see before you die. Machu Picchu, Niagara Falls, The Pyramids of Egypt…but all of these Wonders of The World will be around forever. Iggy won’t be. See him first…
Record #70: Iggy and the Stooges – Search and Destroy
Every record tells a story 
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