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Fifty-five years ago, the rat-a-tat-tat of typewriter keys somewhere in California announced the production of the latest screed by the era’s foremost gonzo rock journalist.
It was Lester Bangs, four days on from an acid trip (“everything is smooth with no hang-ups”), composing what would become a 21-page essay for Creem magazine on The Stooges. The chaotically noisy Detroit band, he wrote, “are not for the ages — nothing created now is — but they are most implicitly for today and tomorrow and the traditions of two decades of beautifully bopping, manic, simplistic jive.”
That must have rung true amid the countercultural convulsions of 1970, but it needs revising for 2025. Iggy Pop, former leader of The Stooges — infamous for his reckless stage antics, “a matador”, in Bangs’s vivid description, “baiting the vast dark hydra sitting afront him” — is still here, flinging himself around venues at the age of 78. The thousands witnessing him do so at Alexandra Palace signalled a longevity that no one back in the day could have thought possible, or perhaps even desirable.
A coffin stood on its end on one side of the stage, the only prop. James Osterberg Jr, aka Iggy, lurched on stage after his seven-piece band to the sound of dogs barking: scoliosis has left him with one leg shorter than the other. He was, as ever, shirtless. The impressive torso of before is just as striking in old age. Big screens showed his leathery, wrinkled flesh in close-up — bulging out here, sagging there. Lustrous straw-coloured hair and gleaming American teeth added a strangely youthful patina to this extraordinary tableau of the ageing male body.
The Stooges’ proto-punk songs dominated the setlist. They formed a formidable wall of noise, shaped by the distinctively brutal riffs and exhilarating surges in power that lifted the group above other garage-rock primitives. A pair of horn players added further refinement to the primal stomp. Iggy whooped and hollered his way through “T.V. Eye” and geed up his forceful drummer during “Raw Power”.
Two signature hits from his David Bowie-marshalled solo career in the late 1970s were played in succession. Cameras were raised for “The Passenger” and chants of its “la-la-la” refrain rang out. “Lust for Life” was even better, an irrepressibly barrelling tribute to Iggy’s joie de vivre, his fundamental characteristic.
The inventor of the stage dive no longer catapults himself on to onlookers (“too rickety”, he said in 2022). But his vocals remain vibrant: there was no hint of raspiness. “I’m loose, baby!” he cried, clambering down from the stage to the audience barrier for The Stooges’ “Loose”, tracked by thickets of smartphone screens. Back on stage, he hurled the microphone stand over, waggled his hands as though challenging all-comers, and beat his fists against his torso as the impressive lead guitarist played a malevolent psychedelic solo during “I’m Sick of You”.
All this might have seemed like pantomime, a creaky pastiche of youthful ferocity — like the routine pair of punk tracks that made an appearance from Pop’s latest album, 2023’s Every Loser. But Iggy’s act still works. His willingness to leave everything out there hits differently now that he is someone for whom time itself is running out. At the end, he was wheeled off in the coffin. “No, come back!” someone near me shouted. The coffin’s lid flew open to reveal the beaming, waving singer, prompting a swell of cheering. That was pure panto — but also proof that Iggy Pop is for the ages.
★★★★☆
iggypop.com
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