Iggy Pop
tells Andrew Perry why he finally decided to revive his legendary band, the Stooges
'My baggage, coming into this, is too many years as a professional rock worker," says Iggy Pop, discussing his first recording in 34 years with his legendary band, the wild - and wildly influential - Stooges. He emits a blast of laughter: "My baggage is pragmatism, compromise, knowledge of trickery. I've met every highly successful scumbag, every rich musician who now considers himself a philosopher king of the whole world - I know them all, and after a while it starts to rub off."
Weathering the storms: Iggy Pop, soon to be 60
The Stooges, by contrast, have come to symbolise a militant purity, their disastrous career appreciated only retrospectively as a beacon of rock at its most iron-willed. "Basically, if we were going to reform the Stooges, a lot of the things I've done to survive had to be un-learnt."
In the past couple of decades, Iggy Pop, who turns 60 next month, has become one of rock's most dependable performers, but this was a quality he acquired only in later life. Before that, he was best known for burning out - most notably in 1974, when the Stooges fell apart in druggy chaos in Los Angeles, and the singer wound up in hospital.
The fall-out from that period was so severe that it seemed unlikely that Iggy would ever reconvene with his old colleagues.
The Stooges, however, are the cornerstone of his career. The Detroit group's three albums, all unsuccessful at the time, have since each provided their own blueprint for punk. Their debut, The Stooges (1969) coined a visceral, fiery-eyed sound driven by boredom and frustration. But Iggy gamely debunks any notion that it invented punk from scratch.
advertisement"Where did we get it from? Other groups!" he roars. "You have the Kinks in there, the Velvet Underground, the Who, a bit of the early Stones, and, in the vocalisations, Bob Dylan. Dylan threw his voice. He would say [reasonable imitation], 'Andrew, how can you be such a draaaag!' So, I would sing [pushing it further], 'Nooow, I wanna be your doooooog!' "
The Stooges was received as frostily by the hippie world as Dylan's electric phase was by the folkies. Funhouse (1970) also bombed. The band descended into anarchy, with the consequence that Raw Power (1973) documented a group heading towards ruin.
When I last spoke to Iggy, in 2001, it was clear that talking about that period in his life - the failure, the drugs, the dream gone sour - was painful to him. "I still associate the Stooges with death," he says today, on this occasion not laughing. "It's all the D's - destruction, depravity, dispossession, real decadence, despair." If this is the case, one wonders again why he has now chosen to revive the group. Everything he has done since - give or take the odd narcotic meltdown - has been part of a process of recovering and rebuilding.
It was David Bowie who first helped him to his feet, decamping with him to Berlin to make two groundbreaking albums, The Idiot and Lust for Life. The title track from Lust for Life symbolised both Iggy's rehabilitation, and that intense period of collaboration.
"[David] wrote that song on a ukulele. Once a week the Armed Forces Network would show Starsky & Hutch, so that was our little ritual - it's Thursday night! We're gonna watch Starsky & Hutch! AFN had an ID [between programmes], where a representation of a radio tower would come on the screen, and it made a signal sound - beep-beep-beep, beep-beep-ba-deep!" He chuckles. "We were sitting there, and we went, aha, we'll take that!"
Unfortunately, Lust for Life was released by RCA three weeks after Elvis Presley's death, when the label was too busy cashing in on the King's back catalogue to worry about Iggy's comeback. As punk spread around the world, however, his cachet rose. After another breakdown, this time in Haiti, he was rescued again by Bowie, who collaborated on 1986's Blah Blah Blah album - his first mainstream success.
Soon after, the duo parted company rather bitterly. Iggy's ego was dented by the prominent appearance of Bowie's name in every magazine article about him - indeed, in our conversation, he avoids using it, preferring a cold and impersonal "he".
Around the time of grunge, when Iggy's stock rose once more, he got his finances in order, and has since carved out a lucrative living on the festival circuit, and from licensing out old songs to adverts and movies. Life, finally, is very good for Iggy Pop.
"When I'm doing music," he tells me, "I stay in a little cottage in a modest, racially mixed neighbourhood here in Miami. When I'm not, I've got a pile 45 minutes away with my hottie, and her dogs, and cats, and birds, and a tennis court - although I don't play tennis." He also has holiday homes in Mexico and the Cayman Islands. "When I'm not working," he says, "I like to go out at night, lay on my back and look at the moon."
When Iggy chose to reform the Stooges in 2003, his former band-mates were not so favourably appointed. Their guitarist, Ron Asheton, was still living at home with his mother, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. His brother, Scott, their drummer, lived nearby, an inveterate party animal.
But while the Ashetons had often approached him about a reunion, their vision of it was untainted by all the compromises necessary to keep afloat in today's rock world. The Stooges were an all-or-nothing band. For Iggy, this wasn't about the money.
"I realised that if it's not cool, there's no point in doing it. Also, if it doesn't go well, I'm f***ed! But, as soon as we started working, we'd instantly slid back into something."
After some earth-shakingly loud live shows, the reformed Stooges this week released their fourth album, The Weirdness, 34 years on from the last. It's the ferocious sound of a band belatedly arriving to collect their dues.
"We're in our own dream, and it's the same dream we had when were 16," says Iggy. "Everybody is up to speed, and believe me, we're into it."
The Weirdness is out now on Virgin.
Iggy Pop: Open Up and Bleed by Paul Trynka is published by Sphere at £18.99
Five things you didn't know about Iggy Pop
Born James Newell Osterberg, Jr, not in Detroit, but in Coachville Gardens, a trailer park near Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Stage name came from his stint as drummer in a beat group, the Iguanas. Surname was coined after he shaved his eyebrows and was thought to resemble a man called Jim Pop who was having chemotherapy.
Bullied at school over his large "endowment", which later became his selling point, as he exposed himself on stage.
Directly inspired David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust persona, and Bowie's hit The Jean Genie.
During his mid-1970s wilderness year he worked in telemarketing.
