1. Kill City (with James Williamson)
The Stooges had come off the rails before, but in February 1974 they finally split for good. Despite the ignominious nature of their demise, Jim Osterberg – the man behind Iggy Pop – had still not quite reached his rock bottom. He spent the best part of a year couch surfing and relying on the charity of others, including fans, for heroin and quaaludes. An intervention took place when he was arrested for intimidating diners at an LA burger emporium. Detention at a psychiatric facility on the UCLA campus gave the singer time to cool off, and at the weekends he was allowed out to record with former Stooges guitarist James Williamson at Jimmy Webb’s home studio in Encino. Kill City is an edgy and erratic blur of driving riffage in the style of the old band, with Pop grumbling about surviving in the city, “until you wind up in some bathroom overdosed and on your knees”. Record companies passed on the 1975 Kill City demos, at least until 1977, when Iggy Pop’s stock was on the rise again, and Bomp! Records gave Williamson funds to complete and release the album.
2. Nightclubbing
Despite their narcotic proclivities, David Bowie and Iggy Pop were good for each other. Their counterintuitive logic led them to try to clean up their lifestyles by moving from LA to Berlin, the heroin capital of the world, but they showed a surprising degree of restraint while living there (for a while anyway). The 18 months they spent together would turn out to be the most productive period of both their lives. Iggy managed to release two albums in 1977, the first of which – The Idiot, named after the Dostoevsky novel – was a far cry from the Stooges. Minimalist, electronic and experimental, it was recorded at the famous Château d’Hérouville in Val d’Oise, before being finished off in Munich and Berlin. The recording techniques of the pair were said to be unorthodox and eccentric. In his Iggy biography Open Up and Bleed, Paul Trynka writes that drummer Michel Santangeli was packed off back to Brittany before he’d even realised they’d started recording, while guitarist Phil Palmer was asked to imagine and replicate the sounds one might encounter walking past the clubs of Wardour Street. Nightclubbing throbs with the sleazy ambience of an underground Kreuzberg club, though with the persistent disco thud slowed down to create the kind of disorientating effect one might experience while heavily sedated. “We recorded the song with a lousy drum machine,” Pop recalled later. “Bowie kept saying, ‘But we gotta call back the drummer, you’re not gonna have that freaky sound on the tape!’ And I replied, ‘Hey, no way, it kicks ass, it’s better than a drummer.’”
3. Funtime
Funtime followed the Stooges’ Fun House and No Fun; in fact it was the Sex Pistols’ cover of the latter (which eventually soundtracked their messy unravelling at the Winterland Ballroom) that first inspired Iggy to revisit the familiar motif. It’s written, unusually, in the first person plural (“Hey baby we like your lips / Hey baby we like your pants”), and Bowie’s backing vocal attacks high in the mix, with both voices offering confrontation. In fact, it’s a deadpan and almost threatening delivery that juxtaposes the devil-may-care lyrics, making it all the more sinister and disconcerting. Based on the pair’s partying experiences in LA, the mechanical tenacity of the backing track and the dehumanised singing represent repeatedly going through the motions when all the fun has dried up.
4. Lust for Life
The unlikely musical germ of an idea for Lust For Life came when Bowie attempted to imitate the Armed Forces Network call signal with his ukulele (he was apparently waiting for Starsky and Hutch to come on the television in Germany). The Armed Forces Network “was one of the few things that was in English on the telly”, said Bowie, “and it had this great pulsating riff at the beginning of the news”. The insistent beat was reinforced by drummer Hunt Sales and his brother Tony on bass, while guitarist Carlos Alomar said its driving rhythm was so dominating that to play something on the offbeat was out of the question. Iggy Pop then improvised the lyrics, alluding to the clean regime he and Bowie were trying to observe (“No more beating my brains with the liquor and drugs”), while the “that’s like hypnotising chickens” line comes straight from the character Johnny Yen in William Buroughs’ novel The Ticket That Exploded. The song got a boost in the 90s when it was prominently used in the film Trainspotting, and thanks to that exposure, it now rivals The Passenger as Pop’s best-known song. Lust For Life is also the title track of the first album written and conceived entirely in Berlin for both Iggy and Bowie. “The wall was beautiful,” said the former. “It created a wonderful island, the same way that volcanos created islands in the sea. The opposing pressures created this place that they all studiously [ignored] and nobody bugged you. It was wonderful.” The album should have sold more in 1977, but Elvis Presley’s unexpected death coincided with Iggy’s own release schedule, meaning all of RCA’s resources were used up reprinting the King’s back catalogue.
5. I’m Bored
Iggy’s third solo album proper, New Values, was the first not to feature Bowie, with James Williamson back as producer. New Values is a wildly creative and commercially undervalued tour de force of songwriting that suffers only slightly from Williamson’s dry and unostentatious production. That doesn’t impede I’m Bored, a song that actually thrives on its threadbare garage simplicity. Pop bellyaches with a deep boom about the ennui he feels, while gently lampooning the captains of industry driving the economy – “I’m bored / I’m the chairman of the bored”. As a champion of the hoi polloi, Pop often had a pop at the establishment, though I’m Bored was far more subtly subversive than I’m a Conservative on the following album. Such nihilism was in keeping with the musical climate, though Iggy had been expressing his dissatisfaction long before it was fashionable to do so.
6. I Need More
Iggy had recruited Rich Kids bass guitarist and ex-Sex Pistol Glen Matlock for the New Values tour. Matlock stuck around for the following album, Soldier, writing one track and co-writing another three (although he soon left again after an altercation over the final mix). The pick of the bunch is I Need More. “More venom, more dynamite, more disaster,” spits Pop, “I need more than I ever did before.” According to Trynka, the song is an exploration of Pop’s narcissism, which was partly inspired by his time in that psychiatric institution. Intriguingly, Murray Zucker, the doctor who treated him in 1975, has said the hypomania he diagnosed might have been a misdiagnosis, adding that I Need More is a “brilliant exploration” of narcissism as a condition. It’s a rough and ready, picaresque adventure into Ig’s id, while musically the song swings with a menace that’s oddly reminiscent of the Fall.
7. Repo Man
In the early 80s, Iggy was struck by hard luck, tax demands and artistic underperformance, but much of his misfortune could be attributed to a tendency to self-sabotage. Record contracts came and went, and musically he lost his way as he persisted in beating his brains, winding up paying another visit to Dr Zucker in 1983. The British movie director Alex Cox found him in an unfurnished studio off Sunset Strip and gave him carte blanche to do whatever he wanted with the theme to Repo Man. “At the time, I’d had a hiccup in my career due to my wild lifestyle,” said Iggy. “I was sort of on the ropes, not making much money … It was like a gift from God to express myself.” Joining forces with ex-Sex Pistol Steve Jones, who was now clean, as well as members of Blondie, Iggy delivered another biting indictment of LA living, which begins with the lines: “I was riding on a concrete slab, down a river of useless flab / it was such a beautiful day / I heard a witchdoctor say, ‘I’ll turn you into a toadstool.’” Repo Man – the song – is a stream-of-consciousness masterclass conceived and recorded in 20 minutes flat. It’s one of Iggy’s indisputable highlights of the decade, though to be fair, there weren’t too many of those.
8. Shades
“There’s a fine line between entertaining flamboyance and being a prat,” said the newly self-aware singer. “I was becoming Don Quixote.” His getting clean and sober also coincided with reconvening his artistic relationship with David Bowie. Again Bowie was there at his lowest ebb with the promise of redemption, and 1986 saw Pop’s profile rise again. There were even hits, notably a cover of Johnny O’Keefe’s The Wild One, renamed Real Wild Child, which went Top 10 in the UK. The resulting album, Blah Blah Blah, certainly sounds like a product of its time, but some of the songs cut through the fluorescent sheen, especially Shades, which is a much better David Bowie song than the ones he was writing for himself at the time. It’s a dizzyingly romantic love song that Iggy carries off with surprising aplomb. “I’m not the kind of guy who dresses like a king / And a really fine pair of shades means everything,” he sings, enamoured with his new present from his sweetheart. “And the light that blinds my eyes shines from you.”
9. Wild America
It may surprise some that Iggy Pop’s best selling album to date is 1990’s Brick by Brick, mainly thanks to his first US top 40 hit, Candy, a duet with the B52s’ Kate Pierson. The album was poor, and at times, puerile; the follow-up, American Caesar, was vastly superior, but sold nothing like its predecessor. In fact the 90s is generally regarded as another fallow period for Pop, the nadir coming in the shape of 1996’s dreadful Naughty Little Doggie, but American Caesar is blessed with some truly fine moments, like a song that documents a night out in the US Iggy Pop style. “Now I’m in a black car with my Mexicana / She’s got methedrine but I want marijuana,” he drawls, and the morning after is recounted too: “She laughed and said Iggy / You have got a biggy.” Wild America features a scything, repetitive guitar line, while the video cuts to autobiographical footage of a shirtless Jim Osterberg recounting growing up in a Michigan trailer park.
10. Paraguay
Iggy Pop’s career is strewn with some fairly indifferent collaborations, but when he gets it right, true alchemy happens. Bowie is the most obvious example of a perfect partner (80s French new wave duo Les Rita Mitsouko are probably less obvious), and then there’s Josh Homme, who has helped resurrect Iggy’s solo career. It all happened thanks to Pop reaching out to the musician by text message, suggesting they might try writing together. Subsequently Pop said Homme took him to “a place I’d never been,” while Homme added it was a place “neither of us had gone before. That was the agreement. And to go all the way.” This year’s album Post Pop Depression is a masterwork by the 69-year-old that may yet prove to be his last. If so then it’s a profound and stylish way to conclude an illustrious career. Every song is a contender, but Paraguay gets the nod because of its sheer ambition. During the clattering, blues-driven outro, Iggy dreams of “getting away to a new life / Where there’s not so much fucking knowledge / I don’t want any of this ‘information’.” Right to the last, there’s an internal struggle and the desire to get away, though at least this time its for new climes rather than disappearing into a deleterious hole (Paraguay may well symbolise a spiritually higher plane). Those that know the singer well often talk of a duality, of the charming James Newell Osterberg versus the monster Iggy Pop. Iggy might appear to be a loser at times, but with a legendary career spanning more than half a century behind him, one can only beg to differ.
