Live Report: Iggy Pop – Royal Albert Hall, London

Post Pop Detonation...

Iggy Pop once described himself as a street walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm. Flailing onto the stage wide-eyed with a beaming smile to the joyous blare of ‘Lust For Life’ – he is all that and much more.

The old world splendour of the Royal Albert Hall is in for an eye-opener. Iggy’s wild abandon is instantly infectious and the 5,000-strong crowd react in a heartbeat – the refined grandeur of the venue goes up like chip pan. Palpable energy courses around the wings and directly through the lucky masses in the standing pit and right up to those perched high in the Gods – all responded – no one was untouched.

“Turn up the lights in this fucking dump!” Iggy bellows… he wants to see us; we’re his collective prey and he wants some fun before he goes in for the kill.

James Newell Osterberg, Jr. has been performing for 55 years – from day one glaring back out into the mass of eyes. Decades of the most intensely committed, brutally honest, unhinged performance. This is the redoubtable and unequivocal embodiment of music’s raw power.

“If you give a good performance, something that gets some feeling across to people, that’s such a rare gift. It’s underestimated at this point in history, when the music biz is inevitably turning into a kind of politics” Iggy says.

Over his long career the stories of his on-stage shenanigans have become legendary and cover everything from cutting himself open through to stripping and flaunting his manhood. As the crepuscular refrain of fourth song ‘Sixteen’ blasts out Iggy is already lurching into the audience, one second running amok, the next lifted and carried aloft by the loyal mob. By the time he’s back on stage a line of blood stripes the side of his head and he shouts, “Let go of my pants, baby!” with a laugh. His trousers might still be on, but this is everything he’s got.

Iggy has said, “What some people would call antics, I would just call a good show”, and it’s hard to imagine anything better than this. At 69, Iggy Pop is undiminished. On the contrary… he is a lodestar and everyone is transfixed.

The lion’s share of the songs is torn from just three albums, the recently released ‘Post Pop Depression’ and the two albums he made in collaboration with his dearly missed friend David Bowie, ‘The Idiot’ and ‘Lust For Life’. There is no filler – ‘Some Weird Sin’, ‘Nightclubbing’, The Passenger’, Break Into Your Heart’, ‘Gardenia’ – bam! It’s relentless and glorious.

Josh Homme is accustomed to being in the spotlight for Queens Of The Stone Age but he seems not only comfortable but damn pleased to be skulking behind the impish force of his new comrade. Yet Homme is still a towering presence and drives the ferocious five-piece band with Arctic Monkeys’ drummer Matt Helder maintaining a flawless pace.

“Let the fucking people free! Let the mother-fucking hall free!” Iggy is a life junkie and his sheer ebullience is something to behold. For 22 songs he is a frantic sinewy blur and utterly compelling for every second.

In ‘Open Up And Bleed’ – Paul Trynka’s exhaustive and peerless biography of Iggy Pop – a deeply intelligent, kind and charismatic person comes to the fore. But his artistic expression soars in a wilfully primitive body of music. And the righteous anger is still there.

There’s been talk of Iggy’s retirement from recording and performing but we can only hope it’s unfounded and that he stays healthy for a long time yet. In this annus horribilis that has seen musical giants tragically depart, Iggy Pop remains as defiant, confrontational and elemental as ever. The incomparable performer rounds off an unforgettable night with ‘Success’, gleefully howling “I'm gonna go out on the street and do anything I want, I'm gonna go out on the street and do anything” into the maw of the night.

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Words: Nick Rice

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