The Iggy Pop laugh is a thing to behold. While his speaking voice is that low-slung, thoughtful Midwestern rumble familiar to listeners of his consistently enthralling – and appropriately iconoclastic – BBC 6 Music radio show, when Igg laughs, dogs cock their ears and drinking glasses shimmer.
At the age of 72, Jim Osterberg Jr – Punk Rock God – retains the body of an adolescent boy, albeit sinewy, wrinkled like testes and the honeyed colour of caramel. But he tee-hees like one too. And it’s utterly infectious.
Iggy’s biggest delighted outburst on the afternoon of our meeting – in Basel, Switzerland, where the rock legend is enjoying a rest day in the midst of a stately run of summer festival shows – comes when we discuss his late friend Lou Reed.
I remind him that it’s been six years since Lou’s passing. Does he still miss him?
“I miss...” he begins, with a ponderous nod, then shifts his lean frame on the sofa in the suite in his majestic, old-world hotel on the banks of the Rhine. He starts again: “I admired him.”
Iggy recently agreed to an interview with Reed’s widow, Laurie Anderson. She’s writing a book on t’ai chi, the internal Chinese martial art “that Lou loved and she knows I do it too. She asked me to do something and I said, ‘Look, Lou tolerated me,’” he says, the giggles gurgling in his throat.
“I admired him and looked up to him as an artist. And that’s still what it is. And there were times when he could be quite decent and gracious,” he adds, as aware as anyone of the times when Laughin’ Lou could be quite something else.
“What I really miss is that there’s nobody that can do anything like he did. And it seems to be a lost art. Tremendous artistry,” he notes, wistfully.
He recalls the last time he saw Reed sing in the flesh. “It was incredible,” he says of the 2011 Hop Farm Music Festival in Kent. “Morrissey curated us all!” He chuckles. “And Lou played. He started with ‘Who Loves the Sun’,” The Velvet Underground’s 1970 track, allegedly expressly written by Reed to be a pop hit. “And the place he could put his voice, talk to you without singing at you, it just sounded so good,” he rattles in the freewheeling, jivey style into which his conversational mode can slide. “And I had to follow him on stage. Well, how do I follow that?”
The gods of ageing rock heroes, though, were smiling on Iggy.
“Luckily for me, on that particular day, Lou also had… What’s the word I’m looking for?” he muses. “He had a contrary streak. He got about four songs in to his set and decided he wanted to sing ‘Mother’ by John Lennon – for ten minutes!” Now Iggy is in fits of wheezing, girlish laughter. “At this festival on a bright sunny day in Kent!” Giggle, gurgle, giggle, gurgle. “So I thought, ‘Well, I guess there’s still room for a dirty little rock band after this set.”
The proto-punk who cofounded The Stooges in Michigan in 1967, this year’s recipient of GQ’s Lifetime Achievement award, laughs on the posh furniture, sipping fine French mineral water (Badoit – a more refined bubble), radiating good health and bonhomie. He wears loose-cut pale-blue linen trousers and a ratty blue V-neck shirt. His hair hangs in freshly washed, neatly parted sheets either side of his Mount Rushmore face.
Iggy is barefoot. He’s kicked off his sliders, one of which has a platform sole an inch or so thick. It’s to level off his hips, an ailment dating from “trying to play American football when I was 14. Big guy ran me over, broke my ankle, hit the growth centre, changed my hips a little bit. I never noticed it until my forties.”
So all those years of punishing his body on stage and in pursuit of his art – the stage-diving, the chest lacerations, the reckless schlong swinging, the enthusiastic drug hoofing – have, remarkably, not withered him. But a bout of school sports is giving him trouble six decades on. Iggy might walk with an off-kilter wobble, yet onstage and on record he still rocks like a mother. A lust for life, forever, for sure.
That said, his hands bear the signs of arthritis – both his index fingers bend inwards, above the top joint, at 45 degrees – and he’s a little deaf. He generally cups his left ear, the better to hear.
“I have a thing that grows in there, a bone,” he explains. His doctors want to periodically cut it back, but Iggy isn’t having it. “I’m not a big fan of surgeries.” He grins. “So I’ve just said, ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’ It doesn’t really bother me. Does it affect my performance? No, not really. You just lose a few highs on one side, but you can compensate. No big deal.”
After a good couple of decades of what we might call imbalance, these days Iggy is, fuzzy hearing notwithstanding, on an even keel.
“I’ve pretty remarkable balance,” he says with some pride. “I can do my job.”
Indeed. The other reason for our meeting is the release of a new Iggy Pop album: Free. Its ten tracks find Iggy in elegiac mood, singing slowly and reflectively over music composed for him by Texan jazz trumpeter Leron Thomas and instrumental guitarist Sarah Lipstate, an LA-based musician who records under the name Noveller. Adding to the air of both exploration and wistfulness are two largely spoken-word tracks.
The first is “We Are The People”, which is Iggy declaiming a lost, state-of-the-fucked-up-nation Lou Reed poem from around 1970. It was finally published, in the collection Do Angels Need Haircuts?, last year. “We are the people without right,” Iggy intones. “We are the people who have known only lies and desperation. We are the people without a country, a voice or a mirror. We are the crystal gaze returned through the density and immensity of a berserk nation.”
Reed’s poem was the perfect fit for a minimal jazz-and-piano soundscape. “Reading it, I heard that music. It’s also incredibly deep and complex and I thought, ‘I didn’t know Lou could write like that.’ As so often happens, somebody falls in love with, or falls into, a classic repetitive minimal form, which is what rock’n’roll is, you know? So Lou left, but he left that behind.”
“We Are The People” is immediately followed by “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night”, Iggy’s straight-up rendition of the Dylan Thomas poem. All together now: “Rage, rage against the dying of the light…”
Free, then, is the sound of a man looking down from the Mount Olympus of life.
On the other hand, it also includes a track called “Dirty Sanchez”, which we might call low-slung mariachi porn. “Just because I like big tits, doesn’t mean I like big dicks!” hollers Iggy over blaring trumpet and hip-hitting bass. So, be reassured, there are no nights being gone into right now, gently or otherwise.
It’s another left turn in a career characterised by mazy zigzagging: in the past three years alone, Iggy has collaborated with Brit electronic veterans Underworld on the EP Teatime Dub Encounters and made Post Pop Depression, a kind of meta rock’n’roll album overseen by Josh Homme of Queens Of The Stone Age. Considering that at the time of our meeting we were almost smack on the 50th anniversary of the release of The Stooges’ mighty self-titled debut album, it’s been quite the career, a lifetime of achievements.
Iggy’s hotel is called Les Trois Rois (“The Three Kings”). It’s a reference to Basel’s location at one of the junctions of heartland Europe: this is the continental corner where Switzerland, Germany and France meet. The Three Kings: you could say that about Iggy and about Lou and about the other corner of Seventies musical royalty, David Bowie.
Reed might have, in Iggy’s self-deprecating telling, only tolerated him. But Bowie loved him. Theirs was a bond forged in New York and Berlin, in drug abuse and still-intoxicating records, notably The Idiot and Lust For Life, Iggy’s best solo albums, both produced by Bowie and both released in 1977.
I say that the passing of David must have knocked him for six. This time there are no giggles. “Shocked would be the word. Shocked. I learned about it at 3.30am, because I was supposed to catch a flight to LA early that morning to begin rehearsals with Josh and company. It just hit me for a loop, you know?"
Iggy doesn’t seem like the type for woe-is-me septuagenarian worries. But he admits that the terrible news was “awkward for me in a way, because it was part of this strange arc of…” he winces, “of death and commentary that started in my life a few years before that. My manager passed away and I got a call in the middle of the night; I was in a foreign country. Then my accountant passed away and I got a call in the middle of the night in a foreign country. Then the guitar player passed,” he says of his Stooges compadre Ron Asheton, who died in 2009. “Then the drummer passed away,” he says of Asheton’s brother, Scott, who died in 2014. “And then it started accelerating, little by little,” he says quietly, “the nature of everything changed. And since then it’s just been bam: Tony Bourdain…” He shakes his head at the mention of another friend, Anthony Bourdain, the chef, author and TV presenter who took his life in France last summer. He’s momentarily lost for words. “Yeah,” he sighs reflectively. Then, as he must and always does, Iggy Pop brightens
“If you believe Philip Roth and, boy, I hate this quote, but it’s a humdinger…” he says, laughing again. “As [Kafka via] Roth says, ‘The meaning of life is that it stops.’ Well, that’s not very comforting!” His laugh is now an emphysemic squawk. “That might not be comforting, but it’s a hell of a spur to examine how you’re using the time when you get to a certain vintage.”
But don’t get the dauntless, defiant Iggy Pop wrong. And don’t go thinking those slabs of mortuary verse from Reed and Thomas on his new album bespeak a man with one foot in the grave.
“I am not at all maudlin. That is not my attitude. Brisk, I would say.” He beams, cracking a smile that reveals two rows of porcelain-white teeth. “A brisk attitude. It’s like: OK, I need to do this, and this, and this, and this. And I need to not be afraid of certain consequences. And I need to do the things I want to do a little more – without trying to pretend I can fly and jump off the balcony.” He chuckles again.
Even so, he’s still a man with a taste for speed (not the narcotic) and for forward momentum. Iggy Pop will always love a classic car – a serial Rolls-Royce fancier, his latest is a Phantom Drophead Coupé. It’s one reason his 1977 classic “The Passenger” still means so much, to him and to everyone, as is evident in the video he made especially for GQ in celebration of his award.
“Well, yes, because the activity is still going on,” he muses of an age-defying, peripatetic lifestyle that has also seen him tour Australia this year. “July is my favourite month and, rather than spending it at my beach digs,” he says of his homes in Miami and the Cayman Islands, “I’m basically being transported like a sack of very fine potatoes around the European continent. I am that passenger!”
He adds, wistful again, “I was thinking about it recently, actually. I was really young, relative to most people in their lives, when I left my home and went a long way, first to England and then all the way to LA and then over to Berlin. That was a long stretch very early in life. And that still goes on.
“And so, because of that, the song is still beautiful. But I ride better than I drive!”
He lets out one more explosive blast of giggles. He is Iggy and long may he ride.
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