Perhaps the most famous footage of Iggy Pop live was shot in 1970, when a local TV crew caught the Stooges playing Cincinnati’s Midsummer Rock festival. It’s the source of one of rock history’s truly heroic images: the crowd hoisting a shirtless Pop above them, clinging on to his legs as he stands fully upright, pointing ahead of him with a silver-gloved hand. It’s an intriguing corrective to the well-worn idea that the Stooges were largely greeted with incomprehension and revulsion: in Cincinnati, at least, the audience seemed to love them. Nevertheless, you can’t imagine that a single person present could possibly have envisioned that the singer would still be performing half a century on.
And yet, here he is, 53 years later, headlining over Blondie and the Buzzcocks at a one-day festival. Within about 30 seconds of his arrival onstage, he’s stripped to the waist, given the audience the finger and called them “fuckers”. He looks extraordinary, his torso wrinkled and covered in prominent veins. There’s the vaguest hint of a paunch about his middle, but then Iggy Pop is 76 years old: old enough to be the father of most of the audience, which skews to late middle-age; grandfather to the smattering of younger fans. In one sense, there’s nothing extraordinary about that: we live in an era where the upper age limit for rock stars has long been abolished, where artists have headlined Glastonbury in their 80s. But with the greatest of respect, his fellow elder statesmen don’t do what Iggy Pop does on stage, which is pretty much what Iggy Pop has always done. He flings himself to the floor, clambers over the speakers, holds his microphone stand above his head then hurls it across the stage midway through I Wanna Be Your Dog. He sings Nightclubbing, punctuating his vocals by sticking the microphone in his mouth and pretending to give it a blowjob. He seeks out a cameraman filming him for the big screens at the side of the stage and spits in his lens.
It should seem pathetic: a man closing in on 80 behaving the same way he did in his 20s, a grotesque pantomime. But it really doesn’t: it’s utterly compelling, as defiant and confrontational in its own way as the fabled old performances that ended in bloodletting and violence. It helps that he sounds fantastic – his voice is still a rich baritone that can rise to a howl – and that he’s equipped himself with a great backing band, complete with a horn section that occasionally strays into the kind of free-blowing territory that marked out saxophonist Steve Mackay’s contributions to the Stooges’ 1970 album Fun House, but more usually underpins the guitar riffs, adding extra heft to Lust For Life or Loose. And it helps that the setlist is well thought-out – a sprinkling of songs from this year’s Every Loser aside, it’s largely drawn from the Stooges’ oeuvre and Pop’s Bowie-assisted 70s albums – with enough curveballs that it doesn’t feel like a tired run-through of obvious highlights: 1972 out-take I’m Sick Of You instead of No Fun or 1969; a grinding, potent version of The Idiot’s Mass Production.
But it’s mostly down to Iggy Pop himself, still able to conjure more than enough feral energy that when he tells you he’s a streetwalking cheetah with a heart full of napalm, it sounds plausible rather than ridiculous. You do wonder for how much longer he can realistically do something that involves such a degree of reckless physicality. But if retirement has to be beckoning, Iggy Pop seems intent on going out the way he arrived.
