Iggy Pop Read online

  It was a peaceful, civilised time, and together David and Jim crafted a peaceful, civilised album. Erdal Kizilcay and his wife had met Jim and Suchi a couple of months before at a dinner with David and Coco, where David had mentioned that he wanted Erdal to oversee most of the music. Erdal liked Jim and his jokes: for instance, his wacky boasts about how many bags of potatoes he could carry. Kevin Armstrong got to know Jim during a rowing excursion on Lake Geneva; Jim was wearing glasses, had a short, college-boy haircut, said ‘cool’ a lot, and pointed out the Villa Diodati, where Lord Byron had entertained Percy and Mary Shelley, and where Mary had written Frankenstein in a storytelling competition. The air of European, jet-set sophistication was not what Armstrong, who’d bought most of Iggy’s albums as a teenager, expected; his slight disorientation was increased by Jim’s manner: obviously cultured and intelligent, with an elegant, almost military bearing. It was a big change from Alien Sex Fiend, the last act that Armstrong had worked with, but it was somehow refreshing to watch Jim and David in the process of growing up, sorting their lives out and relishing their status as survivors.

  David seemed heart-warmingly devoted to the welfare of his friend, and ran the sessions armed with a clipboard, ticking off a to-do list of items to be recorded each day, dedicated to the task in hand and imbued with his customary jittery intensity. In turn, Jim seemed calm, focused, happy to be immersed in this little creative bubble. By now, David too had apparently banished even occasional use of cocaine, but as Kevin Armstrong points out, this didn’t make him any more laid-back, for he was chain-smoking sixty to eighty cigarettes a day and would bring his own espresso machine and supply of Java coffee wherever he happened to be working. ‘He’d be chucking down the coffee and fags, and seriously it would be pretty neurotic and manic around him. Also, being in the orbit of someone who’s so hugely famous, there’s a kind of electrical crackle around them, because those people behave differently, don’t they?’

  Kevin Armstrong would go on to work with Iggy for the next eighteen months, and would later play in Tin Machine alongside Bowie and the Sales brothers. He is well aware of the selfish, neurotic, narcissistic nature of the entertainment industry; still, having seen Bowie working with Iggy at close quarters, he believed that he was seeing a real selflessness being played out. ‘I really think it was selfless. His association with Iggy always reflected well on him, sure, but I think he was quite simply helping his friend. He was genuinely saying, hang on, Iggy needs a hand here - I’m the guy that can do it, I’ve done it before and I’ll do it again.’

  That selflessness was epitomised by the song ‘Shades’, which David had written after seeing Jim give Suchi a present. ‘He turned it around,’ says Jim, ‘made it into one of those “reformed guy” kinda songs.’ The lyric unwraps an image of the narrator’s surprise at receiving a present - ‘I never thought I was worth much, or that anyone would treat me this way’ - while the tune itself was based around the same five notes of ‘Cry For Love’, in a kind of tonal empathy. The song seemed the perfect metaphor for David’s sonic rehabilitation of his friend, who for years now had been regarded as a pariah by the record industry. Alongside ‘Absolute Beginners’, ‘Shades’ was the best ballad that Bowie would write during the 1980s, a period in which his fortunes as a singles artist seemed on the wane. Now he simply gave away one of his best efforts to his friend.

  Even David’s more workmanlike songs, such as ‘Hideaway’, with its simple three-chord structure and crisp Linn Drum beat, displayed an effervescence and deftness that seemed sorely lacking on Bowie’s own overblown Tonight. Iggy, too, seemed to pull something unique out of the bag in the form of ‘Cry For Love’, a conventional, confessional, almost slick ballad that marked a new Bowie-esque craftsmanship in his songwriting. For all its professionalism, the song was nonetheless affecting and sincere - it even featured the LA-bound Steve Jones, whose guitar solo from the September demo was edited into the finished take. Even old friends like Jim McLaughlin from the Iguanas would recognise ‘Cry For Love’ as a new departure, an admission that this ambitious, confident man was vulnerable: ‘He’s saying he’s got a soul and a heart that is easily bruised, and that he lets himself be used because he needs somebody so bad. That’s revealing him in a way I never knew, and I became a complete believer in his music after that.’

  The album that would eventually be titled Blah Blah Blah was undoubtedly a work characterised by professionalism rather than excess and by order rather than chaos, and for that reason it would be described by Iggy supporters as an ‘Iggy-flavoured Bowie album’. Yet if it’s classified as a Bowie album, it definitely qualifies as Bowie’s finest work of the era, with better songwriting and more energy than Bowie’s own Tonight and its successor, Never Let Me Down. The only serious questionmark attaching to Blah Blah Blah, however, was whether it would succeed in its primary aim: to establish the label-less Iggy Pop as a viable commercial artist.

  The answer came in within weeks of tapes being distributed to record companies in New York. Richard Branson, who was planning to set up the Virgin label in the United States, made a personal call to Iggy to get him to sign to his label. Nancy Jeffries, of A&M records, was another enthusiast: ‘I loved the record. It came in pretty much finished, and was almost like a David Bowie record that as a record company you wished you’d had, but never got.’

  Jeffries, one of New York’s most-respected A&Rs - she’d made her name by discovering Suzanne Vega - was more than just a Bowie fan. She was also the ex-singer of cult 1960s band the Insect Trust, and was intimately aware of Iggy Pop’s history, for her quirky, eclectic band had once opened for the Stooges in Ann Arbor. She was surprised and enthused by the fact that the album revealed a new facet of Iggy. ‘For my money, and perhaps this is speaking as a woman, the fact the man can write these beautiful songs that are very moving, and display this intelligence, was a wonder.’ Jeffries was also confident that the album could get played on the radio, but the price tag was large - probably $500,000, which included a production fee for Bowie - and she had to clear the deal with A&M’s founder Jerry Moss. In the end, A&M made the successful bid over Virgin, for Jim was keen to sign with a company that was established in the US. ‘The money was big,’ says Jeffries, ‘but with David Bowie’s name attached it wasn’t as difficult as it might have been. Everybody came in with their assets - it was like, “Here we are, we’ve done this, we’re the coolest people who ever lived. Here’s something you can sell and you can use our name.”’

  Everything that had gone so wrong on Party seemed to go right on Blah Blah Blah, aided by Jim’s undoubted charm, which impressed all of A&M’s staff; Suchi, who was supportive and particularly good at remembering people’s names, and Jim’s efficient, likeable new manager, Art Collins, added to the air of professionalism. But a key component of the success of Blah Blah Blah was an avowed Iggy fan in A&M’s London office, marketing manager Jason Guy. Guy was one of the generation of English kids who had auditioned for teenage bands by playing ‘Search And Destroy’, and as he listened to the pre-release tape of Blah Blah Blah he started pondering about the album’s opening song: a straightforward, throbbing version of ‘Real Wild Child (Wild One)’, the sole worldwide hit of 1950s Australian rock ’n’ roller Johnny O’Keefe (the song had also been covered by American rockers Jerry Allison and Jerry Lee Lewis). ‘I had a hunch that “Real Wild Child” was a good Christmas party single,’ says Guy. ‘Everybody thinks pop and R&B are the big party singles, but if you sit and watch accountants, they like that rock ’n’ roll stuff. If you want to see them lurching around drunk on the floor, that’s what they do it to.’ A small gang of Iggy fans in the London office, including art director Jez Pearce, press officer Chris Poole and radio plugger Alan Jones, shared his hunch. ‘This could be a surprise hit, is how we presented it to the media and radio. We just knew it could be a dark horse at Christmas and we were kind of right. It just exploded and we cobbled together a video, made it a priority record and hammered it through.
It was just one of those moments when the stars align.’

  It is one of the traditions of rock ’n’ roll that pioneering American acts, like Jimi Hendrix or Nirvana, notch up their first hits in the unregimented, non-conformist UK market. In the most delicious of ironies, Iggy Pop, the punk rock pariah, enjoyed his first hit single, reaching number ten in the UK charts, by being marketed to drunken accountants and other salary slaves enjoying their moment of token rebellion in the intoxicated run-up to Christmas. An extra piquance was added when A&M’s Alan Jones arranged an in-person appearance on the Saturday morning No. 73 kids’ TV show. Skipping and bouncing around ludicrously in front of the pre-teen studio audience, Iggy was the last act, and as the credits rolled at the end of the show he seized a large teddy bear and started copulating with it. ‘The credits were coming up and the host was sort of dancing along, as they do, and their faces were aghast, grinning and trying to clap while he was shagging this giant teddy bear. It was a great TV moment,’ remembers Jason Guy fondly. For many years afterwards, the tape of Iggy simulating anal sex with a huge teddy bear was a staple of A&M’s Christmas parties.

  Although ‘Real Wild Child’ had been picked out as a single by A&M in the UK, in New York the staff had fallen for ‘Cry For Love’, says Nancy Jeffries: ‘I see record companies do that, where they ignore an obvious single because they fall in love with something more soulful - then at the end of the day they can’t really sell that to the radio people.’ ‘Cry For Love’ received minimal airplay, and consequently sold poorly as a single, and the sales of Blah Blah Blah were generally respectable, if not dazzling, reaching number 43 in the UK, 74 in the US, as well as making the Top Twenty in several European markets, where Iggy had built up a strong fanbase with his incessant touring. ‘It did pretty well, but not amazingly well,’ was the verdict of Jeff Gold, Vice President of Creative Services at A&M in New York; yet Iggy’s charm and patience, during the inevitable endless conferences and meet ’n’ greets, made the A&M staff feel good about having him on their roster.

  Once again, Iggy Pop would hit the road to promote his new record. Instructed to assemble a band of English musicians, Kevin Armstrong selected keyboard player and guitarist Seamus Beaghen, who’d previously played with Madness, plus drummer Gavin Harrison and bassist Phil Butcher. In October, they launched into a daunting schedule that would run for almost ten months, with a short break that Christmas. These were the longest shows Iggy had ever played, many of them ninety minutes a night, plus there was the added burden of endless meetings with local promotions people and press. For the first time in his life he would play night after night without the aid of drugs or alcohol. ‘And he was taking to it like a duck to water,’ says Kevin Armstrong. ‘And I never felt like this was a real effort or really stressful, he was exuding good energy all the time.’ For Seamus Beaghen, like Jim, learning to play sober was a totally new experience. ‘I found it quite scary at first, but really got into it, you’re totally aware of what’s going on - and you suddenly seem to have loads more time.’

  As the band travelled across North America in their tour bus, Jim conserved his energies, relaxing on the bus, always focusing on the evening’s performance, but invariably ready to chat volubly after the performance with visiting fans and celebrities, such as Elmore Leonard, who turned up for the Detroit show. After the first two-month stint across North America and Europe, there was a three-month run of stadium dates supporting the Pretenders, starting in January 1987; at practically every show Chrissie Hynde would kiss the stage where Iggy had performed (‘despite the fact it was covered with mucus and other bodily fluids,’ says Armstrong), as if she were not worthy to follow her hero. Gradually, the band had introduced more Stooges songs into their set, which was growing more intense by the day, and by April, when they played Fender’s Ballroom in Long Island without the Pretenders, there was mayhem; with too many people crammed into the club, and most of them seemingly on angel dust or worse, one PA stack toppled over. And, for the first time, Armstrong saw Iggy revelling in the chaos. ‘He was really enjoying it. And it was the one little flashback where I thought, God, there is a demon in there.’

  There were other, odd little flashbacks: moments outside hotels, when groupies who’d entertained Iggy on his previous tours showed up. He would tantalise them, joking to his band about how they wanted what was inside his pants, while still dancing around in his coquettish manner, almost as he had back in Prime Movers days, seemingly immune to temptation. Although twenty years older than most of his band, he had a physical and mental stamina they all envied, with an endurance and presence they couldn’t quite fathom. In particular, he had an almost mystical ability to calm crazed fans who managed to evade the minimal backstage security. ‘He seemed to be able to communicate something to them on a deep level,’ remembers Armstrong, ‘as if saying, I have been as crazy as you and even crazier and I understand what you’re going through. He would deal with them really calmly, he’d say calm down, and touch them, take time to diffuse the situation - and these people would go limp immediately. It was like a benediction.’

  Although Jim exuded calm and a sense of control, by six months into the tour there was a brutal, testosterone-laden atmosphere backstage, and Armstrong in particular was starting to fall apart; bassist Phil Butcher bailed out just before a short run of Japanese dates in April 1987 and was replaced by Barry Adamson, who had just left Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds. At one point Armstrong confided in his employer, telling him his marriage was cracking under the strain of his insatiable cavorting with groupies. ‘I was telling him about my wife, my kids, so he turned around and snapped at me, You’re better off without ’em!’ Iggy’s opinion, it seemed, was ‘That’s what guitarists are about. Go out and conquer.’ Even Seamus Beaghen, who’d kept things cheerful with his skits and jokes, was ‘frazzled’ by the end of a second and final European tour in July 1987, while Kevin Armstrong was well on the way to being another victim of the Iggy Pop demolition derby. ‘In the end, frankly, I was a bit of a wreck. A mess. I had to do a lot of hard thinking about myself. And then I had to put my life back together, brick by brick.’

  Exhausted, but still slightly exhilarated by their experience, most of the band members returned to London, while Jim and Suchi flew back to New York. Iggy’s tour had drawn many near-ecstatic reviews; he’d proven himself focused and hard-working and had finally racked up his first hit single. At last, it seemed, he could enjoy a measure of security. As usual, events would intervene.

  With a full fourteen months of recording and gruelling touring behind him, Jim Osterberg returned from the Blah Blah Blah tour and, for the first time, could truly enjoy the fruits of a certain kind of respectability. An awareness that popular culture had finally caught up with him was heightened by the impressive start he’d made with his acting career, which included a brief cameo role alongside Suchi in Alex Cox’s Sid And Nancy movie and an appearance as a pool-hustling wannabe in Martin Scorsese’s The Color Of Money. The sense that his time had arrived was deepened by the dominance in the arts of all those left-field people who admired him, from Andy Warhol to John Waters, Jim Jarmusch to avant-garde composer Robert Ashley, who tried to persuade Iggy to sing in his opera Atalanta. For a man with a skyscraper ego, the feeling that he’d finally been vindicated was powerful and liberating, although he underlined his avoidance of the mainstream by moving from Greenwich Village - which seemed full of people touting movie scripts or arts projects - to the Christadora apartment building on Avenue B in the Lower East Side, which seemed, like Jim Osterberg, to be a little more unpredictable and on the edge.

  For the many people involved with Jim over the end of 1987 and the beginning of 1988, their dealings were characterised by an impressive professionalism. Working steadily towards his next release, Jim decided right from the start he wanted to make a rock album dominated by guitars, which would feature Steve Jones. The crucial choice of producer seemed straightforward, too. Both Jim and David Bowie had admired Bill Laswell’s
production of PiL’s Album - a controversial work, during the recording of which the hip, in-demand producer and John Lydon had sacked all of PiL’s existing line-up and replaced them with session musicians - and it turned out that Laswell had hung out in Ann Arbor and had even seen the Stooges’ performance at the post-apocalyptic Goose Lake festival. The two got on well during Laswell’s production of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s Neo Geo - Iggy had contributed a warm, crooning vocal on the song ‘Risky’ - and Laswell soon became a regular visitor to Jim’s Avenue B apartment to lay plans. For musicians, Jim retained Seamus Beaghen from his live band, and recruited bassist Leigh Foxx to replace Barry Adamson, who was embarking on a new solo career with UK record label Mute, and hired ex-Psychedelic Furs’ drummer Paul Garisto. Jim seemed to have a plan for seemingly every aspect of the projected album, right down to the sleeve design, which would be the responsibility of Grande Ballroom poster designer Gary Grimshaw, and the video, for which he picked out Sam Raimi, the Evil Dead director whose warped but hard-hitting aesthetic seemed perfect for the raw, back-to-basics rock album that Jim had in mind. Every prospective collaborator was impressed by Jim’s clear direction, as well as by the way, like Bowie, he was happy to delegate to people he trusted. ‘He had a vision but he didn’t micro-manage, he was perfect to work for,’ remembers Grimshaw. Even minor details, such as booking the musicians’ plane tickets and finding them nice apartments near Avenue B, were taken care of by Art Collins and Suchi. Nothing had been left to chance. Apart from the songs.

  All of those who worked on the recording of Instinct remember the most minute attention being paid to the sound, with loving care lavished on Iggy’s vocals, which were recorded in a Brooklyn basement studio for the requisite warm but edgy resonance. The band had experimented with the arrangements of each song before entering the studio, and Steve Jones had apparently worked out a comprehensive plan for each of his guitar overdubs. Each guitar part was tracked several times, to combine a solid bottom end, a muscular middle and a jagged treble edge, a high-tech approach to recording heavy rock that had been more or less invented by producer Mutt Lange via his mega-selling albums with AC/DC. Yet throughout all this painstaking work, no one seems to have been concerned by the stultifyingly predictable material. There was perhaps the faintest reminder of Iggy and Jones’s thrilling teamwork on ‘Repo Man’ on the album’s standout track, ‘Cold Metal’, with its ‘I play tag in the auto graveyard’ vocal hook, but otherwise song followed turgid song at the same plodding pace.