Meertens Iggy Pop: 1977 - 1999

Every Album, Every Song
1. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 978-1-78952-619-6
Verlag: Sonicbond Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 160 Seiten

Reihe: On Track

The Stooges were formed in 1967 in Ann Arbor, outside Detroit. They created three classic albums between 1969 and 1973, The Stooges, Fun House and Raw Power. Despite a lack of commercial success, the band attracted a small, devoted following and laid a musical foundation that would influence generations of artists. The Stooges' music was raw, primal, exciting, and the unique and compelling stage presence of the band's singer, Iggy, made them legendary. The Stooges' performances were unpredictable, with Iggy inciting audiences to react and making it impossible for them to remain complacent. Iggy was passionate, fearless and, at times, expressed himself in genuinely frightening ways, performing self-mutilation, stage dives, crowd surfing and rushing into crowds to confront hecklers or spontaneously interacting with audience members who struck his fancy. Iggy tore down the barriers that traditionally existed between audience and performer, forcing the audience to become part of the overall performance. By 1974, Iggy was locked into an orbit of self-annihilation and drug abuse that ultimately led to the demise of the band in February 1974. This book explores in depth all the concerts the Stooges played from 1967 to 1974, bringing the live experience to life through eyewitness accounts, press reports and other source materials to present an unprecedented account of the Stooges' performances during this period.

The author Per Nilsen is a leading authority on Iggy and the Stooges and was one of the authors behind The Wild One, the first biography of Iggy Pop. He has written on numerous artists, including David Bowie and Prince. Nilsen is a behavioural economist from Stockholm School of Economics and is a Professor of social medicine and public health at Linköping University. Music has been a life-long passion since he discovered the Beatles at the age of five.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Meertens, Hans

Leseproben

Chapter 2

The Idiot (1977)

Personnel:

Iggy Pop: vocals

David Bowie: keyboards, synthesiser, guitar, piano, saxophone, backing vocals

Phil Palmer: guitar

Carlos Alomar: guitar

Laurent Thibault: bass

George Murray: bass

Michel Santangeli: drums

Dennis Davis: drums

Recorded at Château d’Hérouville, Hérouville; Musicland, Munich; Hansa Studios, Berlin, between June and August 1976

Producer: David Bowie

Release date: March 1977

Label: RCA

Chart places: US: 72, UK: 30, Aus: 88

Running time: 38:49

In the summer of 1976, Iggy Pop and David Bowie retreated to the 18th-century Château d’Hérouville just outside Paris, a haunted mansion turned recording studio. Its isolated, decadent setting provided the backdrop for an album that predicted the sound of post-punk, when punk had barely put on its pins.

In April, Iggy had celebrated his 29th birthday at Basel railway station, where Bowie gifted him a Polaroid camera to chronicle their European travels. Their journey included a detour to Moscow via Warsaw, during which the KGB detained them at the Polish-Soviet border near Brest and subjected Bowie and Iggy to strip-searches. Among Bowie’s belongings were books that included works on Goebbels and Speer, which he explained were research for a film project. Bowie’s preoccupation with Germany’s past and the Cold War climate foreshadowed a broader fascination – one that would soon pull them both towards Berlin and seep into the music they were about to create. At the afterparty of Bowie’s penultimate Paris show, Iggy and Bowie met Kraftwerk’s Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider. Their presence left Iggy transfixed, watching them with unmistakable awe. Radio-Activity had been a constant throughout Iggy and Bowie’s travels. After Bowie’s tour concluded on 18 May, they left Paris for the Château. Initially there for a break, he bonded with the studio’s manager and engineer, Laurent Thibault, a former bassist of French progressive rock band Magma. Bowie booked the studio for June and July, setting the stage for what would become The Idiot.

Bowie started the recordings with foundational tracks on his Baldwin electric piano. Initially a two-man project, it quickly expanded. He requested a drummer, and Thibault brought in Michel Santangeli, who recorded what he assumed were demos. Unaware that many first takes would remain, he left after the second day, thinking his performance wasn’t up to par. While Bowie experimented with a new sound – later teasingly calling Iggy ‘a guinea pig’ in the 1989 Sound+Vision liner notes – Iggy drew on their time on the road for lyrical ideas, often improvising at the microphone. The method fascinated Bowie: ‘I thought he was the funniest, darkest lyricist of the time’, he told Seconds in 1995. Iggy’s vocal delivery was instinctive, shifting between detachment and intensity, sometimes pushing the limits of the recording equipment. Bowie layered the tracks with guitar, synthesiser, saxophone and backing vocals, while Thibault handled the bass. The studio buzzed with creative energy, Iggy’s handwritten lyrics scattered across the floor. One afternoon, an unexpected muse arrived in the form of Kuelan Nguyen, the Vietnamese girlfriend of French actor and singer Jacques Higelin. ‘Higelin was never around, so biff-bam-boom’, Iggy told The Times in 2023. The couple had been invited to the Château by its owner, and despite language barriers and Nguyen’s existing relationship, their brief, intense affair sparked the lyrics to one of the album’s standout tracks.

As August approached, the Château was no longer available, and the sessions moved to Giorgio Moroder’s Musicland Studios in Munich for additional recordings, including vocals. Working nocturnally beneath the Sheraton Hotel, the atmosphere was both surreal and invigorating. Guitarist Phil Palmer, recommended by Bowie’s producer Tony Visconti, was brought in at short notice. He recalled for this book: ‘Working on The Idiot was a blur. I never saw David or Jimmy in daylight, and their exchanges were often explosive and confusing.’ With recording almost complete, Bowie and Iggy travelled to Berlin to finish the record at Hansa Studio 1. Visconti was brought in to salvage the over-modulated tapes in post-production. The disorder of overdubs, some of them by bassist George Murray and drummer Dennis Davis from Bowie’s band, and, by some accounts, Château d’Hérouville studio assistant Michel Marie, likely contributed to the missing, sparse or incomplete musician credits on the final album and subsequent rereleases.

In Berlin, Bowie and Iggy settled into a seven-room flat above a car parts shop at Hauptstraße 155 in Schöneberg, a district of low rents, immigrant households and a trace of old bohemia. Iggy, still largely unknown in Europe, could move through the city unnoticed. He explored the neighbourhoods alone on foot or by train, or with German photographer Esther Friedman, whom he had started seeing; their relationship would last seven years. The group became regulars at the Brücke Museum, home to Erich Heckel’s Roquairol, whose contorted pose – modelled after fellow Brücke artist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, plagued by addiction and breakdowns – inspired Iggy’s angular stance on the muted black-and-white album cover. The same painting would also influence Bowie’s posture on “Heroes”. Wearing Esther’s tight jacket, Iggy was photographed as rain streaked the frame – officially credited to Andrew Kent, though in 2016, Esther reignited the recurring rumour in Humo that it was actually Bowie who took the photo and had suggested that Iggy wear her jacket. The album’s title, another suggestion by Bowie, directly referenced Dostoevsky’s novel, in which the tragic Prince Myshkin becomes ensnared in a web of moral corruption – a subtle jest at Iggy’s expense.

The Idiot was completed in August 1976, but its release was strategically delayed. Bowie embarked on recording Low, which echoed The Idiot’s experimental essence and featured Iggy on backing vocals for ‘What In The World’, a song first conceived for Iggy’s album. To avoid any impression of derivation, Low was released first, in January 1977, with The Idiot following two months later, to largely positive reviews. While some found it unrepresentative of Iggy’s earlier work, most praised its innovation. Rolling Stone called it ‘a necrophiliac’s delight’; Melody Maker found it ‘disturbingly pertinent’. Circus noted that ‘Iggy’s got the tainted charisma of a dead poet’, while Zigzag described it as ‘strange, morbid, obscure and unsettling’. The New York Times simply deemed it ‘a powerful record’. The album charted in both the US and UK, reaching number 72 on the Billboard album chart and number 30 in the UK – Iggy’s first top 40 appearance. The Idiot is now recognised as a landmark, shaping post-punk, industrial and gothic rock. Siouxsie Sioux called it proof of Iggy’s genius. Its influence runs deep, echoing in the work of Bauhaus, Gary Numan, The Human League, Killing Joke, The Sisters Of Mercy, Depeche Mode, Duran Duran and Nine Inch Nails. Joy Division, too, absorbed its industrial soundscapes. The Idiot was famously the last record Ian Curtis played before he hanged himself.

Musically, the album marked a turning point. Though spiky, metallic guitars are present, it is grounded in the avant-garde spirit of German groups like Kraftwerk, CAN, Faust and Neu!. In NME in 1977, Iggy described it as ‘a cross between James Brown and Kraftwerk’, calling it his ‘album of freedom’. Its murky, mordant sound and discordant synthesisers conjure a dystopian world where Detroit’s industrial churn collides with echoes of Cold War Berlin’s decaying grandeur. Lurking in the chemical shadows are nightclub vampires and the spectre of Nazi zombiism. Despite the darkness, flashes of decadent humour pierce the gloom. This is not just Iggy Pop’s comeback but his full-scale reincarnation: refined, restrained, yet still deeply unhinged. After years of chaos, the record stands as a stark testament to artistic reinvention – a bleak masterpiece whose shadow remains impossible to shake.

‘Sister Midnight’ (Pop, Bowie, Alomar)

First step, firm footing. The opener emerged during rehearsals in Jamaica for Bowie’s Station To Station Tour, sparked by a jam session. Alomar laid down a taut, funk-infused riff; Bowie added some skeletal lyrics and soon slipped the track into his live set. When discussing recording plans, he passed it to Iggy, suggesting he would make it his own. Iggy did just that, injecting it with a Freudian nightmare of Oedipal transgression:

Calling Sister Midnight

You know I had a dream last night

Mother was in my bed

And I made love to her

Father he gunned for me

Hunted me with his six gun

Calling Sister Midnight

What can I do about my dreams?

The version on The...