Iggy pop birthday full#

I first saw Iggy live in 1977 at the Manchester Apollo.

These were definitely people my parents didn’t like – Mum and Dad even cut off my pocket money so I couldn’t buy their records! I found this noise was more suited to my listening. I was already into Bowie and Ziggy Stardust. I first found out about Iggy as a 15-year-old. The rawness, the pure human frustration translated into music, decorated by a pinch of humour, never ceases to amaze me. He embraced the weird, angry, violent side every human possesses, and brings it out time after time during each of his live performances. This ties in with Iggy’s infamous stage presence. A minimal processing of his songs, at times even making up lyrics on the spot, combined with a harsh, sharp and shrill sounding guitar, contributes to the rawness of his music. To me, his approach is one of the reasons Iggy Pop can be seen as one of the most important artists of his time. Iggy Pop is one of those performers for me. The shocking primitivism of the early records he made with The Stooges, as vocalist and lyricist, wasn’t just the howl of men possessed, it has a life-force, a personality, and a history, just like you and me.

He is really just a persona he created in order to transmit his ideas more effectively. Iggy now has eighteen solo albums to his name. They are now confined to history, as from the original line up, only Iggy Pop is alive. The Stooges played their last show in 2013. In 2003, they reunited, and in 2010, the band was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. The band’s final performance was at the Michigan Palace, in Detroit, in 1974.

The Stooges fell apart, for all the usual reasons – drugs, clashing agendas, poor sales. The Stooges generated a caustic, demented drone. He wore golf shoes, a rubber swim cap decorated with several dozen strips of aluminium foil, and a frock described as ‘an old white nightshirt’. Iggy had shaved his eyebrows and slathered his face with white paint. The Stooges played their first public show at Detroit’s Grande Ballroom, in March, 1968. The controversial, dark and aggressive atmospheres that the group conveyed were early signs that Iggy was about to become a significant voice. In a time where music and popular culture in general was occupied with love, peace and flower power, the Michigan band formed by Iggy Pop suddenly introduced a totally new sound. All of this might make one think that a simple 12 months could not be filled with any more history, yet the year also saw the debut of The Stooges, with Iggy as frontman. That historic year gave us Woodstock, saw the election of President Nixon, a man in the moon and the Vietnam war. The year 1969 is already half a century ago.

Iggy pop birthday full#

Iggy the manic wildman, hair flailing, body convulsing, eyes wild, naked torso as he leaps into the concert crowd is not growing old gracefully, as you’d expect. But that doesn’t begin to tell the full story of this complex, enduring rock icon, with the spirit and flair for innovation like any entrepreneur. Although Pop attributed his album inspiration to Michel Houellebecq’s 2005 novel The Possibility of an Island, the sonic shift, from its bookending French-language renditions of Joseph Kosma and Jacques Prévert’s “Les Feuilles Mortes,” to its overall sense of Gallic casualness was a tip of the hat to Hardy.It’s Iggy Pop’s seventy-third birthday today. But in 2009, the former Stooge swerved from his salaciously soaked persona to release Préliminaires, a half-spoken word, half-jazz, album that, with lines including, “You can convince the world that you’re some kind of superstar / when an asshole is all you are,” was surprisingly self-aware. With a legacy of skin-baring performances often featuring drugs and blood, Iggy Pop has truly earned his nickname of the Godfather of Punk. On the 72nd birthday of Iggy Pop, CR remembers when Hardy's sartorial influence extended beyond the realm of the '60s pop movement. No one quite encapsulates effortless French style quite like the most famous Yé-Yé girl of them all: Francoise Hardy.