Auf wiedersehen, pet

N HIS 1982 memoir I Need More, Iggy Pop recalls a moment recording The Idiot with David Bowie, at Château D’Hérouville near Paris, during the summer of 1976. Bowie had challenged Pop to ping-pong. Iggy declined, pleading poor co-ordination, but Bowie persisted. “Suddenly that day I could play,” Iggy writes. “I said, ‘This is weird. I always failed at this game.’ He said, ‘Well, Jim, it’s probably because you’re feeling better about yourself.’ In the very gentlest way… I just thought that was a nice answer. Three games later I beat him and he never played me again. I got good REAL fast.”

The music Pop and Bowie made in 1976-77 scaled new heights for both. As well as Iggy’s 1977 diptych, The Idiot and Lust For Life, there was Bowie’s Low and “Heroes”. The pair were living together in minimalist bohemian lodgings in West Berlin, mending their drug-battered systems, and learning from each other. In a 1977 interview, David marvelled at Jim’s ability to improvise complete lyrics spontaneously in the studio; this “method poetry” would transform the neurotically organised Bowie’s creative process. Iggy saw the benefits of discipline. Bowie grasped the value of spontaneity. Together, in a little over 12 months, they futurised the sound of rock.

Back in May 1975, Iggy Pop was deep in the post-Stooges doldrums, heroin addicted and living by his wits on the streets of Los Angeles, when Bowie spotted him from his limo. After an abortive recording session (including Turn Blue, which would later appear on Lust For Life), their paths crossed again in January. Bowie invited Iggy onto the final leg of his Station To Station tour, and suggested they make an album together afterwards, offering him a new song he was writing with guitarist Carlos Alomar.

The song, Sister Midnight, opens The Idiot, revealing some core precepts of this golden year liaison: a fusion of European and American aesthetics, processing Bowie’s R&B-skilled drummer Dennis Davis and bassist George Murray into dense synthetic landscapes – an industrial funk soundtrack for a man hollowed out by life. “I’m an idiot for you… I’m a breakage inside”: Iggy’s basso monotone is perpetually on the brink of falling over the edge or flying into hysteria. The predatory Nightclubbing was written in the first person plural. Likewise, Funtime: in the gurning middle-eight, Pop and Bowie chant “We’re having fun!” like Kraftwerk’s showroom dummies run amok. (On tour in ’76 they listened intently to Radio-Activity.)

One of The Idiot’s revelations is Iggy’s voice, a weathered croon on Baby and Tiny Girls, the latter explicitly referencing Sinatra’s take on Jacques Brel’s Ne Me Quitte Pas. The album’s permanent cloud

Iof doomed romance bursts on China Girl: Iggy shifts up from supplication into screaming despair (“It’s in the whites of my eyes!”), as the arachnoid guitar, Bowie’s ARP strings and an oscillatory bass figure ice-dance to fade.

China Girl was set-closer on an intense six-week UK/US tour in March-April 1977 promoting The Idiot, where Iggy’s band featured the killer rhythm section of Hunt and Tony Sales, Scottish guitarist Ricky Gardiner (the unsung star of Low), and one David Bowie on keyboards. The Sales brothers impressed everyone with their apparently casual accommodation between swing and brutality, qualities which they brought forcefully to Lust For Life, recorded entirely at Berlin’s Hansa Studios. By June 1977, Iggy and Bowie’s creative union was more obviously competitive. On one of its two most famous songs, The Passenger, Bowie had no compositional input whatsoever – take a bow Ricky Gardiner – while the other is dominated by the pairing of Hunt Sales’ Neanderthal Buddy Rich beat and that riff, good enough to delay Iggy’s entrance for more than a minute. “I’m worth a million in prizes,” he sang, and you can feel he really meant it. The energy is amped.

Pop and Bowie had been in each other’s pockets for almost 18 months, and by Iggy’s later admission, “David was pretty sick of my rock histrionics”. Yet on Lust For Life, Iggy was on an incandescent performative roll. No wonder Bowie stuck around; perhaps aware it wouldn’t last. Iggy certainly realised his capacity to regress: “Things get too straight, I can’t bear it,” he notes on Some Weird Sin. Only he could write a celebratory song called Success and make it sound bittersweet: “In the last ditch/I’ll think of you…”

Both utterly essential, The Idiot and Lust For Life are now separately available as vividly remastered 2-CD editions with bonus live discs. The Idiot adds the full Finsbury Park Rainbow gig from March 7, 1977. Though sonically ragged, it captures a cultural moment: since his previous London gig, with The Stooges in 1972, Iggy had become deified by UK punk, whose prime movers turned out to witness his return. Lust For Life is paired with the perfunctory TV Eye – 1977 Live, released in 1978 purely so that Iggy, piqued at Lust For Life’s commercial failure, could quit his RCA contract. Its three best tracks come from the Cleveland Agora Ballroom on March 27, now available in full on the box set, the pick of its four live discs. A disc of Edits & Outtakes offers alternate studio mixes (Dum Dum Boys; China Girl; Tiny Girls; Baby), abbreviated singles, the 1977 live version of I’ve Got A Right (from TV Eye), and a short 1977 interview about The Idiot, where Iggy approvingly describes his and Bowie’s relationship as “frictional”.

These extras will delight Ig-heads and Bowie buffs; likewise the thoroughly annotated 40-page booklet, featuring new interviews with key participants (Carlos Alomar, Phil Palmer, Tony Visconti) and photographs by Esther Friedmann, who met Iggy in Berlin and would be his girlfriend for the next five years. Esther appears to be the subject of Fall In Love With Me, the closing song on Lust For Life, an ostensibly throwaway white soul groove, its acutely observed Iggy lyric alive with the possibilities of young love. “Here in this old saloon/Way back in West Berlin… A table made of wood/And how I wish you would…” But as Bowie dials up his synthesizer’s chilly Low setting one last time, the mood is as much fond farewell as new beginning: Jim and David bidding each other bon voyage, the world’s forgotten boy and the Starman taking different roads. They would always have their days in Europa.